Introduction

Lawrence Venuti’s Hermeneutic Model of literary translation offers a telling insight into why re-translators should take an interest in the work of their predecessors. Rejecting the assumption that translation seeks to transfer across some invariant meaning immanent in the source text, Venuti emphasises instead the act of variation by which any translator must ‘inscribe’ in the original an interpretation that signifies in its new environment:

Translation is […] an interpretive act that varies the form, meaning and effect of the source text according to the intelligibilities and interests of the translating culture. The variation is inevitable, driven in the first place by the structural differences between languages and by the differences in values, beliefs, and representations between cultures. (VENUTI, 2017, 8)

Studying in detail the choices and decisions visible in an earlier translator’s inscription can therefore open a window on the ‘intelligibilities and interests’, and especially the ‘values, beliefs, and representations’, of the society in which he or she was working, revealing especially those aspects of the original context that required ‘variation’ (in the active sense of the word):

Translation works by detaching the source text from the set of contexts—linguistic and cultural, institutional and social—that constitute it as a signifying process and by building another set of contexts that constitute the translated text so as to permit it to signify in another language and culture. (ibid.)

When a historical translation is closely contemporary with the original, comparing the sets of socio-cultural contexts mobilised respectively by the source text (ST) and the target text (TT) can offer insight into differences between the originating and receiving cultures of the day, and the expectations of their respective target audiences, as the original is made to ‘answer […] to the receiving situation’ (ibid.). The inscribed interpretation of the early translator can thus cast an additional historical light on the original, an oblique illumination that gives salience to features which from a purely modern perspective might not stand out at all, thereby opening up potential new choices and decisions for the re-translator. I have referred elsewhere to the experience of working in the presence (or shadow) of such a historical TT as translating ‘in stereo’ (YOUDALE & ROTHWELL, 2022): the ST becomes stereophonically ‘haunted’ by the constantly-present voice of the prior translator, which also adds an extra ‘spatial’ dimension to the ST, in the manner of a Victorian stereoscope.

This paper reports on the creation of an experimental working environment to test the feasibility of such stereo translating. The project to re-translate into English Émile Zola’s 1884 novel La Joie de vivre (ROTHWELL, 2018a) was carried out in the computer-assisted translation (CAT) tool memoQ, using a translation memory (TM) created by aligning Zola’s ST with the 1901 translation The Joy of Life by Ernest Alfred Vizetelly, still in wide circulation. TM is generally assumed to be inappropriate for literary translation because its main design benefits (leveraging of repetitions, consistent terminology and phraseology) are largely nullified by the rich use of general language and stylistic variety characteristic of literary texts. However, a TM containing an older translation (potentially more than one) can present quite different benefits for the literary re-translator. Rather than providing standard text for speedy re-use, as in commercial translation, it makes readily available to scrutiny, sentence by sentence, the solutions chosen by the earlier translator(s), revealing their decision-making processes and interpretation of the ST in close detail. In the case of La Joie de vivre this stereo effect was especially marked, not just because of our chronological distance from Zola and his contemporary translator, but for the gulf in social and moral values that the TM revealed between Third Republic Paris and Victorian London, which led Vizetelly to drastically self-censor his work. Different relationships between a literary ST and its prior translation(s) will of course yield different insights for the re-translator, but it will be argued from the present case study that, where an electronic copy of an old TT is available alongside the ST, it may generally be worthwhile for re-translators to experiment with this non-standard use of TM. In what follows, the focus will be on the lessons learnt from the initial alignment process, before the work of re-translation itself began.

Zola’s Victorian translator

A plot summary of La Joie de vivre, the twelfth in Zola’s epic Rougon-Macquart novel cycle, may make it sound like a moralistic story in which goodness and optimism triumph over pessimism and disaster. 10-year-old Parisian orphan Pauline Quenu is adopted by her aunt and uncle and taken to live on the wild Normandy coast, after inheriting a substantial fortune from her shopkeeper parents. Falling in love with her feckless older cousin Lazare, she sees her money squandered by her guardians on his various failed projects. Despite this, Pauline sacrifices herself for his happiness, pushing him to marry the coquettish Louise, whose sickly baby she then helps bring into the world, and later cares for. However, the novel’s contemporary translator into English, Ernest Alfred Vizetelly (1853-1922), knew Zola well and was in little doubt that he intended its title to be taken ironically. The material and emotional disasters that befall the heroine, the chronic agonies of her gout-ridden uncle, the devastation wreaked by the sea on the fishing village and its indigent, depraved population, the pervading atmosphere of Schopenhauerian pessimism that shrouds Lazare’s existence, and the final coup de théâtre of the maid’s suicide, all support such a reading, reflected in his sardonic initial choice title, How Jolly Life Is!.1 This first translation was issued in 1886 by his father Henry’s publishing house Vizetelly & Company, which also published the first English translation of Madame Bovary, done by Eleanor Marx, in the same year. It was revised for republication with the same press in 1889, and again for Chatto and Windus in 1901, with the final title The Joy of Life by which it is still widely known today.

Publishing translations of Zola at all in the prudish moral climate of Victorian England was a risky business: he had the reputation of a literary pornographer and care was needed to avoid prosecution. In Chapter 9 (‘The British Pharisees’) of his critical study Émile Zola, Novelist and Reformer (VIZETELLY, 1904), the translator looks back, more in sorrow than in anger, at the hostile reception received in reactionary circles by the English versions his father published, and their joint efforts to forestall a ruinous ban. Things came to a head with La Terre (1887), already a cause célèbre in France, which had earned Zola the Légion d’Honneur and was published in English as The Soil the following year. A long-standing resident of Paris, Ernest recalls his initial optimism, on hearing of his father’s plan for the publication, that it might indicate some ‘prospect of English people dropping the hypocrisy which had clung to them so long’ (VIZETELLY, 1904, 253). However, on reading the proofs he had ‘found in them a good deal of matter, which in his opinion needed “toning” for the English reader’. Accordingly, he and his father set to work and ‘struck out or modified a very large number of passages’, though he notes that the arrival of the proofs in sections made it ‘difficult to determine what incidents and facts might be really essential, and how far expurgation might be carried without rendering the book unintelligible’ (VIZETELLY, 1904, 255-6) — a clear indication of the lengths to which he felt obliged to go.

To no avail, however, for Zola and Henry Vizetelly were targeted in 1888 by a House of Commons debate on ‘pernicious literature’ (VIZETELLY, 1904, 262-67; KING, 1978, 238-240) and in October that year, in a prosecution sponsored by a self-styled National Vigilance Association (GORHAM, 1978, 361), Henry was tried at the Old Bailey under the Obscene Publications Act for The Soil and several other novels by Zola, including How Jolly Life is!. He was found guilty, fined £100 and saw the books banned (KING, 1978, 240-42). This doubtless explains why, in the Preface to the second edition of How Jolly Life Is!, which he had carefully ‘re-expurgated’ following the guilty verdict (Vizetelly, 1904, 543), Ernest was at such pains to stress the book’s inoffensiveness, while still rushing combatively to the defence of its author:

Criticism has fallen fiercely upon most of the works of fiction which have proceeded from M. Émile Zola’s busy pen — at times the criticism of envy, at others the criticism of prejudice, and again the criticism of the blind. Indeed, in the long series of volumes dealing with the Rougon-Macquart family there is but one which has commanded the approval of friends and foes alike; and that is the present story ‘La Joie de vivre’.
When this book first appeared in Paris its merits fairly took away the breath of the envious, and its superiority over every-day fiction was so manifest that the blindest began to see. As for the prejudiced, all that the most captious among them could lay hold of for rebuke was a few passages contained in the tenth chapter. (VIZETELLY, 1889, v)

The implication that he had needed to expurgate just ‘a few passages’ of Chapter 10, which is substantially given over to details of Louise’s excruciating and dangerous delivery, was disingenuous, but the threat of renewed prosecution that he was attempting to ward off remained very real. His father was in fact indicted again in 1889 for twelve translations, including the re-expurgated How Jolly Life Is! (VIZETELLY, 1904, 285-6; KING, 1978, 245-6). On conviction, he was sentenced to a £200 fine and spent three months in Holloway Prison, having already liquidated his publishing house, and he died a broken man on New Year’s Day in 1904. Little wonder, then, that the 1901 version by which Zola’s novel remains widely known in English should still bear the scars of Ernest’s self-censorship, a process revealed in close detail when the translation is aligned with the original.

Aligning Vizetelly with Zola

Creating a translation memory from a source text (ST) and its existing translation requires electronic files of each to be available. In the present case the Zola text was obtained from the Gallica database of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and checked against the definitive Pléiade edition (ZOLA, 1964), page numbers from which were also added manually to the electronic file, while a 1915 reprint of VIZETELLY 1901 was downloaded from Project Gutenberg. Next, both texts were divided by chapter into eleven smaller files, and the ST and TT of each were aligned at segment level using the freeware tool LF Aligner 4.1. This uses clues such as relative position in the text, sentence length, and punctuation to work out probable correspondences between ST and TT sentences, which can then be corrected manually by splitting or joining segments, and moving them up or down, until they align horizontally. Each corrected alignment was finally exported in TMX (Translation Memory eXchange) format, for subsequent import into a translation memory in memoQ (YOUDALE & ROTHWELL, 2022). For the purposes of the present paper, the corrected alignments were also exported to Excel for convenient analysis.

Correcting the alignment was a revealing process for the re-translator, since it demanded a close cross-reading, sentence by sentence, between Vizetelly’s TT and Zola’s ST, allowing patterns of thematic shifts and omissions to emerge. For most of the chapters the automatic alignment was fairly successful, though careful attention was needed to pick up the relatively numerous cases where the translator had decided to split or join Zola’s sentences (it was found that he never chose to arrange them in a different sequence). A second issue was the frequent omission of one or more complete sentences, and the not infrequent omission of substantial passages, which required the text of the TT to be moved down the corresponding number of slots until the alignment could be resumed (see e.g. in Figure 1, rows 355 and 356):

Figure : LF Aligner interface (from Chapter 2, onset of Pauline’s puberty)

A third, subtler category of shifts in the TT was the omission or reductive paraphrase of part(s) of a sentence (see e.g. Figure 1, row 354), which did not affect the alignment but was revealing of Vizetelly’s strategies for avoiding potentially controversial material — and indeed of his judgements about what might be regarded as controversial in the first place.

The outcome, for the re-translator, was a nuanced sense of the constraining boundaries of decency and respectability within which his Victorian predecessor was striving, in the event unsuccessfully, to confine his version. This cast into sharp relief the daring experimentalism of Zola’s writing, attacked also in conservative circles in France but never censored there, giving the retranslation task an edgy historical perspective that it would otherwise have lacked. The ‘stereo’ view of the ST thus obtained helped in turn to calibrate decisions in the new translation about whether and how far to aim for a similar shock effect on the modern reader to that experienced by Zola’s contemporaries. Without the constantly present reference point of the Vizetelly alignment, such decisions could only have been framed in an amorphous present-day language-world in which the subject-matter itself of La Joie de vivre is unlikely to offend many 21^st-century readers. The alignment can thus be argued to have deepened the re-translator’s reading of the ST in important ways and probably contributed to producing a better-informed TT.

Vizetelly’s (self-)censorship

In support of these claims, the analysis that follows will focus on the main no-go areas that Vizetelly judged most certain to excite the zeal of the moral ‘vigilants’. While the themes of desire, sex and reproduction are predictably selected for deletion and paraphrase, perhaps the most damaging expurgations for the novel’s power to move the reader concern the consistent repression of Pauline’s bodily and emotional experience as a woman, the source of much of the work’s complexity and at times startling modernity. Almost as significant is the care with which Vizetelly adjusted Zola’s social observations to remove conflicts with the Victorian system of ‘respectable’ family values. With these three elements either substantially bowdlerised or excised, it is little wonder that the book represented in English for over a century by Vizetelly’s 1901 translation should have been received as lifeless and dull — even if his assiduous, though reluctant, expurgations ironically proved insufficient to keep his father out of jail. To illustrate his approach, extracts from the ST and TT will be presented below in parallel, somewhat as they appear in the aligner, with significant deletions of ST information underlined and reductive paraphrasing in the TT italicised.

Louise’s pregnancy and delivery

Vizetelly’s most extensive act of expurgation occurs in Chapter 10, where Zola narrates the difficult pregnancy and life-threatening delivery of Lazare’s young wife, Louise. Here LF Aligner reported a drastic misalignment between ST and TT, finding 730 sentences in 264 paragraphs in the former but just 323 sentences and 113 paragraphs in the latter — making the translation less than half the length of the original (so much for Ernest’s ‘few passages’). Already in Chapter 9 Lazare’s first allusion to her condition is euphemised: ‘Sa grossesse la fatigue beaucoup’ (p. 1049) becomes ‘Her state of health has made her weak and languid’, while the narrator’s explanation that ‘La grossesse de sa femme, à ce moment, lui causa une nouvelle secousse’ (p. 1058) is rendered ‘The knowledge that his wife was enceinte gave him a fresh shock.’ This ‘polite’ use of an Anglo-Norman legal archaism2 would no doubt have bamboozled any minimally-literate English adolescent into whose hands the book had fallen, as would Vizetelly’s references to Mme Bouland, who comes to assist Louise, as the ‘accoucheuse’ — he seems unable to use the Anglo-Saxon ‘midwife’. He also omits the medical fact of the duration of pregnancy: Louise’s despairing objection ‘À huit mois, que voulez-vous que la sage-femme puisse y faire?’ (p. 1077) is untranslated, and when she is finally summoned, the specifics of her ‘questions brèves, sur les dates, le lieu et le caractère des douleurs’ (p. 1084) are telescoped into: ‘began to question her.’

Much of the force of Chapter 10 comes from the remorseless build-up of the physical symptoms and pain of Louise’s dangerous labour, which Vizetelly expurgates systematically. Zola’s preparation of the ground, ‘Sa grossesse, très pénible, l’avait en effet accoutumée à de continuelles nausées, à des maux d’entrailles, dont la violence parfois la tenait pliée en deux, pendant des journées entières’ (p. 1078), is simply omitted, as is the realism of her early attempts to cope with the pain: ‘Assise au bord de son lit, la jeune femme, les pieds nus, enveloppée dans un peignoir, se balançait d’un mouvement d’horloge, sous la fixité intolérable d’une souffrance qui lui arrachait de grands soupirs réguliers’ (p. 1080). She experiences terrible contractions, nausea and vomiting, as first the midwife, who has just lost another patient, then Dr Cazenove, an ex-naval surgeon essentially self-taught in obstetrics, strive by candle-light and without anaesthetic to save the lives of the mother and child. Vizetelly’s strategy is to maintain only the bare bones of the narrative, using a combination of deletion and neutral reformulation to conceal from his reader the unacceptable details of Louise’s ‘state of health’. For instance, her ambulatory compulsion, groans and screams of agony, and movingly pathetic attempts to preserve her modesty, are suppressed or toned down by summarisation with superordinate expressions:

À toute minute, ses mains tâtonnantes quittaient un instant la commode, glissaient le long de ses flancs, allaient empoigner et soutenir ses fesses, comme pour alléger le poids qui les écrasait. Et Pauline, debout derrière elle, ne pouvait rien, devait la regarder souffrir, détournant la tête, feignant de s’occuper, lorsqu’elle la voyait ramener son peignoir d’un geste d’embarras, avec la préoccupation persistante de ses beaux cheveux blonds défaits et de son fin visage décomposé. (p. 1083)

Meantime Pauline remained with Louise, unable to assist her in spite of her desire to do so.

Leurs oreilles se tendaient vers la chambre. Des plaintes vagues en sortaient toujours, il y eut deux cris déchirants. (p. 1084)

They strained their ears to catch the sounds that came from Louise’s room;

When the anxious father-to-be asks the midwife what is wrong, it is precisely the ‘particulars’ of her answer that Vizetelly omits, at the same time replacing the drama of direct speech with summarizing narration:

Lazare pâlissait. Un souffle froid lui avait glacé la face. Il balbutia: — Qu’y a-t-il ? — L’enfant se présente par l’épaule gauche, autant que j’ai pu m’en assurer, et je crains même que le bras ne se dégage le premier. — Eh bien ? demanda Pauline. — Dans un cas pareil, la présence d’un médecin est absolument nécessaire... Je ne puis prendre la responsabilité de l’accouchement, surtout à huit mois. Il y eut un silence. (pp. 1084-5)

Lazare turned pale. An icy breath passed over his brow. Then in stammering accents he asked for particulars.                                                                                                     Madame Bouland gave them, adding: ‘I cannot undertake the responsibility. The presence of a doctor is absolutely necessary.’ Silence fell once more.

There follows a passage some 1,650 words long (pp. 1086-92 in the Pléiade edition) in which Zola describes Mme Bouland’s quasi-military preparations and her observations of developments during the tense wait for the doctor, setting up a camp bed and explaining to Louise what was happening to her:

La sage-femme, afin de rassurer Pauline, lui expliquait à demi-voix que les douleurs de la dilatation du col étaient parfois plus intolérables que les grandes douleurs de l’expulsion. Elle avait vu ce travail préparatoire durer deux jours, au premier enfant. Ce qu’elle redoutait, c’était la rupture des eaux, avant l’arrivée du médecin; car la manœuvre qu’il allait être obligé de faire, serait alors dangereuse. (p. 1087)

Her waters do burst, and the temporary feeling of relief is soon replaced by increasing pain as the contractions resume:

La poussée partait du bas des côtes, descendait dans les reins, aboutissait aux aines en une sorte de déchirure, sans cesse élargie. Chaque muscle du ventre travaillait, se bandait sur les hanches, avec des raccourcissements et des allongements de ressort; même ceux des fesses et des cuisses agissaient, semblaient par moments la soulever du matelas (pp. 1089-90).

As the physical details intensify and become more intimate, Louise starts to weaken and even passes out, and by the time the doctor eventually arrives, the child’s little arm is already protruding. Vizetelly sums up this whole traumatic prelude to her delivery in the single phase: ‘Louise was in quite a desperate condition’, prefixed to the sentence announcing the arrival of Cazenove.

Her chances are not helped by the doctor’s limited experience, noted by Zola in an aside with clear anti-colonialist import that Vizetelly, doubtless with the great British Empire in mind, predictably spares his reader:

Un souvenir importun ne le quittait pas, il se souvenait des quelques négresses qu’il avait accouchées, aux colonies, une entre autres, une grande fille dont l’enfant se présentait ainsi par l’épaule et qui avait succombé, pendant qu’il la délivrait d’un paquet de chair et d’os. C’étaient, pour les chirurgiens de marine, les seules expériences possibles, des femmes éventrées à l’occasion, quand ils faisaient là-bas un service d’hôpital. (pp. 1092-3)

Also omitted is Cazenove’s discussion of the medical options (attempt a version which will likely kill the child or perform a caesarean in which the mother will probably die, whether or not to use chloroform — pp. 1093-4), then on the following page the delivery itself begins, introduced by Vizetelly in a single short sentence: ‘There came a cruel and affecting scene.’ For the next five pages, Zola pulls no gynaecological punches:

À la grande clarté brutale, le mystère troublant s’en était allé de la peau si délicate aux endroits secrets, de la toison frisant en petites mèches blondes; et il ne restait que l’humanité douloureuse, l’enfantement dans le sang et dans l’ordure, faisant craquer le ventre des mères, élargissant jusqu’à l’horreur la fente rouge, pareille au coup de hache qui ouvre le tronc et laisse couler la vie des grands arbres. (p. 1096)

The trembling doctor introduces his arm, greased with lard, and succeeds in extremis in turning the child, which finally enters the world:

Et il y eut quelques minutes effroyables, la malheureuse hurlait plus fort, à mesure que la tête sortait et repoussait les chairs, qui s’arrondissaient en un large anneau blanchâtre. Au-dessous, entre les deux cavités distendues et béantes, la peau délicate bombait affreusement, si amincie, qu’on redoutait une rupture. Des excréments jaillirent, l’enfant tomba dans un dernier effort, sous une pluie de sang et d’eaux sales. (p. 1100)

In all, over 1,700 words of this remarkable description are effectively collapsed by Vizetelly into the single typographical space between the introductory sentence quoted above and a bland summary of the birth, reductively sanitised into the uncontroversial value-discourse of positivistic Victorian science vanquishing retrograde ‘Nature’:

There came a cruel and affecting scene. It was one of those dread hours when life and death wrestle together, when human science and skill battle to overcome and correct the errors of Nature. More than once did the Doctor pause, fearing a fatal issue. The patient’s agony was terrible, but at last science triumphed, and a child was born. It was a boy.

His 1889 text had been even more succinct: ‘However, after a long and agonizing period of suspense, a baby boy was born, and it was alive.’ The fact that Zola based much of the physical detail of this desperate delivery closely on an obstetrics textbook3 in no way detracts from its power as a piece of writing about the most fundamental of female experiences, almost entirely lost in the Victorian English versions.

Pauline’s growth to womanhood

While La Joie de vivre presents the topics of pregnancy and childbirth through the character of Louise rather than Pauline, whom the plot movingly prevents from experiencing this conventional apotheosis of female existence, the heroine’s physical and emotional development from small dependent child to adult moral agent is conducted by Zola in a sensitive and, for the time, enlightened way which makes it the heart of the book. In the process, he touches almost as many raw nerves in Vizetelly’s sensitivity to Victorian bienséance as he does in Chapter 10, offering the re-translator a clear sense of where the boundaries of taste and decency were felt to lie, a litmus test of how the author’s polemical daring and outspokenness might have been perceived by the ‘respectable’ reader, French or English, of his day. Again, the alignment allows precise calibration of Vizetelly’s expurgations.

A key moment in Chapter 2 is the arrival of Pauline’s puberty, which Zola presents with sensitivity and realism but which Vizetelly euphemises as an unspecific illness, discreetly leaving the word ‘changes’ to the reader’s interpretation:

Puis, c’étaient en elle des changements qui la troublaient, un lent développement de tout son corps, des rondeurs naissantes, comme engorgées et douloureuses, des ombres noires, d’une légèreté de duvet, au plus caché et au plus délicat de sa peau. Quand elle s’étudiait, d’un regard furtif, le soir, à son coucher, elle éprouvait un malaise, une confusion qui lui faisait vite souffler la bougie. Sa voix prenait une sonorité qu’elle trouvait laide, elle se déplaisait ainsi, elle passait les jours dans une sorte d’attente nerveuse, espérant elle ne savait quoi, n’osant parler de ces choses à personne. Enfin, vers la Noël, l’état de Pauline inquiéta madame Chanteau. Elle se plaignait de vives douleurs aux reins, une courbature l’accablait, des accès de fièvre se déclarèrent. (p. 852)

Then came changes in herself which disquieted and distressed her.                                                                                                     About Christmas-time Pauline’s health was such as to alarm Madame Chanteau.

After examining his patient, the good doctor advises the aunt to explain to her ward what is happening, but she puts it off: ‘elle avait pour système d’éducation l’ignorance complète, les faits gênants évités, tant qu’ils ne s’imposaient pas d’eux-mêmes’ (p. 853). When Pauline subsequently has her first period, Vizetelly cuts not just the physical symptoms, but also the terror with which she experiences them: ‘— Oh! ma tante, je, me suis sentie mouillée, et vois donc, vois donc, c’est du sang!... Tout est fini, les draps en sont pleins. Sa voix défaillait, elle croyait que ses veines se vidaient par ce ruisseau rouge’ (p. 853). Madame Chanteau’s flustered and inadequate response is carefully paraphrased by Vizetelly to remove Zola’s accusation of deliberate deceit, minimise the seriousness of her underlying motive, and euphemise the discussion of bleeding, while the direct speech through which she betrays her disarray is simply flattened and subsumed into a mildly moralistic, conventional nudge from the narrator to mothers everywhere:

Étourdie, la tante cherchait des mots décents, un mensonge qui la tranquillisât, sans rien lui apprendre. — Voyons, ne te fais pas de mal, je serais plus inquiète, n’est-ce pas ? si tu étais en péril... Je te jure que cette chose arrive à toutes les femmes. C’est comme les saignements de nez...

But that worthy woman, from ridiculous notions of her own, was largely to blame, as she refused to take Doctor Cazenove’s advice and talk to the girl as she should have done.

In all, Vizetelly renders the c. 560 words of this episode in just five short sentences totalling little more than 80 words (a ratio of 7:1), essentially enacting in his expurgated translation the very concealment of the ‘facts of life’ that Zola denounces.

While the erased topic of menstrual blood (the ‘ruisseau rouge’) returns later in the book in a key thematic role which is completely repressed from Vizetelly’s translation, no less significant for Pauline’s future is the different way author and translator conclude the episode:

Des journées passèrent, [Pauline] était sortie de la crise, étonnée, songeant désormais à des choses nouvelles et confuses, gardant sourdement au fond d’elle une question, dont elle cherchait la réponse. Ce fut la semaine suivante que Pauline se remit au travail et parut se passionner pour la mythologie. (pp. 853-4)

When she was well again                                                                                                     and resumed her studies, she began to affect an enthusiastic interest in the Greek Mythology.

In Zola’s presentation, puberty is a moment of growth and development that Pauline comes to celebrate, and the desire to learn more about it inspires her subsequent self-education. While Mme Chanteau intends, by home schooling, to inculcate in her niece elements of ‘l’Histoire de France expurgée et […] la Mythologie à l’usage des jeunes personnes’ (p. 852), alongside catechism, deportment and piano-playing, Pauline’s own burning curiosity leads her to feign interest in such subjects while in reality studying the medical textbooks left behind in his study by Lazare during his unsuccessful attempt to train as a doctor in Paris. Knowing that her aunt would disapprove, she does this surreptitiously — a point of filial disobedience that Vizetelly suppresses — but then he is at extraordinary pains to over-explicitate Zola’s hint that, despite Pauline’s innocent intentions, the young might have a prurient motive for perusing such books:

Lazare, aux beaux jours de flamme, avait acheté des volumes qui ne lui étaient d’aucune utilité immédiate, le Traité de physiologie, de Longuet, l’Anatomie descriptive, de Cruveilhier; et, justement, ceux-là étaient restés, tandis qu’il remportait ses livres de travail. Elle les sortait, dès que sa tante tournait le dos, puis les replaçait, au moindre bruit, sans hâte, non pas en curieuse coupable, mais en travailleuse dont les parents auraient contrarié la vocation. D’abord, elle n’avait pas compris, rebutée par les mots techniques qu’il lui fallait chercher dans le dictionnaire. Devinant ensuite la nécessité d’une méthode, elle s’était acharnée sur l’Anatomie descriptive, avant de passer au Traité de physiologie. Alors, cette enfant de quatorze ans apprit, comme dans un devoir, ce que l’on cache aux vierges jusqu’à la nuit des noces. (p. 854)

There were a good many of those works,                                                                                                     and, though at first she failed to understand all the technical terms she met with, she plodded on through anatomy and physiology, and even pathology and clinical medicine. Thus she not only learnt — in all simplicity and purity of mind, saved from all vicious thought by a healthy craving for knowledge — many things of which girls of her age are usually ignorant;

The ‘vicious thought’ against which Vizetelly protests too much would, of course, be sparked by the engraved illustrations, celebrated by Zola for their beauty and scientific rigour but regarded by Victorian society as tantamount, in the wrong hands, to pornography:

Elle feuilletait les planches de l’Anatomie, ces planches superbes d’une réalité saignante; elle s’arrêtait à chacun des organes, pénétrait les plus secrets, ceux dont on a fait la honte de l’homme et de la femme; et elle n’avait pas de honte, elle était sérieuse, allant des organes qui donnent la vie aux organes qui la règlent, emportée et sauvée des idées charnelles par son amour de la santé. La découverte lente de cette machine humaine l’emplissait d’admiration. Elle lisait cela passionnément; jamais les contes de fées, ni Robinson, autrefois, ne lui avaient ainsi élargi l’intelligence. Puis, le Traité de physiologie fut comme le commentaire des planches, rien ne lui demeura caché. Même elle trouva un Manuel de pathologie et de clinique médicale, elle descendit dans les maladies affreuses, dans les traitements de chaque décomposition. (p. 854)

but her researches extended to the symptoms and treatment of all sorts of disease and ailment.

This whole paeon to anatomical science and the ‘machine humaine’ that is, arguably, an important character in this book, a counterpart to the anthropomorphised locomotive La Lison in La Bête humaine, is suppressed by Vizetelly in the semi-colon which appends this last clause to the one in the previous box. He finds no difficulty in translating Pauline’s humanitarian dream of learning about medicine ‘to be of assistance to those who suffered’, but her personal satisfaction in understanding about puberty and its link to the life-force is excised, and Vizetelly’s deletion of the recurrent rich metaphors of marée and vendage also impoverishes his translation thematically:

Et, maintenant, Pauline savait pourquoi le flot sanglant de sa puberté avait jailli comme d’une grappe mûre, écrasée aux vendanges. Ce mystère éclairci la rendait grave, dans la marée de vie qu’elle sentait monter en elle. (p. 855)

Knowledge rendered Pauline grave and thoughtful.

When Madame Chanteau finally realises what Pauline has been reading and confronts her about it, Vizetelly omits any reference to the engravings (leaving the nature of the offensive material to his reader’s presumably fertile imagination) and removes the style indirect libre dialogue by which the aunt further betrays her narrow-minded hypocrisy:

Quand madame Chanteau, ouvrant les livres sur la table, aperçut les gravures, elle resta pétrifiée. Elle qui se donnait tant de peine, afin d’innocenter les amours de Jupiter! Vraiment, Lazare aurait dû mettre sous clef de pareilles abominations. Et, longuement, elle interrogea la coupable, avec des précautions et des sous-entendus de toutes sortes. Mais Pauline, de son air candide, achevait de l’embarrasser. Eh bien, quoi ? on était fait ainsi, il n’y avait pas de mal. (p. 855)

There was a scene, but the girl, with her outspoken frankness, quite routed her aunt. ‘How can there be harm in knowledge of the normal conditions of life?’ she asked.

Even Pauline’s innocent allusion to sex, ‘on est fait ainsi’, is euphemised and diluted into a non-specific generality of oblique relevance (‘the normal conditions of life’).

On the following page, Vizetelly’s nervousness about sex even extends to the activities of Minouche, the family’s ordinarily demure and fastidious feline, who, observed by Pauline, goes on a rampage four times a year from which she returns dishevelled and pregnant: ‘Les quelques bêtes de la maison l’auraient instruite, si elle n’avait pas ouvert les livres. La Minouche surtout l’intéressait’ (p. 856). Vizetelly suppresses a gently humorous 300-word description of the cat’s unladylike behaviour (‘On l’entendait jurer et se battre, on voyait luire dans le noir, ainsi que des chandelles, les yeux de tous les matous de Bonneville. Puis, elle rentrait abominable, faite comme une traînée’), which exemplifies both Zola’s fondness for domestic animals and his powers of observation. Pauline’s plea to keep just one of the kittens is rejected by Véronique, the maid, who always drowns the whole litter in the sea: ‘— Non, par exemple! pour qu’elle nous le traîne partout!... Et puis, elle n’y tient pas. Elle a tout le plaisir, sans avoir le mal’ (p. 856). When the theme of Minouche’s pleasure-seeking promiscuity returns in the final chapter, Vizetelly remains unable to mention her amorous behaviour (‘La veille, elle l’avait aperçue sur un mur avec un grand matou, balayant tous deux l’air de leurs queues hérissées’) and ‘fécondité inépuisable’ (p. 1119), set by Zola in poignant contrast to Pauline’s frustrated urge to motherhood. He only partially translates the humorous comment from the old priest that closes this second episode:

— Au moins, elle a pour elle la propreté, conclut l’abbé Horteur, qui regardait la Minouche s’user la langue à se nettoyer. Tant de coquines ne se débarbouillent même pas! (p. 1120)

‘Well, well, she at any rate keeps neat and clean,’ said the priest, glancing at Minouche as she continued washing herself with her tongue.

When we put together the animal’s lubricious behaviour, the lexis Zola uses to characterise her (traînee, coquine) and his observation that ‘Du reste, il n’y avait toujours pas de plus mauvaise mère’ (pp. 1119-20), the alignment suggests why, in Vizetelly’s eyes, it was unacceptable for a young girl to be instructed in the facts of life by such a dissolute female, evoking the unnameable Victorian spectre of the prostitute (Nana) rather than the wholesomely maternal ‘angel in the house’ (GORHAM, 1978, 370) that Pauline would become.

As the heroine continues to develop towards womanhood in Chapter 2, the métaphores filées of ripe fertility that Zola uses to convey her growth are largely censored by Vizetelly, along with the physical correlatives to which they refer:

En moins d’une année, l’enfant de formes hésitantes était devenue une jeune fille déjà robuste, les hanches solides, la poitrine large. Et les troubles de cette éclosion s’en allaient, le malaise de son corps gonflé de sève, la confusion inquiète de sa gorge plus lourde, du fin duvet plus noir sur sa peau satinée de brune. Au contraire, à cette heure, elle avait la joie de son épanouissement, la sensation victorieuse de grandir et de mûrir au soleil. Le sang qui montait et qui crevait en pluie rouge, la rendait fière. Du matin au soir, elle emplissait la maison des roulades de sa voix plus grave, qu’elle trouvait belle; et, à son coucher, quand ses regards glissaient sur la rondeur fleurie de ses seins, jusqu’à la tache d’encre qui ombrait son ventre vermeil, elle souriait, elle se respirait un instant comme un frais bouquet, heureuse de son odeur nouvelle de femme. C’était la vie acceptée, la vie aimée dans ses fonctions, sans dégoût ni peur, et saluée par la chanson triomphante de la santé. (p. 856-7)

She had developed, too, into a well-formed young woman, and with her healthy mind and love of knowledge it was with delight that she found herself reaching full growth and sunny ripeness.                                                                                                     On her part there was a full acceptance of life, life beloved in all its functions, welcomed with the triumphant greeting of vigorous health and soundness of nature.

It might be argued that Zola’s pastoral formulations (‘corps gonflé de sève’, ‘pluie rouge’, ‘frais bouquet’) are themselves primarily euphemistic rather than poetic, wrapping in flowery language allusions to female anatomical attributes that even he felt unable to name, but when they return in parallel but emotionally-inverted guise in Chapter 8, they form a poignant contrast with Pauline’s enforced barrenness, a key irony that Vizetelly’s translation largely loses. Once again, his strategy is a combination of drastic reduction and recourse to safe and conventional superordinates (‘full growth’, ‘vigorous health’, and the timidly metaphorical ‘sunny ripeness’), along with a compensatory diversion of the reader’s attention from physical to mental and moral aspects (‘healthy mind and love of knowledge’) which are consistent with other aspects of Zola’s portrayal of the heroine, but deliberately absent here. No single word more clearly betrays Pauline’s reductive ‘translation’ from sensual woman to one-dimensional, conventionally moral figure, physical to moral ‘nature’, than ‘soundness’, with its powerful yet inscrutable Victorian connotations of conservative respectability.

Gradually, as they work together on his industrial seaweed-processing project in Chapter 3, Lazare starts to become aware that his tomboy playmate and apparently sexless laboratory assistant is maturing into a potential object of desire. Initially this transformation irritates him: ‘Un jour, comme il se tournait, il la heurta du coude. Elle jeta un cri, elle porta les mains à sa gorge. Quoi donc ? il lui avait fait du mal ? mais il l’avait à peine touchée! et, d’un geste naturel, il voulut écarter son fichu, pour voir’ (p. 867). When one day she refuses to put her hands in cold water, he finally realises that it is because of her period, to which Zola barely alludes: ‘Puis, la voyant rougir, il comprit, il la regarda d’un visage béant’ (idem.) — another passage that Vizetelly omits. On the following page Zola describes her hot flushes, and Vizetelly gratefully seizes on her fear of illness to avoid making any reference to the cause, suppressing the unexpected feelings that fill her with anxiety and shame until her medical knowledge comes to the rescue:

Dès ce moment, chez la jeune fille, se développèrent des sensations dont elle ne parlait à personne. Elle ne mentait pas, elle se taisait simplement, par une fierté inquiète, par une honte aussi. Plusieurs fois, elle se crut souffrante, sur le point de faire une maladie grave, car elle se couchait fiévreuse, brûlée d’insomnie, emportée tout entière dans le tumulte sourd de l’inconnu qui l’envahissait; puis, au jour, elle était seulement brisée, elle ne se plaignait même pas devant sa tante. C’étaient encore des chaleurs brusques, une excitation nerveuse, et des pensées inattendues qui la révoltaient ensuite, et surtout des rêves dont elle sortait fâchée contre elle. Ses lectures, cette anatomie, cette physiologie épelées passionnément, lui avaient laissé une telle virginité de corps, qu’elle retombait dans des stupeurs d’enfant, à chaque phénomène. (p. 868)

She often believed that she was on the point of falling into some serious illness, for she grew very feverish, and could not sleep. In the daytime, too, she felt weary and listless, but she made no complaints to her aunt.

Strikingly, here as throughout the book Vizetelly even omits to translate references to Pauline’s morally irreproachable status of virginity: her existence as a sexualised, desiring being is almost completely repressed, which greatly diminishes the pathos of her self-sacrifice in encouraging the man she loves, Lazare, to marry another.

The culminating point of that plot-line comes in Chapter 8, already alluded to, on the night of their marriage. Having attended the wedding in Caen as the family’s sole representative, and decked the couple’s hotel room with flowers, she returns alone to Bonneville that evening and, as she prepares for bed, her thoughts turn to the bliss of the newly-weds (here as throughout, Vizetelly refuses to use the word ‘bedroom’):

Du trouble de son cerveau, des images se précisaient et se dressaient, les deux autres dans leur chambre, là-bas, une chambre qu’elle connaissait, où elle-même, le matin, avait porté des fleurs. (p. 1043)

In her troubled brain arose the thought of those two others over yonder.

In a state of anguished sexual and emotional jealousy, Pauline’s thoughts on examining her own naked body are conveyed in a purple passage of prose where Zola re-runs the harvest metaphors from Chapter 2 in inverse, deceptive mode:

Ce n’était donc pas pour elle cette moisson de l’amour? Jamais sans doute les noces ne viendraient. Son regard descendait de sa gorge, d’une dureté de bouton éclatant de sève, à ses hanches larges, à son ventre où dormait une maternité puissante. Elle était mûre pourtant, elle voyait la vie gonfler ses membres, fleurir aux plis secrets de sa chair en toison noire, elle respirait son odeur de femme, comme un bouquet épanoui dans l’attente de la fécondation. Et ce n’était pas elle, c’était l’autre, au fond de cette chambre, là-bas, qu’elle évoquait nettement, pâmée entre les bras du mari dont elle-même attendait la venue depuis des années? (ibid.)

Alas! the harvest of love was not for her! To another were given the embraces of that husband for whose coming she herself had looked forward for so many years!

As previously, Vizetelly completely suppresses the metaphorical details, retaining only the bland superordinate ‘harvest of love’, but adding instead an emphasis on respectable female social roles (‘wife or mother’) absent from the original. The narrative and emotional inversion is completed when Pauline realises she is having another period and recalls her optimism after the first one:

Ah! misère! la pluie rouge de la puberté tombait là, aujourd’hui, pareille aux larmes vaines que sa virginité pleurait en elle. Désormais, chaque mois ramènerait ce jaillissement de grappe mûre, écrasée aux vendanges, et jamais elle ne serait femme, et elle vieillirait dans la stérilité!’ (ibid.).

Never would she be a wife or mother; the years would come and go, and she would age in utter loneliness.

True to form, Vizetelly omits the physical metaphors expressive of Pauline’s womanhood, choosing instead to gloss femme as referring to the ‘angel in the home’ roles of wife and mother, and further censoring the sudden urge to self-mutilation with scissors that now comes upon her. Also omitted are her regrets in Chapter 10, accompanied by another period, that she will never bear a more strapping son for Lazare than Louise’s runtish infant: ‘Elle baissait un regard désespéré vers ses hanches, vers son ventre de vierge qui venait de tressaillir. Dans la largeur de son flanc, aurait tenu un fils solide et fort’ (p. 1103). When Zola finally, and movingly, replaces the fruitful harvest metaphors with Pauline’s despairing realisation that her fecund body is destined to remain a ‘champ inculte’, Vizetelly, having virtually erased them earlier, can now only resort to a bland superordinate ‘fulness of life’, weakly negated:

Jamais elle ne serait mère, elle aurait voulu que tout le sang de son corps s’épuisât, s’en allât de la sorte, puisqu’elle n’en pouvait faire de la vie. À quoi bon sa puberté vigoureuse, ses organes et ses muscles engorgés de sève, l’odeur puissante qui montait de ses chairs, dont la force poussait en floraisons brunes ? Elle resterait comme un champ inculte, qui se dessèche à l’écart. Au lieu de l’avorton pitoyable, pareil à un insecte nu sur le fauteuil, elle voyait le gros garçon qui serait né de son mariage, et elle ne pouvait se consoler, et elle pleurait l’enfant qu’elle n’aurait pas. (p. 1103)

She herself would never be a mother! She was young and strong, and healthy and beautiful, but of what avail was all that? The fulness of life was not for her. And she wept for the child that she would never have.

As before, Pauline’s reproductive fitness is toned down into acceptable feminine attributes, ‘young and strong, and healthy and beautiful’, which neuter and trivialise her personal drama.

Respectable values

While it is unsurprising that Vizetelly should have feared the wrath of the law over the obstetric operations in Chapter 10 or Zola’s candour about Pauline’s puberty and sexual jealousy in Chapters 2 and 8 of La Joie de vivre, the broader anxiety that the alignments reveal is about social conformity and ‘respectable’ values, especially concerning relationships. For instance, as Lazare works with Pauline on his seaweed project and it is decided by her aunt that they will marry, Vizetelly goes the extra mile to stress that there is nothing untoward in their mutually affectionate conduct, omitting both the sensuality alluded to by Zola and the consanguinity deprecated by the Church of England:

Mais il n’y avait, dans ces contacts de chaque heure, que la caresse permise échangée sous des yeux de grands-parents, une bonne amitié chauffée à peine d’une pointe de joie sensuelle, entre cousin et cousine qui doivent s’épouser un jour. (p. 887)

But at those moments there was nothing beyond decorous permissible tenderness, such as might have been manifested openly before the members of their family.

Lazare struggles to resist temptation, but whereas Zola stresses his physical attraction to Pauline and awareness that it is reciprocated, and hints that he is hypothesising about how to bring it about (‘une chute derrière une porte’), Vizetelly euphemises his lustful thoughts as vague ‘dangerous dallying’ and lays on with a trowel the lexis of the Victorian gentleman’s code of conduct:

À partir de ce jour, il évita jusqu’à la tiédeur de son haleine, jusqu’au frôlement de sa robe. La pensée d’une faute bête, d’une chute derrière une porte, révoltait son honnêteté. Malgré la résistance instinctive de la jeune fille, il la voyait à lui, étourdie par le sang à la première étreinte, l’aimant au point de se donner entière, s’il l’exigeait; et il voulait avoir de la sagesse pour deux, il comprenait qu’il serait le grand coupable, dans une aventure dont son expérience pouvait seule prévoir le danger. Mais son amour augmentait de cette lutte soutenue contre lui-même. (p. 888)

From that day he guarded himself from contact with her. His sense of honour rebelled against the thought of any disgraceful lapse; he was quite conscious that in heart and soul she was entirely his own; but he felt that respect and protection were her due, and that in dangerous dallying his would be the guilt alone. However, this very struggle on his part only served to increase his love.

In Zola’s text, the sexually experienced Lazare judges that demure Pauline is ready to sleep with him if he asks her, and so resolves to protect her from that error, whereas in Vizetelly’s he is merely confident that she will become his wife.

As their intimacy develops, in Chapter 4 the couple, chaperoned from the beach by Mme Chanteau, take a long sea swim which leaves Pauline exhausted and leads to a dangerous inflammation of her throat. Lazare nurses her though this life-threatening illness, and Vizetelly is happy enough to translate his rejection of his aunt’s concerns about propriety:

Les premiers jours, madame Chanteau avait voulu lui faire comprendre l’inconvenance de ces soins donnés par un homme à une jeune fille; mais il s’était récrié, est-ce qu’il n’était pas son mari? puis, les médecins soignaient bien les femmes. (p. 917)

At the outset of Pauline’s illness Madame Chanteau tried to make him understand the impropriety of a young man thus nursing a girl; but he retorted by asking if he were not her husband, and by saying that doctors attended women equally with men.

But he baulks at describing the details of Lazare’s caregiving, despite Zola’s insistence on the innocence of his motives:

Il lui rendait tous les petits services, la levait, la recouchait, en frère apitoyé qui ne voyait de ce corps désirable que la fièvre dont il frissonnait. C’était comme le prolongement de leur enfance bien portante, ils retournaient à la nudité chaste de leurs premiers bains, lorsqu’il la traitait en gamine (pp. 917-8).

Meanwhile, with Pauline still at death’s door, her aunt realises that it would actually be more financially advantageous for Lazare to marry Louise, so sets about (rather implausibly) stoking her desire for him to the point where she becomes unable to sleep at night, enacting a Victorian erotic cameo that Vizetelly also omits:

Elle se retournait, brûlée d’insomnie, le voyait se détacher des ténèbres, avec sa peau blanche. Souvent elle prêtait l’oreille, pour écouter s’il ne marchait pas, à l’étage supérieur; et l’idée qu’il veillait sans doute encore près de Pauline couchée redoublait sa fièvre, au point qu’elle devait rejeter le drap et s’endormir la gorge nue (p. 933).

Lazare himself starts to fantasize about seducing Louise, whom he imagines, too scandalously for Vizetelly’s censorious readership, as a servant-girl available to the attentions of the man of the house:

Dans ce débat, ce n’était jamais l’image de Pauline qui l’arrêtait: elle n’en aurait rien su, un mari trompe bien sa femme avec une servante. La nuit, il imaginait des histoires, on avait renvoyé Véronique devenue insupportable, Louise n’était plus qu’une petite bonne, qu’il allait retrouver pieds nus. Comme la vie s’arrangeait mal! (p. 942)

It was no thought of Pauline that kept him back. She would never have known anything about the matter.

Although of course Lazare and Pauline are not married, this male imagining of banal adultery chimes with Vizetelly’s report of the divorce cases which, he asserts in refutation of Zola’s alleged obscenity, are freely recounted in salacious detail in the newspapers (VIZETELLY, 1904, 265); the polemical statement ‘un mari trompe bien sa femme avec une servante’ exposes the raw nerve of a key threat to Victorian family values, and the threat of adultery hangs over the rest of the plot. Whereas in Zola it is clear that the sensual Louise enjoys flirting with this risk (‘Elle était suffisamment instruite par ses longues années de pensionnat, pour ne rien ignorer de ce qui la menaçait; et, dès ce moment, elle avait vécu dans l’attente à la fois délicieuse et effrayée d’un malheur possible’ (p. 943)), Vizetelly limits his recognition of her co-responsibility to the statement that ‘though aware of the danger, she seemed unable to change her ways’, and entirely omits the hypocritical encouragement of Lazare’s mother (‘La famille complice semblait vouloir les perdre’ (p. 943)).

If Lazare contemplates adultery with Louise while betrothed to Pauline, once he is married to Louise and while she is pregnant, he tries to commit it for real with his former fiancée. In a remarkable scene of lust in Chapter 9, he attempts to have his way with an almost consenting Pauline, restrained in extremis by her morality and sense of duty:

Il lui baisait les mains, il finissait par les mordiller, le sang à la face, dans un coup de désir qui l’aveuglait. Et ils ne parlèrent plus, ce fut une folie commune, un vertige où ils tombèrent ensemble, la tête perdue, pris du même étourdissement. Elle s’abandonnait, glissée au fond du fauteuil, la face rouge et gonflée, les yeux fermés, comme pour ne plus voir. D’une main brutale, il avait déjà déboutonné son corsage, il cassait les agrafes des jupons, lorsque ses lèvres rencontrèrent les siennes. Il lui donna un baiser, qu’elle lui rendit furieusement, en le serrant au cou de toute la force de ses deux bras. Mais, dans cette secousse de son corps vierge, elle avait ouvert les yeux, elle se vit roulant sur le carreau, elle reconnut la lampe, l’armoire, le plafond, dont les moindres taches lui étaient familières; et elle sembla s’éveiller, avec la surprise d’une personne qui se retrouve chez elle, au sortir d’un rêve terrible. Violemment, elle se débattit, se mit debout. Ses jupons glissaient, son corsage ouvert avait laissé jaillir sa gorge nue. Un cri lui échappa, dans le silence haletant de la pièce. — Lâche-moi, c’est abominable! Il n’entendait plus, fou de désir. Il la reprit, acheva d’arracher ses vêtements. Au hasard des lèvres, il cherchait le nu de sa peau, la brûlait de baisers, dont, chaque fois, elle frissonnait tout entière. À deux reprises, elle faillit tomber encore, cédant au besoin invincible de se donner, souffrant affreusement de cette lutte contre elle-même. Ils avaient fait le tour de la table, le souffle court, les membres mêlés, quand il réussit à la pousser sur un vieux divan, dont les ressorts crièrent. De ses bras raidis, elle le tenait à distance, en répétant d’une voix qui s’enrouait: — Oh! je t’en prie, oh! laisse-moi... C’est abominable, ce que tu veux! Lui, les dents serrées, n’avait pas prononcé un mot. Il croyait la posséder enfin, lorsqu’elle se dégagea une dernière fois, d’un effort si rude, qu’il chancela jusqu’à la table. Alors, libre une seconde, elle put sortir, traverser d’un bond le corridor, se jeter chez elle. (p. 1071)

He kissed her hands and pretended to bite at them, while the blood surged to his face in a sudden thrill of passion. They neither of them spoke. They were affected by a common madness — a vertigo which threw them both into dizzy faintness. Pauline seemed on the point of swooning; her eyes closed; but at last, as Lazare’s lips suddenly met hers, the thrill she felt made her raise her eyelids, and she awoke like one who has just passed through a terrible dream. Then she sprang to her feet, and, faint though she still felt, she found courage to resist both Lazare and her own passion. The struggle was short, but violent. She repulsed him again and again, and at last, profiting by a brief respite, she fled across the landing into her own room.

Among the extensive cuts in the English version, perhaps the most significant are the loss of Pauline’s direct speech pleas and the reduction of their mutual desire to the ambiguously safe euphemisms of a ‘thrill’ that makes her ‘swoon’ and feel ‘faint’: even in this most challenging passage, Vizetelly just about manages to drag Zola’s writing into the conventional moral and literary ambit of Victorian respectability. In the next page and a half, however, he gives up the unequal struggle, as Lazare first tries to force his way into Pauline’s room, then pleads with her to open up and let him satisfy his frustrated desire — a passage of some 500 words that Vizetelly reduces to just two sentences of respectable sentimentality:

He followed, and she could hear him speaking to her, but in spite of the passionate promptings of her own heart she kept silent. He sobbed and her own tears fell, yet she gave him no response.

It is not difficult to see how this scene of female violation, in a long line of mythological and historical representations (including for instance Rubens’ Rape of the Sabine Women in London’s National Gallery) with ambiguous appeal, might have been regarded as titillating, but it plays a central role in the novel’s thematic economy. Although the pair’s desire for each other continues to torture them throughout Louise’s pregnancy, this moment represents the high-water mark of Pauline’s opportunity for emotional and sexual fulfilment, and her renunciation of it is made the more poignant by Zola’s linking of intense physical and emotional sensations that Vizetelly can only shrink into bland convention.

Adultery is not the only socially disruptive conduct that Vizetelly feels obliged to censor from the novel. Zola’s reforming social message is also conveyed through his portrayal of the squalid living conditions and unedifying morals of the impoverished fisher-folk of Bonneville, heightened by being periodically reported through the mouths of the urchins sent up every week by their parents with tales of hardship to extract food and money from the charitable Pauline. The alignment allows close calibration of the limits of Vizetelly’s sense of the acceptable, as these episodic characters develop from childhood into depraved adolescence and early adulthood, holding up an inverse mirror to Pauline’s own moral growth. While Pauline always treats her ‘petits amis’ (p. 900) with compassion, they horrify the superficially respectable Louise:

Était-ce possible que, si près d’une grande ville comme Caen, il existât des trous de pays, où les habitants vécussent de la sorte, en véritables sauvages? Car, enfin, il n’y avait que les sauvages pour offenser ainsi toutes les lois divines et humaines. (p. 899)

Was it really possible that near a big town like Caen there existed such hideous places, where people lived in that utterly barbarous fashion? For, surely, they could be nothing less than savages, to thus trample under foot all law, both divine and human.

In Chapter 7 we learn of the family background of a lad named Cuche:

La femme Cuche, cette misérable abandonnée qui se prostituait à tous les hommes, dans les trous de la côte, pour trois sous ou pour un reste de lard, s’était cassé une jambe en juillet; et elle en demeurait contrefaite, boitant affreusement, sans que sa laideur repoussante, aggravée par cette infirmité, lui fit rien perdre de sa clientèle ordinaire. (p. 1004)

Cuche’s wife, a miserable abandoned woman, had broken her leg in July, and had remained infirm ever since.

The 13-year-old Gonin girl then tells Pauline that Cuche senior has moved in with her mother and is trying to murder her paralytic father:

Le cousin Cuche, l’ancien matelot qui avait lâché sa femme, pour s’installer à leur table et dans leur lit, s’était jeté sur le vieux, le matin même, avec l’idée de l’achever. (p. 1004)

Cousin Cuche, the sailor who had deserted his wife and installed himself in Gonin’s house, had made a violent attack upon the old man that very morning, in the hope of finishing him off.

Offended by her wheedling, Lazare interrogates her about her own conduct, and again Vizetelly converts the revealing dialogue, greeted by the other kids with ‘des yeux rieurs, où flambaient les vices précoces’, into a safe but dull Victorian euphemism:

Il la questionna brusquement: — Que faisais-tu donc, avant-hier, dans le bateau de Houtelard, avec un homme qui s’est sauvé ? Elle eut un sourire sournois. — Ce n’était pas un homme, c’était lui, répondit-elle en désignant du menton le fils Cuche. Il m’avait poussée par-derrière... De nouveau, il l’interrompit. — Oui, oui, j’ai bien vu, tu avais tes guenilles par-dessus la tête. Ah! tu commences de bonne heure, à treize ans! (p. 1005)

He began to question her sternly, for he had seen her gadding about with several lads of the neighbourhood.

Zola’s cameo portraits of the perverting effects of poverty (others among the children are thieves and drunkards) culminate in the final chapter, when the band again visit the Chanteaus’ garden some months later. One of the fishermen, Houtelard, has been lost at sea and, much to Pauline’s chagrin, his grown-up son has moved in with his stepmother (the cue for another euphemism from Vizetelly):

Mais Pauline, forcée de surveiller ses aumônes, avait juré de ne rien donner au fils ni à la veuve, tant qu’ils vivraient ouvertement en ménage. Dès la mort du père, la belle-mère, cette ancienne bonne qui rouait le petit de coups, par avarice et méchanceté, s’en était fait un mari, à présent qu’il n’avait plus l’âge d’être battu. Tout Bonneville riait du nouvel arrangement. (p. 1113)

Pauline, however, obliged as she was to exercise strict supervision over her charities, had sworn that she would never give a single sou to either son or widow, for they lived together in open shame.

As well as the ribald mockery (rather than condemnation) of the locals, Vizetelly also omits the young man’s cynical justification: ‘Et puis, ce n’est pas ma mère, ça ne fait rien que ce soit avec moi ou avec un autre...’ (p. 1113). It also turns out that the Cuche lad is now pimping for his mother —here Vizetelly suppresses the crucial sentence that makes sense of his wild living:

Il avait les pieds nus, il portait pour tout vêtement une vieille culotte et un morceau de chemise déloqueté, qui laissaient voir sa peau, noire de hâle, labourée par les ronces. Maintenant que les hommes ne voulaient plus de sa mère, tombée à une décrépitude affreuse, lui-même battait le pays pour lui amener encore du monde. On le rencontrait courant les routes, sautant les haies avec une agilité de loup, vivant en bête que la faim jette sur toutes les proies. (p. 1114)

His feet were bare; indeed, the only clothes he wore were some old breeches and a ragged shirt, through which showed parts of his skin, browned by the sun and torn by brambles. He was to be met running about the highroads, leaping over hedges with the agility of a wolf, living like a savage, to whom hunger makes every sort of prey acceptable.

Meanwhile, the Gonin girl has become a child-mother4 and given birth to a strapping daughter, whom Vizetelly cannot excise from the narrative because of the thematic contrast between her and Louise’s sickly offspring, though he is careful to omit the single sentence that would have been taken as an allusion to an unmentionable social problem of the Victorian working classes: ‘Cette fille-mère, accouchée si jeune, était bien heureuse d’avoir une enfant de cette grosseur’ (p. 1116). We also learn that her father has finally died in circumstances of interest to the police, while her mother and her new partner have designs on the baby: ‘Maintenant, la femme et son amant parlaient d’étrangler cette morveuse inutile, qui prenait sa part de la soupe’ (p. 1116). Zola stresses the childishness of the young mother: ‘Elle s’était assise, elle la tenait sur les genoux, avec une maladresse de gamine jouant à la poupée. Ses yeux clairs gardaient une continuelle surprise de l’avoir faite’ (p. 1117), narrating Pauline’s displeasure that she had lain the baby on the ground in order to have a stone fight with a little friend. Unsurprisingly, Vizetelly spares his middle-class readership these details which deliberately expose, albeit melodramatically, the squalid and dissolute condition of the French lower orders, which might invite comparisons with those of Victorian Britain.

Conclusion

When we look closely, thanks to alignment, at what is left of La Joie de vivre in Vizetelly’s 1901 translation, we find a novel substantially amputated of its key themes and expressive means, reductively euphemised, by omission, dilution and reformulation, into conformity with a range of values and attitudes (mis)calculated to pass the Victorian legal censors. Beneath the ‘unspeakable’ topics of sex and reproduction, the translator’s deeper anxieties are about the conservation of a Victorian social and moral status quo, that tenacious myth of middle and upper-class ‘respectability’. Tracing his textual evasions sentence by sentence against the original helps the re-translator to appreciate not just the extent of Zola’s risk-taking in placing such subversive material before his own readership and society, but also the fact that doing so as a call for social reform was precisely his point. Vizetelly’s bowdlerised version, in contrast, ironically enacts the veiling of social realties symbolised in Louise’s futile shame at the start of her labour: ‘Elle gardait, dans l’abominable torture, cette unique préoccupation de sa pudeur et de sa grâce de femme’ (p. 1081) — which the translator omits. His sustained act of self-censorship seriously damages Zola’s Bildungsroman of the heroine, Pauline, whose rise to womanhood, then decline into (albeit accepted) surrogate motherhood, stand as a manifesto for both female education, and the literary expression of the real experiences of women as active and desiring moral agents, rather than just the demure objects of legitimate male lust.

While it may be tempting to look back from our very different social perspective to deprecate Vizetelly’s self-censorship, as well as the disservice it did to the book’s subsequent reputation in English, it would be unfair to do so. He himself expressed profound frustration at the necessity, regretting that ‘British pharisaism being what it is he [i.e. EAV] had never been able to give an absolutely complete version of any of Zola’s books’ and recommending that ‘to properly appreciate and judge any one of the works of the great novelist it must be read in the original and in its entirety’ (VIZETELLY, 1904, 387). The very material threat to his father’s business, and ultimately his liberty and health, left Ernest no choice in the matter: the English inscription of La Joie de vivre that the institutions of a prudish Victorian cultural establishment permitted him to make was of necessity tightly constrained. For the re-translator starting work on a new inscription, the experience of performing and then analysing the alignment of his text with Zola’s was found to inform the modern project by highlighting the constraints of the historical one. This, rather than any putative gains in efficiency or consistency, is the reason why alignment and translation memory may now be proposed as productive, and arguably essential, tools of the literary re-translator.