Book #1: Suzy's Dream: Tackling a Few Issues

In the next post, I will start posting my translation, but before I get to that, I'd like to explain a few issues I ran into when translating and exploring Le rêve de Suzy (Suzy's Dream). As I mentioned in my last post, I explained that Henri Ardel's novel was pretty much written with an omniscient POV, although the story isn't as problematic as some other novels I've read written with that type of POV. I'll break down other issues I ran into:

• Exclamation Points -- I haven't researched whether what I came across in this novel was common for the time or not, but there were a few continuous problems I found with punctuation. One was the usage of exclamation points (!). They. Are. Everywhere. And that's no joke. Almost every piece of dialogue is bogged down by exclamation points. After a while, I couldn't tell what was supposed to be taken as a yell or an exciting moment or just a quiet thought. Also, exclamation points show up in what I think was probably considered proper sentence placement at the time, but has long since changed (somewhat like the Spanish exclamation point and upside down question mark (¿). Language is a fluent changing river and over time what was once current is now no longer used (Two spaces after periods, anyone?) I decided to replace most exclamation points with periods, unless I felt the text demanded an exclamation point.
• Ellipses -- Along the same lines as exclamation points, was the usage of ellipses (...). They. Are. Everywhere. They are just as ubiquitous as the exclamation points and, honestly, I have no idea why. Most of them make very little sense as to why they were placed in almost every paragraph and sentence. Again, I pulled most of them out of the text, unless I felt the text demanded an ellipsis in a specific spot.
• Paragraph Length -- Throughout the book, there were few long paragraphs, which at first didn't bother me. As I continued through and then later worked on the deeper translation, I discovered that the continuous stream of one or two-sentence paragraphs didn't always make sense. I decided to develop some scenes into longer paragraph forms, mainly because it started to feel odd having strange paragraph breaks all the time when adding the next two or three in made more sense and filled out the paragraph.
• Repetition -- By the end of my first read-through I had developed my eye to pick out words that would take me out of the text simply because they had become too repetitious. If an author is more of an experimental author and is looking to use repetition as a stylistic choice deliberately, then that makes sense. Since Ardel's work seems relatively unknown today, my guess is that the repetition was just her way of writing. This tells me that either there was little oversight when her books were turned in for editing, an inexperienced editor didn't bother to notate the repetition, or this was a very common stylistic choice for French literature at the time.
• Dialogue Tags -- Many of the dialogue tags start before the dialogue, which tends to be an out-of-fashion way of working with the flow of dialogue. Most of these I've worked into the overall flow of a scene so that they don't feel so disruptive in the text.
• Lack of Character Development -- The last thing I want to touch on is Ardel's lack of character development. I understand that since the book was published in 1914 that things may have been a bit different in the writing market. Perhaps structuring complex characters wasn't a priority for works published for women at the time. That would be something I'd like to look into more.

I believe that's all I have for now, but if anything else comes up along the way, I'll share it as I go. I look forward to sharing my first installment of Suzy's Dream in the next post!

Ciao for now!