FLAUBERT AND THE IMPERFECT TENSE.

FLAUBERT AND THE IMPERFECT TENSE. French and some related languages, like Latin and Italian, have a verb tense (the imperfect) which is used for an action in the past which was repeated or as this wikipedia article puts it, “an action that was happening, used to happen, or happened regularly in the past, as it was ongoing.” There is no directly equivalent tense in English. Flaubert uses the imperfect a lot in MADAME BOVARY, and Jonathan Raban points out that that the imperfect conveys “the numbing repetitiousness of life” in the book. The imperfect is “the tense of the daily round and the routine action, the tense of provincial boredom.” I had not noticed the effect when I read the book, but as Raban’s article suggests, this is one of Flaubert’s subtleties that is hard to convey in an English translation.