SOURCE: A review of Albertine in Five Times, in Queen's Quarterly. Vol. 95, No. 4, Winter, 1988, pp. 967-68.

In the following review, Paul comments on Tremblay's critique of patriarchy in Albertine in Five Times.

The chief difficulty in translating [Albertine in Five Times], originally published in French in 1984, stems from the fact that Tremblay's play was written in joual. Thus, much of the colourful charm and poetic forcefulness of the language is lost in the English translation. Although disappointing, this departure from the original text may have been unavoidable. In the Canadian context, it would certainly have been problematic (but not impossible) to find an English-language dialect that could serve as an equivalent to joual. The end result is that the standard English of Albertine in Five Times reads smoothly enough on its own but it does seem somewhat flat and unevocative when compared to the original French text.

Linguistic...