Really bad writing

I present to you, the passage that made me quite convinced that continued reading of The Trolley, written by Claude Simon and and translated from French by Richard Howard, was a complete waste of time:

That Allee des Marronniers which the trolley followed, gradually slowing down at the end of its route, parallel to the Boulevard du President Wilson just past the monument to the dead erected at the entrance to the municipal gardens, seemed to constitute, in the late afternoons (as if there were a link between them and the monumental monument), the rendezvous of half a dozen of those little go-carts consisting of a black-painted wicker seat between two wheels behind a third smaller wheel attached to a steering-shaft by a bicycle-chain running up to the doublecrank also serving as hands of those men (or rather, apparently, of exact copies of the same man– for they all looked just alike: the same bony, raptorial countenance, the same black moustache wax to a point (or comically frizzled with a hot curling-iron), the same hand-rolled cigarette butt, the same tiny fan of faded ribbons in the jacket buttonhole, the same shiny black oilcloth, creased and worn in patches, spreading from the seat down to the narrow running-board on which no foot ever rested) whom Maman called with what seemed a sort of wicked delight by a compound name (stump-men) which had a sort of sinister resonance (like ‘thousand-legger’ or ‘praying-mantis’) and which on her lips and in her tone of voice had something at once offensive, macabre, and despairing about it, as if she were reproaching them not only for the exhibition of their infirmary, but for merely existing, for having emerged, virtually sliced in two but alive, from that conflict which had torn from her the only man she had ever loved, as if that cruel label of hers somehow implied a charge of cowardice along with envy, jealousy, and pity– she who had now renounced that crepe veil behind which, not without a certain ostentation, she had hidden her face long past the decent limits of mourning, but persisted in wearing only dark colors and who perhaps (just as her membership in a certain charitable society obliged her twice a week to teach the catechism to a handful of unruly children in a side-chapel of the cathederal) visited the hospital or hospice or the asylum (there must have been a site, a shared locus from which, in the late afternoons, they headed toward that Allee des Marronniers impassive and terrifying with their waxed moustaches, their hawklike noses, their rickety vehicles and their tormented bodies, constituting a permanent chastisement, a permanent recrimination with regard to living…) where these wretched creatures were quartered, in order to bring them candy or even perhaps (though she hated this vice, but doubtless in memory of that smoking-service brought back from the Orient by the man for whom she were still mourning and which figured in cloisonne (tray, tobacco, and ashtrays) a flock of pink-breasted turquoise birds flying through reeds over huge water-lilies)…perhaps, then, some of that inferior tobacco stocked in country stores, cubical packets wrapped in flimsy gray paper sealed by the white ribbon of the State Excise, and to which she never failed to attach one of those notebooks of litle sheets of cigarette paper whose trademarks (“Riz-la-Croix” or “JOB”) might have seemed so many incitations to submit to their martydom had not the cross stamped on the sky-blue paper simply referred to a manufacturer’s name and the acronym JOB printed in gold letters on a white background been derived, as was common knowledge, from the lozenge-shaped enlargement of the founder of the firm’s initials (one Joseph Bardou) and, like the cross, had no application to the sufferings of the biblical figure.

This sentence, this single sentence, was encounterd near the top of page 19 and continued unabated to nearly the middle of page 21. One first encounter, I forced myself to endure it a second time to ensure that I was indeed reading one hopelessly proud, pretentious, and abysmally execrable sentence.

Given the mediocre and affected quality of the text that came before it, this sentence served as the straw of back breaking ability.

Q: Might it have been better in the original French?
A: It would be hard to imagine it worse, so signs seem to indicate “Yes”.

Q: Who might have better translated this work?
A: Ernest Hemingway, if he could stomach it.