At first sight, the French imparfait does not appear to present any major obstacles to translation into English; it is usually possible to identify the contextual factors guiding the translator towards one or another of the tense-aspect or modal forms of English that can be deemed its equivalents, with varying degrees of constraint. However, contrastive observation shows that it is not always possible to render all the shades of meaning expressed by the imparfait in English: either some specific feature is lost in translation, causing some degree of stylistic ‘neutralisation’, or on the contrary the translator chooses to offer an explicit interpretation of the imparfait through aspectual, modal or lexical alterations and additions. In my examination of a small bilingual corpus taken from both literary and journalistic texts, I attempt to illustrate the range of choices available to the translator and to account for them in terms of contextual features, with a view to showing that the French imparfait and the English simple past, far from standing in contrast to one another as is generally claimed, in fact share many common features in terms of complexity, polysemy and ambivalence.