The Years

by Annie Ernaux

  This will not be a work of remembrance in the usual sense, aimed at putting a life into story, creating an explanation of self. She will go within herself only to retrieve the world, the memory and imagination of its bygone days, grasp the changes in ideas, beliefs, and sensibility, the transformation of people and the subject that she has seen—perhaps nothing compared to those her granddaughter will see, as will all beings who are alive in 2070. To hunt down sensations that are already there, as yet unnamed, such as the one that is making her write.

  It will be a slippery narrative composed in an unremitting continuous tense, absolute, devouring the present as it goes, all the way to the final image of a life. An outpouring, but suspended at regular intervals by photos and scenes from films that capture the successive body shapes and social positions of her being—freeze-frames on memories, and at the same time reports on the development of her existence, the things that have made it singular, not because of the nature of the elements of her life, whether external (social trajectory, profession) or internal (thoughts and aspirations, the desire to write), but because of their combinations, each unique unto itself. To this “incessantly not-she” of photos will correspond, in mirror image, the “she” of writing.

  There is no “I” in what she views as a sort of impersonal autobiography. There is only “one” and “we,” as if now it were her turn to tell the story of the time-before.

  In the old days, when she tried to write in her student room, she yearned to find an unknown language that would unveil mysterious things, in the way of a clairvoyant. She also imagined the finished book as a revelation to others of her innermost being, a superior achievement, a kind of glory. She would have given anything to “become a writer,” in the same way that she had longed as a child to wake up as Scarlett O’Hara one morning. Later, as she stood in grueling classes of forty students, or pushed a shopping cart at the supermarket, or sat on a bench in the public gardens next to a baby carriage, those dreams deserted her. There was no ineffable world that leapt out from inspired words, as if by magic, and she would never write except from inside her language, which is everyone’s language, the only tool she’s ever intended on using to act upon the things that outraged her. So the book to be written represented an instrument of struggle. She hasn’t abandoned this ambition. But now, more than anything, she would like to capture the light that suffuses faces that can no longer be seen and tables groaning with vanished food, the light that was already present in the stories of Sundays in childhood and has continued to settle upon things from the moment they are lived, a light from before. Save

  —the little village fête at Bazoches-sur-Hoëne with the bumper cars

  —the hotel room on the rue Beauvoisine in Rouen, not far from the Lepouzé bookstore, where Cayatte filmed a scene for To Die of Love

  —the wine tap at the Carrefour on rue du Parmelan, Annecy

  —I leaned against the beauty of the world / And I held the smell of the seasons in my hands

  —the merry-go-round at the spa park, in Saint-Honoré-les Bains

  —the very young woman in a red coat walking down the sidewalk next to a staggering man she had gone to fetch at the Café Le Duguesclin, in the winter, in La Roche-Posay

  —the film People of No Importance

  —the half-torn poster for the dating site 3615 Ulla at the bottom of the hill in Fleury-sur-Andelle

  —a bar and a jukebox that played Apache at Tally Ho Corner, Finchley

  —a house at the very back of a garden, 35 avenue Edmond Rostand in Villiers-le-Bel

  —the gaze of the black-and-white cat the moment the needle put her to sleep

  —the man in pajamas and slippers who wept every afternoon in the lobby of the old folks’ home in Pontoise, and asked visitors to call his son, holding up a piece of soiled paper on which a phone number was written

  —the woman of the Bentalha massacre in Algeria in the photo by Hocine that resembles a Pietà

  —the dazzling sun on the walls of San Michele Cemetery, seen from the shade of the Fondamenta Nuove

  Save something from the time where we will never be again.

  Vaillant, a young people’s cartoon weekly with Communist roots, started in 1945. Now called pif gadget. mes vaillantes, founded in 1937, a Catholic journal illustré for young girls; a sister magazine to Cœurs vaillants, both associated with the eponymous Catholic youth movement.

  A song recounting a tryst in the woods at Chaville that results in the birth of a child, whose entire unfortunate life the singer foresees.

  A character invented in 1956, a marie-chantal or la Marie-Chantal is a prissy grande bourgeoise who is heedless of social realities other than her own.

  In 1954, Prime Minister Pierre Mendès France initiated a milk-drinking campaign to combat malnutrition among schoolchildren and alcoholism in the general population.

  A mock-serious libertine ballad sung to the tune of a funeral march with words by Théophile Gautier (1864), the subject of which is pubic lice and the battle to overcome them.

  Bac, or baccalauréat, a diploma passed at the end of secondary school, a prerequisite for university. Until 1963, it included two parts; the second bac exam was written a year after the first, and was equivalent to a B.A. degree.

  A method proposed by the Japanese obstetrician Dr. Ogino in the 1920s to calculate the optimum period for conception. Later, it was popularized as a method of birth control (a.k.a. the rhythm method).

  Six-volume textbook series on French literature from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, first published in 1948 and used in schools for decades.

  Hypokhâgne: prepatory class for advanced studies in arts and literature at the École normale supérieure, followed by the Khâgne. Both are informal, pseudo-Greek expressions, based on the word cagneux, meaning “knock-kneed.”

  (Slang, pejorative.) Generally, a secret agent, a spook; here meaning anti-OAS agencies who used methods that could not officially be used by the police or the army.

  Certificat d’aptitude au professeur de l’enseignement du second degré, the secondary teachers’ training certificate. After obtaining their license (bachelor’s degree), applicants take a one-year course, followed by a probationary year when they work as teachers in training.

  A French word dating back to Rabelais, generally meaning “carnival” or “chaos.” In de Gaulle’s speech of 1968, he pronounced the word as “chie-en-lit,” which resulted in a scatological pun. “La réforme oui, la chie-en-lit non,” literally, Reform—yes, shit the bed—no.

  Referring to the movement of Établissement (the word is not translated into English), primarily practiced by French Maoists. Établissement groups were formed by Marxist-Leninist militants, who went to live with the popular masses and work in factories.

  Geographically, the Paris region is located in a sedimentary basin (le bassin parisien).

  The Paris ring road, dividing Paris intra muros from the close or inner (petite couronne) suburbs.

  Gigantes y cabezudos, costumed figures that appear in many Spanish festivals and parades.

  The French national employment agency (Agence Nationale pour l’Emploi).

  A charity founded in 1985 by Coluche to distribute food packages and hot meals to the homeless and those of low income. Its activities have expanded since.

  Banlieue (or banlieues): in neutral language, suburb or suburbs. Here it specifically refers to the “disadvantaged” suburban zone, equivalent to low-income public housing or “the projects.”

  Les enfants du rock (“the children of rock,” 1982 to 1988): weekly pop culture TV “magazine,” showcasing vanguard rock, comics, film, etc.
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  Les Nuls (meaning “the boneheads”): a group of French comedians and their eponymous TV show (1987 to 1992, Canal+), filmed live, with a guest host, skit-based and sometimes compared to Saturday Night Live.

  Slogan of the SOS Racisme organization, founded in 1984 in France. Its logo is a hand with the slogan Touche pas à mon pote, meaning “Hands off my buddy!”

  TUC jobs (travail d’utilité communataire): part-time jobs, actually “internships” of a six-month (maximum) duration, in public institutions, for young job seekers. Paid less than half the minimum wage, the jobs were ineligible for social benefits, and presented no possibility of advancement.

  Aircraft carrier; with her sister ship the Foch, the mainstay of the French fleet.

  Armed Islamic Group of Algeria (Groupe Islamique Armé).

  Illegal immigrants, sans papiers.

  Pacte civil de solidarité, civil solidarity pact, a contractual form of civil union between two adults. Voted in 1999, primarily to offer some legal status to same-sex couples.

  A chain of hypermarkets.

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  The Years is at least twice as long as all but one of AE’s previous books and in other ways, too, is a departure from her other work. There are many different atmospheres and registers, styles and rhythms. It is a book with a vast, sweeping scope (from microcosm to macrocosm and back), lots of movement and many different “speeds.”

  The book is punctuated by scenes of holiday meals—long, animated afternoons with family and friends. They provide a concentrated view of where the “characters” are in their lives and in history. They begin shortly after the narrator’s birth in 1940 until her sixty-sixth year.

  During the holiday meals of the narrator’s childhood, when the parents and their friends and their own parents were alive, the talk is of hardship in their early lives and the world wars. The elders tell stories, conjure up ancestors and distant cousins and long-ago neighbors. The children (including the narrator) go off to play together and then return to the table for dessert. They listen to the adults talk, sing (war songs, love songs), and tell the “two great narratives: the story of war and the story of origins.”

  The narrator says of this generation, that of the parents and earlier:

  From a common ground of hunger and fear, everything was told in the “we.”

  This sets the scene for the narrator/writer’s own “project” to speak in a “je collectif.”

  She writes about the years between 1940 and 2007 as if the story were not only hers but that of her generation.

  To write in the “je collectif,” in French AE uses the nous or the on (which I translate mostly as “we” but sometimes as “one” for formality or rhythm or simply because it is the only choice that presents itself; very occasionally I use the impersonal “you”). She also uses ils/elles (they) or les gens (people), and later in the paragraph switches pronouns, often more than once (on, nous, ils . . .). Each pronoun clearly refers to the same subject or subjects. In French it is quite striking, and presents a certain translation challenge. The shifts imply that “we” and “one” (that is, nous and on) contain an “I” or a “them,” a “her,” “him,” and “you,” a “someone” or “some people”—truly collectif !

  It is very common in French to English translation, in sentences where the subject is on, to translate into the passive voice. I know the passive voice can be windy and unwieldy, but in The Years, it is sometimes appropriate to use it in order to maintain the impersonal tone.

  Another recurring element in the book is the description of photos (or home movies or video segments) from different times in the narrator’s life.

  Here is her own description of their function in her narrative:

  [These are] freeze-frames on memories, and at the same time reports on the development of her existence, the things that have made it singular, not because of the nature of the elements of her life, whether external (social trajectory, profession) or internal (thoughts and aspirations, the desire to write), but because of their combinations, each unique unto itself. To this “incessantly not-she” of photos will correspond, in mirror image, the “she” of writing. (emphasis added)

  The actual descriptions of the photos are accompanied by the author’s speculations on what “the girl in the photo,” Annie, might be thinking (how she views world events, if at all; and especially how she views herself and her future).

  The descriptions of the photos are generally precise in clear-cut prose.

  However, the speculations are sometimes written in other styles: sinuous as she drifts from one memory to the next, or telegraphic as she makes mental lists of things seen and lived (some she’d rather forget), movies, books, songs . . .

  Yet another thread in the book (which comes with its own style and translation challenges) is the book in progress—the book, this book, the one that becomes The Years. She reflects upon it for decades, takes copious notes, and endlessly seeks a form for her book. She goes back to former times of her life, to “selves” superimposed on one another, alludes to a sensation she calls “a palimpsest sensation.” She waits for a catalyst event or image—a madeleine à la Proust. In this sense, we witness a kind of mise en abyme in the making (the narrator compares the book-to-come to Dorothea Tanning’s painting Birthday). Toward the end, when she is getting closer and closer to starting, this is how she describes the book-to-come:

  It will be a slippery narrative, composed in an unremitting continuous tense, absolute, devouring the present as it goes, all the way to the final image of a life. An outpouring, but suspended at regular intervals by photos and scenes from films . . .

  There is no “I” in what she views as a sort of impersonal autobiography. There is only “one” and “we,” as if now it were her turn to tell the story of the time-before. (emphasis added)

  Early in the process, I vastly reduced the use of the continuous tense, and shortened many sentences, at the suggestion of my editor at Seven Stories. I don’t think this “unremitting continuous tense” has to be, or can be, literally applied in the entire book, but there are places where it could be considered the model for the writing (and the translation). For instance, this sense of continuity and “devouring the present” is captured in sequences of long sentences where the writing takes off like a shot. There are sentences that go on for entire paragraphs. It is often the case in the holiday dinner scenes. After reducing the length of some marathon sentences for clarity, I restored all that I could to their full “breathless” length, with considerable help from commas and dashes. AE’s “breathless” marathon sentences sometimes give the impression that time is speeding up. Time in the book slows down, speeds up, sweeps us away, repeats itself, grinds to a halt, or transforms into a very intricately detailed interior time. The narrative shrinks and expands constantly, and these effects are shored up by sentence structure, verb tense, mode, and so on.

  In translating The Years there was a balance to maintain between the plain, incisive writing (écriture plate), so often associated with the author’s work, and a prose more sinuous and expansive.

  There were times to be terse and times to be sweeping.

  Is this Ernaux’s Remembrance of Things Past (or her Gone with the Wind, Life and Fate, with perhaps a nod to Virginia Woolf: the stream of consciousness, the struggle with the “I” . . . ?

  I have added a few footnotes. I had to look up quite a number of names, and incidents, which would perhaps be clear to many French readers but not to every English reader.

  As in all of Ernaux’s books, it is worthwhile to pay attention to the spacing between sections. There is method in it.

  —Alison L. Strayer

  Paris, April 2017

  About the Author

  Born in 1940, ANNIE ERNAUX grew up in Normandy, studie
d at Rouen University, and began teaching high school. From 1977 to 2000, she was a professor at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance. One of France’s most esteemed living writers, her books have been subject to much critical acclaim. She won the prestigious Prix Renaudot for A Man’s Place when it was first published in French in 1984. The English edition was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The English edition of A Woman’s Story was a New York Times Notable Book.

  ALISON L. STRAYER is a Canadian writer and translator. Her work has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Literature and for Translation, the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal, and the Prix littéraire France-Québec. She lives in Paris

  About Seven Stories Press

  SEVEN STORIES PRESS is an independent book publisher based in New York City. We publish works of the imagination by such writers as Nelson Algren, Russell Banks, Octavia E. Butler, Ani DiFranco, Assia Djebar, Ariel Dorfman, Coco Fusco, Barry Gifford, Martha Long, Luis Negrón, Hwang Sok-yong, Lee Stringer, and Kurt Vonnegut, to name a few, together with political titles by voices of conscience, including Subhankar Banerjee, the Boston Women’s Health Collective, Noam Chomsky, Angela Y. Davis, Human Rights Watch, Derrick Jensen, Ralph Nader, Loretta Napoleoni, Gary Null, Greg Palast, Project Censored, Barbara Seaman, Alice Walker, Gary Webb, and Howard Zinn, among many others. Seven Stories Press believes publishers have a special responsibility to defend free speech and human rights, and to celebrate the gifts of the human imagination, wherever we can. In 2012 we launched Triangle Square books for young readers with strong social justice and narrative components, telling personal stories of courage and commitment. For additional information, visit www.sevenstories.com.