The Years by Annie Ernaux

Author:Annie Ernaux
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: feminism, book club recommendations, book club, translated memoir, women in translation, ecriture feminine, french new wave, nouvelle vague, 1960s france, 1960s, feminist memoir, french women, feminist lit, memoir, french books, french literature, classic literature, autobiography, literature, 20th century, family, world war 2, ww2, wwii, letters, world war two, literary fiction, translation, cold war, literary, war, 1940s, roman, essays, memory, 1950s, women, english, death, aging, wwi, philosophy, friendship, found in translation
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2017-11-06T16:34:02+00:00

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.

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