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