2022年诺贝尔文学奖得主安妮·埃尔诺：我们的语言、我们的历史不一样，但我们在同一个世界上！

Nobel Prize in Literature winner Annie Ernaux/

当地时间10月6日，瑞典文学院在斯德哥尔摩宣布，将2022年诺贝尔文学奖授予法国作家安妮·埃尔诺（Annie Ernaux），以表彰其在文学上的成就。瑞典文学院的颁奖词称，“她以勇气和敏锐的洞察力揭示了个人记忆的根源、隔阂和集体限制”（“for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”）。在她的写作中，埃尔诺始终从不同的角度审视了在性别、语言和阶层方面存在巨大差异的生活，她的创作之路漫长而艰辛。

著名法语文学翻译家许钧表示，“安妮•埃尔诺在法国作家中也是一位特殊的存在。她关注当下生活，关注人们的日常情感世界。她的写作探索都是从这些方面着手的，她的作品中没有重大历史题材，也没有不同文化的冲突和交融。这和诺贝尔文学奖这几年关注的作家很不一样。”

Annie Ernaux

Annie Ernaux (81) is France’s most famous living writer. She has won numerous prizes and for years has been one of the top favourites for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Ernaux grew up as the daughter of a working-class family in Normandy, then left her parental milieu behind and lived a middle-class life as a teacher and mother. Since 1974, she has published more than a dozen books – analytical works in which she addresses her biographical experiences and her social advancement, but also the lives of ordinary people in France. In recent years, her books have also been translated into English and German. The English translation of her book “Happening” was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2019.

诺奖作者：安妮·埃尔诺

法国女作家，代表作有《空衣橱》《位置》《一个女人》《单纯的激情》《耻辱》《事件》《占领》等。长篇小说《悠悠岁月》获人民文学出版社21世纪2009年度最佳外国小说奖。

Nobel Prize in literature goes to French author Annie Ernaux

Stockholm — French author Annie Ernaux, who has mined her own biography to explore life in France since the 1940s, was awarded this year's Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday for work that illuminates murky corners of memory, family and society.

Ernaux's autobiographical books explore deeply personal experiences and feelings - love, sex, abortion, shame - within a changing web of social and class relationships. Much of her material came out of her experiences being raised in a working-class family in the Normandy region of northwest France.

The Swedish Academy said Ernaux, 82, was recognized for "the courage and clinical acuity" of her writing.

Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel literature committee, said Ernaux is "an extremely honest writer who is not afraid to confront the hard truths."

"She writes about things that no one else writes about, for instance her abortion, her jealousy, her experiences as an abandoned lover and so forth. I mean, really hard experiences," he said after the award announcement in Stockholm. "And she gives words for these experiences that are very simple and striking. They are short books, but they are really moving."

Ernaux is just the 17th woman among the 119 Nobel literature laureates and is the first French literature laureate since Patrick Modiano in 2014. One of France's most-garlanded authors and a prominent feminist voice, she expressed surprise at the award, asking a Swedish journalist who reached her by phone: "Are you sure?"

"I was working this morning and the phone has been ringing all the time but I haven't answered," she told the TT news agency.

Ernaux told Swedish broadcaster SVT that the award was "a great honor" and "a very great responsibility."

Olsson said Ernaux had used the term "an ethnologist of herself" rather than a writer of fiction.

Her more than 20 books, most of them very short, chronicle events in her life and the lives of those around her. They present uncompromising portraits of sexual encounters, abortion, illness and the deaths of her parents.

Olsson said Ernaux's work was often "written in plain language, scraped clean."

Ernaux describes her style as "flat writing" - aiming for an very objective view of the events she is describing, unshaped by florid description or overwhelming emotions.

Ernaux worked as a teacher before becoming a full-time writer. Her first book was "Cleaned Out" in 1974. Two more autobiographical novels followed - "What They Say Goes" and "The Frozen Woman" - before she moved to more overtly autobiographical books.

In the book that made her name, "La Place" (A Man's Place), published in 1983 and about her relationship with her father, she writes: "No lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony. This neutral writing style comes to me naturally."

"Shame," published in 1997, explored a childhood trauma, while "Happening," from 2000 depicts an illegal abortion.

Her most critically acclaimed book is "The Years," published in 2008, which described herself and wider French society from the end of World War II to the 21st century. Unlike in previous books, in "The Years," Ernaux wrote in the third person, calling her character "she" rather than "I". The book received numerous awards and honors, and Olsson said it has been called "the first collective autobiography."

"A Girl's Story," from 2016, follows a young woman's coming of age in the 1950s.

The Nobel literature prize has long faced criticism that it is too focused on European and North American writers, as well as too male-dominated. Last year's prize winner, Tanzanian-born, U.K.-based writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, was only the sixth Nobel literature laureate born in Africa.

"We try first of all to broaden the scope of the Nobel Prize, but our focus must be on literary quality," Olsson said.

The prizes to Gurnah in 2021 and U.S. poet Louise Glück in 2020 helped the literature prize move on from years of controversy and scandal.

In 2018, the award was postponed after sex abuse allegations rocked the Swedish Academy, which names the Nobel literature committee, and sparked an exodus of members. The academy revamped itself but faced more criticism for giving the 2019 literature award to Austria's Peter Handke, who has been called an apologist for Serbian war crimes.

A week of Nobel Prize announcements kicked off Monday with Swedish scientist Svante Paabo receiving the award in medicine for unlocking secrets of Neanderthal DNA that provided key insights into our immune system.

Three scientists jointly won the prize in physics Tuesday. Frenchman Alain Aspect, American John F. Clauser and Austrian Anton Zeilinger had shown that tiny particles can retain a connection with each other even when separated, a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement, that can be used for specialized computing and to encrypt information.

The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded Wednesday to Americans Carolyn R. Bertozzi and K. Barry Sharpless, and Danish scientist Morten Meldal for developing a way of "snapping molecules together" that can be used to explore cells, map DNA and design drugs that can target diseases such as cancer more precisely.

The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics award on Monday.

The prizes carry a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (nearly $900,000) and will be handed out on Dec. 10. The money comes from a bequest left by the prize's creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, in 1895.

Annie Ernaux is regarded as the doyenne of French literature. In her books, she rigorously takes herself to task in addressing social differences and female independence. A discussion about the difficult struggle for self-determination, both now and in the past. 下文是《正发生》电影获奖后的采访。

In Venice, the film version of your novel “Happening” has just been awarded the Golden Lion. In it, you talk about your illegal abortion in France in the 1960s. What does this award mean to you?

I really like this movie. The director and the leading actress have managed extremely well to convey the feeling of loneliness; this sword of Damocles hanging over you. When I see what’s happening in Texas, I feel it’s all the more important to address this topic all over again. I’m afraid it’s only a matter of time before the right to abortion is challenged again in our country.

In this book, you describe the feeling of powerlessness – when you can’t decide for yourself about your body and your future – with brutal openness.

I wanted to record what it felt like to be a woman without the right to self-determination. You can no longer imagine what it was like when abortion was illegal. Nobody helped you – neither doctors, nor friends, nor your family. They all looked the other way. It was a feeling of immense loneliness. It was as if a brick wall had been raised in front of me, as if the law was saying to me: “stop there, you don’t go any further”. After all, I didn’t have the money to go to Switzerland as the more affluent girls did back then.

You grew up in a working-class family in Normandy and describe this moment as if your body were throwing you back into your milieu. What did you mean exactly?

When you try to escape your original social class, as I tried to do back then with my studies, you often ask yourself: What’s going to trip me up? What's going to stop me in the end? When I found out I was pregnant, it suddenly dawned on me: It would be my body, that’s what would stop me. At that time, an unmarried pregnant woman was the epitome of poverty. It was a guarantee that you’d never be set free. That it was all over.

But you didn’t just accept those social constraints. You wanted to decide for yourself how you would live, and you even accepted that you might die. After going to a back-street abortionist you ended up in the emergency room.

Oh God, yeah, it was horrible. I’m sure it sounds crazy, but in situations like that you don’t think you could die. You know it, but you put it right out of your mind. I just carried on and didn’t let this government ban stop me. I was proud of that at the time.

Where does your enormous desire for self-determination come from?

From my mother. Without her, I certainly wouldn’t be where I am today. Social advancement is a form of exile. You leave a whole world behind you, say goodbye to yourself in a way. It’s hard. To do that, you need someone who encourages you to do it, someone who says: Go on, jump! Someone who doesn’t hold you back, even if they know you’ll have to edge away.

How did your mother support you?

In our village I had many friends whose mothers often said, “That’s nothing for us” and just made themselves scarce. My mother never did anything like that. She always said: “You’re worth it.” For example, I remember this one time at the village ball, when I had danced a lot with a boy whose parents owned a fancy café in the city. On the way back, one of the other mothers said: “That boy’s way too posh for us.” That’s when my mother got really angry. She said, “Excuse me, my daughter is graduating from high school! With all the diplomas she’s going to get, she’s definitely worth this guy!”

Education became your ticket to social advancement. So what led you to write in the end?

Two books. One was “The Second Sex” by Simone de Beauvoir. It was a revelation. Suddenly I understood: feminism is a must. And the second was “Distinction” by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. It’s about the cultural differences between people born into a certain class and those who have found advancement. On reading it, I realised what a gulf existed between me and my original milieu, but also that I would never really belong to the new one. That’s when I knew I had to write about it.

In your autobiographical books, which are termed “literary sociology”, you also describe how, as a young girl, you felt ashamed about your origin. Where did that come from?

It’s the way others look at you. And that look is powerful. You always get looked at. And you’re always judged. In the eyes of other people, you’re either considered equal, or superior, or else as inferior. All our social relationships put us at a higher or a lower level.

Does that still apply today? Or do you find society more socially permeable than when you were young?

The social differences exist in France then and now. Many people from the working and middle classes can actually hope for nothing more than to continue living like their parents did. Self-determination and social advancement remain very difficult – but it’s still possible today.

You even managed to climb to the top of the intellectual elite: today you’re considered the most important writer of your generation. But you've been living in a suburb of Paris for decades. You seem to be isolating yourself and not wanting to integrate completely.

I just don’t feel very comfortable in certain circles to this day. Not in my rightful place, so to speak. When I walk through Paris – through Saint Germain des Prés, past all the luxury boutiques, for example – it’s just not my world. I like nature, silence. I can’t see any fascination with this sophisticated world, I just don’t care for it.

Has success in your life made you freer or less free?

Neither. Success doesn’t mean much to me. It has little influence on what I do or how I see myself. I live for writing. I write most of the time here in my house. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve missed out on something because I’ve subordinated everything to writing. But when I read the many letters in which people tell me how important my books are to them and how they have changed their lives, then I think to myself: it was worth it. Maybe that’s exactly what I’m here for.

致中国读者

　　2000年春天，我第一次来到中国，先到北京，后到上海。我应邀在一些大学里谈了自己的写作。你们的国家，中国，我在童年时就多少次梦想过的地方，我在想象中在那里漫步，在一些把脚紧裹在小鞋里的女人、背上拖着一条大辫子的男人当中。当然，在最近10年里，一些影片、纪录片、书籍，改变了我简单化的观点，但只有在到达北京时，这种由意识形态的偏见和杜撰、虚构的描述所构成的模糊一团才烟消云散。

　　我在街道和建筑工地的喧闹中、在偏僻的胡同和公园的宁静中漫步。我在最新式的高楼旁边呼吸着平房的气息。我注视着一群群小学生，被货物遮住的骑车人，穿着西式婚纱拍照的新娘。我怀着一种亲近的感觉想到“我们的语言、我们的历史不一样，但我们在同一个世界上”。我看到的一切，在卡车后部颠簸的工人，一些在公园里散步的、往往由祖父母、父母亲和一个独生子女组成的家庭，和我当时正在撰写的长篇小说《悠悠岁月》产生了共鸣。在中法两国人民的特性、历史等一切差别之外，我似乎发觉了某种共同的东西。在街道上偶然与一些男人和女人交错而过的时候，我也常常自问：他们的生活历程是什么样的？他们对童年、对以前的各个时期有着什么样的记忆？我会喜欢接触中国的记忆，不是在一切历史学家著作里的记忆，而是真实的和不确定的、既是每个人唯一的又是与所有人分享的记忆，是他（她）经历过的时代的痕迹。

我最大的希望是我的小说能使你们，中国朋友，接触一种法国人的记忆。一个法国女人的、也是和她同一代人的人所熟悉的记忆，从第二次世界大战直到今天的记忆，在各种生活方式、信仰和价值方面，比他们几个世纪里的祖先有着更多的动荡。一种不断地呈现一切事件、歌曲、物品、社会的标语口号，集体的恐惧和希望的记忆。它根据对从童年到进入老年的各种不同年龄所拍摄的照片的凝视，同样勾勒了社会的进程和一种生活的内心历程。在让你们沉浸于这些你们也经历过——也许不一样——的岁月的时候，愿你们能感到，其实我们完全是在同一个世界上，时间同样在无情地流逝。

（此为作者获2009年度21世纪最佳外国小说奖时的获奖感言）

金狮奖电影原著，亦出自她手

2021年第78届威尼斯国际电影节金狮奖电影《正发生》（L'Événement）改编自安妮·埃尔诺的同名自传作品。

电影《正发生》法国版海报

《正发生》讲述上世纪六十年代初，女大学生安在意外怀孕后试图堕胎的故事。

电影《正发生》剧照

出身于外省下层家庭，完成学业是天资聪慧的安改变命运的唯一途径，而意外怀孕则打乱了一切，威胁着她的人生规划。

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