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I had been in Paris a couple of years before any of this became clear to me.
在我認清這些之前，我在巴黎呆了兩三年的時間。
When it did, I like many a writer before me upon the discovery that his props have all been knocked out from under him, suffered a species of breakdown and was carried off to the mountains of Switzerland.
待到認清這些之后，我就像許多前輩作家發現他的生活支柱全部被人拆掉了一樣，遭受了一種精神崩潰的痛苦，不得不到瑞士的高山上去療養。
There, in that absolutely Hiroshima landscape, armed with two Bessie Smith records and a typewriter I began to try to recreate the life that I had first known as a child and from which I had spent so many years in flight.
在那一片晶瑩的雪山景色中。我以兩張貝西?史密斯的唱片和一臺打字機為工具，開始試圖把自己孩提時代最初體驗到的，多年來又一直想盡力忘卻的生活經歷再現出來。
It was Bessie Smith, through her tone and her cadence, who helped me to dig back to the way I myself must have spoken when I was a pickaninny, and to remember the things I had never listened to Bessie Smith in America
是貝西?史密斯用她的音調和節拍幫我發掘出了當我還是個黑人小孩時本就使用過的說話口吻，使我重新憶起了小時候的所聞、所見和所感。我已將這些深深藏在了心底。在美國我從來不聽貝西?史密斯的歌。
(in the same way that, for years, I would not touch watermelon), but in Europe she helped to reconcile me to being a “nigger”.
(這與我多年不碰西瓜是同一道理)，但在歐洲，她卻使我體會到身為"黑鬼"并沒有什么不好。
I do not think that I could have made this reconciliation here. Once I was able to accept my role-as distinguished, I must say, from my “place”—in the extraordinary drama which is America, I was released from the illusion that I hated America.
我覺得自己在美國是體會不到這一點的。一旦我能夠接受自己在美國這出不同尋常的戲劇中所扮演的角色--應該指出，這里說的角色是就我的"地位"而言--我便從仇恨美國的幻覺中清醒過來了。
