I had been in Paris a couple of years before any of this became clear to me.
在我认清这些之前，我在巴黎呆了两三年的时间。
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.
待到认清这些之后，我就像许多前辈作家发现他的生活支柱全部被人拆掉了一样，遭受了一种精神崩溃的痛苦，不得不到瑞士的高山上去疗养。
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.
在那一片晶莹的雪山景色中。我以两张贝西?史密斯的唱片和一台打字机为工具，开始试图把自己孩提时代最初体验到的，多年来又一直想尽力忘却的生活经历再现出来。
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
是贝西?史密斯用她的音调和节拍帮我发掘出了当我还是个黑人小孩时本就使用过的说话口吻，使我重新忆起了小时候的所闻、所见和所感。我已将这些深深藏在了心底。在美国我从来不听贝西?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”.
(这与我多年不碰西瓜是同一道理)，但在欧洲，她却使我体会到身为"黑鬼"并没有什么不好。
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.
我觉得自己在美国是体会不到这一点的。一旦我能够接受自己在美国这出不同寻常的戏剧中所扮演的角色--应该指出，这里说的角色是就我的"地位"而言--我便从仇恨美国的幻觉中清醒过来了。