(单词翻译:单击)
“Think of this as a travel piece,” she might have written.
“把这想成一篇旅行文章，”她可能会这样写道。
“Imagine it in Sunset magazine: ‘Five Great California Stops Along the Joan Didion Trail.’”
“把它想成在《日落》杂志上:‘琼·狄迪恩小道上的五大加州站’。”
Or think of this as what it really is: a road trip of magical thinking.
或者把它想成它真正的样子:一次天马行空的公路之旅。
I had known that Didion’s Parkinson’s was advancing; seven or eight months earlier, someone had told me that she was vanishing; someone else had told me that for the past two years, she hadn’t been able to speak.
我曾了解到狄迪恩的帕金森病在恶化; 七八个月前，有人告诉我她正在消逝; 有人告诉我，在过去的两年里，她一直不能说话。
I didn’t want her to die.
我不想让她离去。
My sense of myself is in many ways wrapped up in the 40 essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album.
自我的感觉以多种方式被包裹在了《向伯利恒跋涉》和《白色相册》中的40篇散文中。
I don’t know how many times I’ve read Democracy.
我不知道我读了多少遍《民主》。
“Call me the author,” she writes in that novel. “Let the reader be introduced to Joan Didion.”
“就叫我作者吧，”她在那本小说中写道。 “让读者认识琼·狄迪恩。”
There are people who admire Joan Didion, and people who enjoy reading Joan Didion, and people who think Joan Didion is overrated.
有人崇拜琼·狄迪恩，有人喜欢读琼·狄迪恩，有人认为琼·狄迪恩被高估了。
But then there are the rest of us.
但还有我们这些人。
People who can’t really explain how those first two collections hit us, or why we can never let them go.
我们这些人无法解释前两个作品集是如何影响我们的，也无法解释为什么我们永远无法放弃这些作品。
I picked up Slouching Towards Bethlehem in 1975, the year I was 14.
1975年，我14岁，拿起了《向伯利恒跋涉》这本书。
I had met Didion that spring, although she wasn’t famous yet, outside of certain small but powerful circles.
那年春天，我认识了狄迪恩，尽管除了在某些有权势的小圈子里，她当时还不出名。
She’d been a visiting professor in the Berkeley English department, and my father was the department chair.
她是伯克利英语系的客座教授，而我父亲是系主任。
But I didn’t read her until that summer.
但我直到那年夏天才读到她的书籍。
I was in Ireland, as I always was in the summer, and I was bored out of my mind, as I always was in the summer, and I happened to see a copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem in a Dublin living room.
夏天的时候总是这样，我总是呆在爱尔兰，夏天的时候总是这样，我总是无聊透顶，我碰巧在都柏林的客厅里看到了一本《向伯利恒跋涉》的书。
I read that book and something changed inside me, and it has stayed that way for the rest of my life.
我读了那本书，改变了内心的一些东西，并且在我的余生中一直如此。
Over the previous two years people kept contacting me with reports of her decline.
在过去的两年里，人们不断地联系我，告诉我她的病情。
I didn’t want to hear reports of her decline.
我不想听到关于她病情恶化的消息。
I wanted to hear about the high-ceilinged rooms of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, and about all the people who came to parties at her house on Franklin Avenue.
我想听听关于皇家夏威夷酒店中穹庐般高顶的房间的故事，还有那些来她富兰克林大道中的房子里参加派对的人们的故事。
I wanted to go with her to pick out a dress for Linda Kasabian, the Manson girl who drove the getaway car the night of the murders.
我想和她一起去给琳达·卡萨比安挑条裙子，就是那个案发当晚开着车逃跑的曼森女孩。
I wanted to spend my days in the house out in Malibu, where the fever broke.
我想在马里布的房子里过我的日子，那里是我退烧的地方。
In 1969, Didion wanted to go to Vietnam, but her editor told her that “the guys are going out,” and she didn’t get to go.
1969年，狄迪恩想去越南，但她的编辑告诉她“男人们要去”，而她不能去。
When her husband had been at Time and asked to go, he was sent at once, and he later wrote about spending five weeks in the whorehouses of Saigon.
当她的丈夫在《时代》杂志工作，要求前往越南的时候，立刻便派他去了，后来他写下了在西贡妓院里度过的五周。
Being denied the trip to Vietnam is the only instance I know of that her work was limited by her gender.
被拒绝去越南是我所知道的唯一一个她的作品中受到性别限制的事例。
She fought against the strictures of the time—and the ridiculous fact of being from California, which in the 1950s was like being from Mars, but with surfboards.
她反抗当时的种种束缚，反抗自己来自加州这一荒谬的事实。在20世纪50年代，来自加州就像来自火星，只不过还带着冲浪板。
