Joan Didion became a cultural icon for Americans by documenting the social realities of middle-class life and the collapse of ideas in the United States in the 1960s, the rise of the hippie movement, and other social realities, which sparked phenomenal discussions. (Infographic/Figure)
In March 2021, after completing the translation of "Trek to Bethlehem", the translator He Yujia had a brief conversation with his friend and non-fiction writer He Wei. Speaking of this classic work in the history of the American "New News Movement", He Wei said that of course he had seen it, "She'sgood."
Joan Didion, 86, is a well-known American writer and cultural icon. At the age of 81, she became the face of the French brand Celine. In 2013, the U.S. government awarded her the National Humanities Medal, in which then-President Barack Obama commented that "[she is] the sharpest and most respected observer of American politics and culture in decades."
Much of what Chinese readers know about Didion comes from her recent works, "The Year of Fantasy" and "Blue Night". In 2003, on the eve of their fortieth wedding anniversary, Didion's husband died of a sudden heart attack, and their daughter was in a state of pneumonia coma and was living in an intensive care unit. She wrote about her grief and memories of her husband into the best-selling book "The Year of Fantasy". Two months after the book was published, her daughter also died. She went on to write Blue Nights. He Yujia told Southern Weekend that when she translated the book, she felt that Didion was like a "wounded deer."
If the doom of life made Didion's later writing. Early in her career, she was better known and more importantly a journalist.
Joan Didion was born in 1935 in Sacramento, California. Her writing began with a dramatic start: as a senior at the University of California, Berkeley, Didion took the first place in Vogue's essay contest, which gave her the opportunity to work as an assistant editor at the well-known fashion magazine, and came to New York alone in her early twenties.
In the 1960s, later known as the "crazy youth" specimen, the United States set off a "countercultural movement." The scars of the old post-war political order are still pervasive: the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the defeat of the United States in Vietnam, the Watergate... In the 1950s, the shadow of McCarthyism still hovered over the United States, and the wave of the new era had already been set off— school democracy, black civil rights, women's liberation, anti-war peace, environmental protection, and equal rights for homosexuals. After the high pressure dissipated, the American spiritual world faced shock and disintegration, and the younger generation used rock and roll, sexual liberation, drug addiction, hippie culture and mysticism to release repression.
For the recorder, it was a golden age when history and storytelling intersected.
Joan Didion, who wears sunglasses, medium-length hair and a minimalist T-shirt, enters the Hight-Ashbury district of San Francisco for immersive interviews— the birthplace of the hippie movement in the 1960s and 1970s. She wrote the eponymous chapter Trek to Bethlehem, which was published in 1968 in conjunction with other writings of the same period, and the book became Joan Didion's masterpiece. At the end of June 2021, Chinese simplified version of the book was published.
Nearly sixty years later, some fragmentary anecdotes have made He Yujia feel the influence of Didion in current American culture: she once met a Chinese writer in Chengdu who studied creative writing in the United States. Learning that He Yujia was translating "Trek to Bethlehem", the writer told her that for literature students in American universities, the male writer who must read is James Baldwin, and the female writer is Joan Didion.
An American community bookstore even posted a note at its door, "Stopstealing JoanDidion's work!" (Stop stealing Joan Didion's work!) The bookstore owner said that the most commonly stolen in the store was "Trek to Bethlehem" because it sold well in the second-hand market.
In February 2021, the New Yorker published a book review titled "Our Misconceptions About Joan Didion." Author Nathan Heller writes: "She is highly regarded for her impeccable style, but Didion's real insight is what unites society, or tears it apart." ”
<h3>Trek to Bethlehem: The most urgent sense of writing</h3>
In the spring of 1967, Joan Didion married fellow writer John Gregory Dunn and lived in Los Angeles. The New Yorker's report chronicles Didion's life at that time. She doesn't work for a media agency, and the couple's main source of income is filling out editions — writing regular columns for the Saturday Evening Post.
It was a good job, about twelve hundred words, much bigger than the review page at the beginning of the magazine. The Post paid them handsomely, and Didion and Dunn wrote one a month. In a column called "PointsWest," they write a story where they're interested in interviewing a few people or no one on the West Coast.
The Post was struggling to make ends meet (it went bankrupt two years later), and the chaos allowed columnists to experiment with alternative writing. Didion wrote about the leader of a small political group and spent a spring writing about the hippie movement.
Along with Tom Wolfe, Truman Capotti, Guy Tris, and others, Didion was a representative of the "New Press Movement" that emerged in the United States in the 1960s. The movement advocated the introduction of literary techniques into journalistic writing, with an emphasis on dialogue, scenes and psychological depictions, as well as the portrayal of the most important details for journalists.
The title of "Trek to Bethlehem" comes from the poet Yeats's poem "The Second Holy Presence":
Everything disintegrates, the center cannot be maintained,
All that remains is chaos, disorder in the world
The dark tide of blood spread in all directions
Drowning belief in the celebration of innocence;
The good lack faith, the wicked
But full of passion, soaring forward.
Didion wrote a story by Joan Baez. The folk singer is the leader of the civil rights movement in the music industry, the "Virgin Mary" of the rebels, and a friend of Martin Luther King Jr. and an ex-girlfriend of Bob Dylan. It was difficult to meet Joan Baez at the time for those who had not penetrated the protest movement – especially for journalists. Didion eventually met her at the "School of Nonviolent Studies" run by Baez.
She has a scrutinizing attitude towards this literary goddess. For example, a quote from Baez's old friend Ella Sandpel, who once became Baez's mentor to the pacifist movement: "She found herself making many friends who knew politics very well, and her feelings were strong, but she knew nothing about the social, economic, political and historical aspects of the nonviolent movement." ”
Even though he is often known for his sense of alienation, Didion's only words in the preface sometimes exude the nervousness of writing. She writes that the eponymous chapter, "Trek to Bethlehem," is the most urgent of all the anthologies, and the only one that has plunged herself into depression and despair after its publication.
In the United States in 1967, the center was no longer sustainable. "In this country, bankruptcy announcements and public auction notices are all over the place; random killings, displaced children, abandoned homes are not uncommon; those who graffiti and destroy cultural relics will misspel even four words." Faced with this social situation, Didion also had to deal with her inner disorder— she found herself unable to work for months.
One of the most indelible scenes of "Trek to Bethlehem" appears in the last scene of the text. In the hippie block, a kid in a double-breasted coat is sitting on the living room floor reading a comic book. She licked her lips intently, and the only thing that was a little wrong was the "white lipstick" on her mouth. The five-year-old was named Susan, and her mom had been taking psychedelics for a year.
Years later, Didion's husband's nephew, director Griffin Dunn, asked in a documentary filmed for her, "As a journalist, what were you thinking when you saw a child with psychedelics on his mouth?" Didion sat on the couch in the living room, wearing a gray cashmere sweater with a thin gold chain hanging from his neck. She lowered her eyes, thinking, blinking. One viewer replied: This is terrible. I want to call an ambulance, I want to call the police, I want to cry, I want to get out of there and go back to my two-year-old daughter. Seven seconds later, Didion lifted his chin and raised his eyes to Dunn, "Let me tell you, it's gold. ”
<h3>"This sentence is my birthday present to you."</h3>
He Yujia, who lives in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, has translated many non-fiction literary works, such as Shark Fin and Pepper, Journey to Northeast China, Invisible America, and Goodbye, Old Beijing. In the past, she would be in close contact with the original author during the translation process. When translating Shark Fin and Pepper, she even communicates with the author Fuxia WeChat, who provides a lot of Chinese advice.
But Didion couldn't be contacted. He Yujia found an email address on the Internet and sent several emails without replying. She decided to put down the text and look at the man. In the documentary, an elderly Joan Didion appears in the video. "You can feel her sensitivity and she's a very rude person."
After the new book was printed, He Yujia sent 5 sample books to friends. Two friends saw it and said they liked it very much, while the other three didn't react. This book is not thick, and He Yujia thinks that friends should not be because they have not read it yet. She uses the term "honey of A, arsenic of B" to describe how people feel about Didion. "People who like her will like her super much, and people who don't like her won't get it." For example, in "Blue Night", there are private messages from readers who say, what is this? ”
Blue Nights and The Year of Whimsy have been called "classics of mourning literature.". That feeling of mourning but not hurting will impress He Yujia, "The language of "Blue Night" is very direct, its literal emotion is already very hard, you can just turn it out." "This is not the case with Trek to Bethlehem. He Yujia needed to consult a lot of information to understand the deep meaning of some sentences.
From the age of eleven or twelve, Didion enjoyed reading Hemingway. She would type out the articles with a typewriter — to see how each sentence worked. Her Hemingway-style sentences are very concise. Looking at the original English text, you will understand that she is not idle, and the arrangement of sentence structure has her own purpose. However, in the context of Chinese, it seems more prosaic. ”
In the early days of the "New Press Movement", Didion apparently contributed a rather bold personal style. According to an article in the New Yorker, Joan Didion, in the form of dialects, imitated the laziness and fatigue revealed in the speech of hippie street people. She even adopted a kind of hippie street personality, integrating such a character personality with the scene at that time, and the author also absorbed the confusion of this personality as part of his own consciousness.
Over the course of six decades, Didion has tried to write novels— Democracy and His Last Wish. She also explores different kinds of nonfiction creations: review articles, political reports, memoirs. She published a second magazine article collection, The White Album, in 1979, followed by El Salvador, Miami, After Henry, Political Fiction, and Where I Came From. In the spring of 2005, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded Didion the Gold Medal.
She recalled in The Year of Whimsy that john sat by the fire in the living room before dinner and read aloud to me. He was reading aloud my novel The Book of Public Prayer, and he wanted to re-read it and carefully appreciate the writing technique, so he put it in the living room... "Mother," John closed the book, and said to me, "Don't tell me in the future that you don't have the talent to write." This sentence is my birthday present to you. ”
In the prologue to Trek to Bethlehem, Didion writes that while writing the story of the same name, she fell seriously ill and could not sleep at night. For twenty to twenty-one hours of the day, she had to drink gin mixed with hot water to relieve the pain, and then eat dextroamphetamine, which stimulates the central nervous system, to relieve the paralysis of gin, so that she could write.
She concludes the article by saying, "What else should I tell you?" I'm not good at interviewing people. I'm reluctant to talk to anyone's media agent. (This means that most of the actors are outside my writing range, which is a great thing in itself.) I don't like to talk on the phone, and I don't want to count how many mornings I've been sitting in bed at one of the 'Best Western' motels, trying to force myself to call the assistant district attorney. As a journalist, my only strength is that I am particularly petite, my temperament is particularly low-key, I am very poor at expression, and people will always forget that my existence is against their interests. This has always been the case. Here's the last thing you have to remember: writers are always selling out to others. ”
Southern Weekend reporter Fu Ziyang