Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language - Softcover

Hoffman, Eva

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140127739 ISBN 13: 9780140127737

Publisher: Penguin, 1990

Synopsis

A marvelously thoughtful book . . . It is not just about emigrants and refuges. It is about us all. The New York Times When her parents brought her from the war-ravaged, faded elegance of her native Cracow in 1959 to settle in well-manicured, suburban Vancouver, Eva Hoffman was thirteen years old. Entering into adolescence, she endured the painful pull of nostalgia and struggled to express herself in a strange unyielding new language. Her spiritual and intellectual odyssey continued in college and led her ultimately to New York s literary world yet still she felt caught between two languages, two cultures. But her perspective also made her a keen observer of an America in the flux of change. A classically American chronicle of upward mobility and assimilation. Lost in Translation is also an incisive meditation on coming to terms with one s own uniqueness, on learning how deeply culture affects the mind and body, and finally, on what it means to accomplish a translation of one s self. Hoffman raises one provocative question after another about the relationship between language and culture . . . and about the emotional cost of re-creating oneself. Newsday "

About this title

Review:

The condition of exile is an exaggeration of the process of change and loss that is inevitable as we grow and mature; there is a sense in which we are all exiles from the decade of our childhood, but exiles are more so. Eva Hoffmann spent her childhood in Cracow, among family friends who, like her parents, had escaped the Holocaust and were sceptical about the newly imposed Communist state. Her parents managed to get sponsorship and emigrated to a 1950s Canada where Eva was old enough to feel a stranger--bland food and quieter lives and schoolmates hardly aware of where her original home was. Still, there were neighbours who knew something of other ways, and a piano teacher who could not have been more Middle-European in his neurotic enthusiasm. True exile was college in Texas, among people frightened and hostile and not, like Canadians, polite about it, or a Harvard where she found her new intellectual self alien even to her parents, or meeting childhood friends who had grown up in Israel and had the preoccupations of soldiers, and not scholars. Lost in Translation is a moving memoir which makes quite specific circumstances hugely more general in their application; it is a touching and an intelligent book.--Roz Kaveney

Review:

"A deep and lovely book. The author manages to capture the very essence of exile experience, in beautifully human terms against a background of keen and searching intellect. This is how tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people felt in this century. Eva Hoffman speaks movingly for all of them" (Josef Skvorecky, author of The Engineer of Human Souls)

"Eva Hoffman's elegant and elegaic autobiography is something different... It is the story...of a paradise lost but regained...a tender and memorable book" (Independent)

"Hoffman takes her experience into the realms of universality, expressing herself in a way which has echoes and points of recognition for others who leave their history, their roots, their known identity adn must try to recreate themselves in another culture... An exquisite feast" (Angela Neustatter Literary Review)

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0140127739
• ISBN 13: 9780140127737
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288