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

Hoffman, Eva

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0749390700 ISBN 13: 9780749390709

Publisher: Vintage, 1991

Synopsis

In 1959 13-year-old Eva Hoffman made a voyage that took her from the familiar, loved country of her childhood to the unknown New World. Her life was irrevocably divided in two. In this personal memoir, she evokes the landscapes of postwar Poland - recently war-torn, suffering oppression, yet also the land of friends, first love, first home. She then sets out to convey the shock of the disruption of exile from that home and the struggle to comprehend a suddenly alien world, in which she experienced hardships among the well-manicured lawns of suburban Vancouver. The view of an adolescent thrust into a new world with no familiar references is offered via comments on a succession of American landscapes - college education in Texas; counterculture at Harvard; the literary milieu of New York. The reader is given an insight into the profound consequences of living a bicultural identity, the risks of nostalgia, the conflicting pulls of freedom and family knowledge. The book also explores the condition of being caught between two languages - a condition that literally offers different answers in moments of important decision - and tells how Hoffman learned to rewrite herself in the splintered, challenging English idiom.

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: Vintage
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0749390700
• ISBN 13: 9780749390709
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288