Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language

by Eva Hoffman

Overview

“A marvelously thoughtful book . . . It is not just about emigrants and refugees. 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780140127737
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/01/1990
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.07(w) x 7.74(h) x 0.65(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Eva Hoffman was born in Krakow, Poland, and emigrated to America in her teens. She is the author of Lost in Translation, Exit Into History, Shtetl, The Secret, and After Such Knowledge. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Award, and an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Hoffman lives in London.

Editorial Reviews

Hoffman raises one provocative question after another about the relationship between language and culture . . . and about the emotional cost of re-creating oneself.” –Newsday

"A marvelously thoughtful book . . . It is not just about emigrants and refugees. It is about us all.” -The New York Times

From the Publisher

Daughter of Holocaust survivors, the author, a New York Times Book Review editor, lost her sense of place and belonging when she emigrated with her family from Poland to Vancouver in 1959 at the age of 13. Although she works within a familiar genre here, Hoffman's is a penetrating, lyrical memoir that casts a wide net as it joins vivid anecdotes and vigorous philosophical insights on Old World Cracow and Ivy League America; Polish anti-Semitism; the degradations suffered by immigrants; Hoffman's cultural nostalgia, self-analysis and intellectual passion; and the atrophy of her Polish from disuse and her own disabling inarticulateness in English as a newcomer. Linguistic dispossession, she explains, ``is close to the dispossession of one's self.'' As Hoffman savors the cadences and nuances of her adopted language, she remains ever conscious of assimilation's perils: ``But how does one bend toward another culture without falling over, how does one strike an elastic balance between rigidity and self-effacement?'' (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Born in Poland shortly after World War II, Hoffman emigrated to Canada with her parents in 1959. Gifted both as a writer and a musician, Hoffman succeeded enough in her ``second'' culture to win scholarships to Rice and Harvard and to become a published author in her adopted language and a New York Times editor. But, as this perceptive and moving memoir demonstrates, no matter how successful the adaptation to a new culture, the immigrant experiences loss as well as gain. Hoffman makes one feel intensely the pain of an abrupt rupture with one's culture and native language, as well as the difficulties of adjusting to a new idiom. Recommended for public and college libraries. Ann. H. Sullivan, Tompkins Cortland Community Coll . , Dryden, N.Y.

Library Journal