Customer Reviews

Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language

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I am a woman born from a multi-cultural marriage (an American mother and a Jewish Hungarian father who met in Florence, Italy) a neutral third ground. I deeply appriaciated Eva Hoffmann's description of her life in two places. For me who has always lived in one, I feel divisions in identity at a different leve. But as a daughter of parents from different cultural backrounds, I recognize the constant sense of loss and tension between and among memories and experiences originating in different places under different sets of values. I am deeply interested in this topic and have found few books that I appreciated more than Ms. Hoffmann's. I would like to suggest to people with similar interest a book that seems to me to take up where "Lost in traslation ends". It is called "Mother Tongue, An American life in Italy". The author, Wallis Wilde- Menozzi, lives in Italy and describes the divisions and syntheses in her experience of bi-culturalism in a complex and lyrical way that touches finally the minute core of being. Alessandra Pauncz

It is impossible to not recognize in the sensibility of the writer of this work a great power of perception and intelligence. The story of the transition from world to world, from the Poland of her childhood to the Canada of the latter part of her youth, and young adulthood is too told as the story of a family ' lost in translation'. On the purely human individual level there is an exceptional story told here by an exceptional story - teller. There are too a number of remarkably moving scenes , I think especially of her re-meeting the love of her Polish childhood, and the kind of understanding they have for each other though they now live cultures away.
I nonetheless found a certain absence in the work, an absence in the making as end of the story real human connection beyond that given in childhood and early years. Every writer as Henry James has his ' donnee' the subject and material which he is given, and is not to be criticized for having. Eva Hoffman's is this lostness in translation, this perpetual not- at- homeness, but it nonetheless makes of her story at least to my mind , one which however successful on the purely literary level presents a life lacking in the higher significance of giving to and being with others.

In 1959, when she was 13yo, Eva Hoffman fled Poland with her family to British Columbia to escape the rigors of the communist regime. It did not prove to be the tremendous relief she expected, and the book begins with a section titled Paradise, in which the author reminisces about her life back in the Old Country.
The immigrant experience, a new language, new culture, new food - everything was traumatic for her. It became so bad that she felt her brain stopped working for a time.
The most fascinating parts of this book are those that take the reader back into Poland for a behind the scenes glimpse of the 'good life' lived by the middle class. Altho the whole family, plus a live-in maid, lived in just 3 rooms, they lived well, attending the theater and opera regularly. All this, of course, ended when Poland's gov't began persecuting Jews in the late 50s.
Fortunately for her and for us, Hoffman recovered from her period of despair and depression and went on to become editor of the New York Times Book Review.

I didn't care for this book all that much. First, her adolescent experience as an immigrant to Canada seems heavily covered over by later-acquired learning in the philosphy of structuralism, semiotics, etc, all very fashionable nowdays. The book has more the feel of a post-mortem analysis than a personal memoir, and in trying to be both it fails on both levels.

Second, I didn't find her a sympathetic character, because she herself seemed to have so little sympathy for others: Canadians were boring, dull, undemonstrative; North-American teenage life superficial; the local Jewish community obsessed with status and the notion of 'better' or 'worse' people. etc. I got the feeling of her portraying herself as a true and sensitive (European!) heart among the barbarians and the uncomprehending. Sorry, doesn't wash.

This book is a must. It explores the difficulties of learning to express oneself in a new language. Although I have never experienced this myself, it does make you consider the link between language and experience and how sometimes there are no words available to say what you really feel. Hoffman draws you in to her narrative with ease, despite the difficulties she expresses. It is a moving insight into her life as an immigrant and her fellings of alienation.

For many years, I have been involved in the preparation of teachers, both graduate and undergraduate, to work in the multicultural, multilingual climate of our nation's schools. Teachers can be successful ONLY if they have a real sense of what is going on in the minds of the children they teach. All too often, they make assumptions about what a child knows and is able to do or what a child is actually feeling and why. Such assumptions can wreak havoc in the lives of the thousands of immigrant children who come to our classrooms from their home cultures each day speaking a language other than English. Eva Hoffman's book, more than any other work I know, allows a teacher to learn and FEEL what it is really like to make that ultimate journey from the culture and language of one's birth, of one's heart, into the English-speaking world. This is one of the most brilliant books that I have ever read, and it is a MUST for every teacher!

I'm also an immigrant. My new language(s) are like a spider's net in which I cannot travel freely from place to place. Things I feel or think are born in a polyglot pool of disinformation and ignorance. A friend of mine use to say that I'm becoming an illiterate polyglot. Hoffman's book is extremely sensitive to 'translational' problems but I still feel very lonely in this land. I cannot find my way home...

Eva Hoffman states how difficult is to share one`s own identity with whoever does not speak your same language.The total disintagration of the relationship beetwen signifier and signified is achieved and in the same time is denied.On the one hand, the person who is uttering the signifier refers it to a signfied related to his/her own experience, his/her environment, his/her values background and it means to his/her language.The relationship beetwen signifier and signified is disintagrated because for each culture we have specific signifieds.But it even means that in the very moment of uttering a signifier any person relates it to one and only one signnified linked to his/her background.So to speak it seems as if,the signifier refers to more than a signified,because the English word "sun" wil never correspond to the Italian " sole"(the " signified" in this case is really different!!)but it implies that for an English the signifier "sun" has got one and only on signified "the pale sphere in the sky"..The Eva Hoffman`s own words are remarkable: "Do you marry him? No, I answered in English;Yes I answered in "my" language.Two different languages are two different persons, with two different lives...

I've read Hoffman's book 3 times now, and it never ceases to amaze. In fact, I'm writing part of my senior thesis on it this year. Very rarely is an author able to capture truth in words as Hoffman manages to do page after page. Her journalistic memoir captures the humanity that links us all.

This book marvelously captures the cultural differences between North America and Europe. It describes two similar but fundamentally different cultures, one based on the material comforts that a wealthy society can provide, and the other based on the human comforts of good friends, love of music and literature and a life that feels lived.