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Book
ReviewTrauma
and the Recapturing ExperienceLost in translation: a life in a new language. Eva Hoffman,
1991. London: Minerva; ISBN 0749390700, pbk, 288 pp., £7.99
SAGE Publications, Inc.2005DOI: 10.1177/09675507050130010505
Alison James
Surrey Institute of Art & Design, UC
Lost
in translation is the story of Eva Hoffman's shift between worlds, from her
birth in Cracow, Poland, to her family's emigration to Canada when she was
thirteen. It evokes the struggles of them all, but Eva in particular, to integrate
themselves into the ways of a new continent. A tale of linguistic dispossession,
it is Eva's attempt to recapture her experience of losing personal voice and
identity through emigration. In writing this, Eva is both blessed and cursed
by the strength of her talents – especially the quality of her mind
and ability to remember or recre- ate in riveting terms the life she left
behind. She has an almost Proustian motivation (with less volubility) to locate
real meaning in a moment or tiny action. It suffuses the scope and detail
of her imagination/memory to fix the reader in different episodes or moments – contentment experienced through sunshine, the impact and sufficiency of memories
at four years old, the customs, rituals and traditions of agricultural and
urban Poland. Above all she is driven by a need to pin down the truth or reality
of things, in relation to the limitations or blessings of language. She under-
stands and reveals how `moving languages' traumatizes our sense of self and
our world; the impossibility of words from one language to fully replace similar
words in another; displacement and loss of reference points in emigration; and the most fundamental need for adequate language: `I want my peace of mind
back' (p. 128). Her truth-seeking determination permeates her questioning
of time, reality and mortality, as she shifts gear linguistically through
academic analysis, clear unadorned prose, lyrical evocation and quasi-poetry.
Her duty to the truth is paralleled
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by her
sense of responsibility with the legacy of other people's remembered pain.
She is also supremely aware of the ephemeral nature of being and the fragility
of human existence. She takes her mission seriously. In doing it justice she
is both capable of producing stunning observations about the human condition
while, on occasion, not being able to escape the Sisyphean nature of her search
for truth – the harder you try to define something, the more elusive
it becomes. Once in a while these convolutions of thought are ones not easily
followed. Ultimately, however, the satisfaction is Eva's; her re- creation
in new surroundings is deep enough for her to finally regain the self she
had lost for many years. Other citations for Lost in translation praise it
as `deep and lovely', `tender and memorable', `... capturing the very essence
of exile experi- ence'. Indeed it is and does, and also has the power to humble.
Even (especially?) readers who have lived abroad and speak more than one lan-
guage will find her response to her challenges awe inspiring. More than any
other book I have read she made me understand the extent to which loss of
language and transplantation from one culture to another control and shape
the self that is constantly in formation.