Auto/Biography 0967-5507 14 2 200606 Sage Publications Sage UK: London, England Book Review: The Blessings and Pains of Language Lost in translation: a life in a new language. Eva Hoffman 1998. London: Vintage. ISBN 0749390700, 288 pp., £7.99, paper AlisonJamesLondon College of Fashion 184 185

184 Book ReviewThe Blessings and Pains of LanguageLost in translation: a life in a new language. Eva Hoffman 1998. London: Vintage. ISBN 0749390700, 288 pp., £7.99, paper SAGE Publications, Inc.2006DOI: 10.1177/09675507060140020504 Alison James London College of Fashion 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 13. It evokes the struggles of them all, but Eva in particu- lar, 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 4 years old, the customs, rituals and traditions of agricultural and urban Poland. 185 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, the displacement and loss of reference points in emigration, and the most fundamental need for adequate lan- guage: `I want my peace of mind back' (p. 128). Her truth-seeking deter- mination 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 paral- leled 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 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 recre- ation 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 experience'. Indeed it is and does, and also has the power to humble. Even (espe- cially?) readers who have lived abroad and speak more than one language 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.