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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.
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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.