Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language

Hoffman, Eva

ISBN 10: 0525246010 / ISBN 13: 9780525246015

Published by E.P. Dutton, 1989

About this Item

E.P. Dutton, 1989; stated first edition, with full number line, SIGNED by Hoffman on title page; 280pp. Binding is tight and sturdy; blue and white quarter-cloth boards very good; gilt titling remains bright and bold. Ends of spine bumped. Light shelfwear to dust jacket, with mild age-toning to extremities. Small (1/8"x1/8") brown stain to fore-edge, interior unaffected, and free of previous owner markings (save, of course, author's signature). Ships same or next day from Dinkytown, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Seller Inventory # 327449

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language
• Publisher: E.P. Dutton
• Publication Date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0525246010
• ISBN 13: 9780525246015
• Binding: hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Signed: Signed by Author

About this title

Synopsis

In 1959 13-year-old Eva Hoffman left her home in Cracow, Poland for a new life in America. This personal memoir evokes with deep feeling the sense of uprootendess and exile created by this disruption, something which has been the experience of tens of thousands of people this century.

Reviews

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?"
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.