LOST IN TRANSLATION: A LIFE IN A NEW LANGUAGE
Eva Hoffman
New York: E.P. Dutton, 1989
280 pp., $18.95
As a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl from Krakow, emigrating in 1959 with her family to Canada then going on to live in the United States, Eva Hoffman found herself unprepared to speak all the required new American vocabularies. Now an editor at the New York Times Book Review in New York, Hoffman describes with stunning accuracy the anguish of becoming someone else through a new language, having to acquire a foreign grammar of the soul while trying to keep intact the original syntax of her self.
Her autobiography Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language, is a study in the art of transition: from one--simple, decaying--world, to the future reified--to bustling, forbidden, overconfident America; from a gentle, nuanced Eastern European language carefully molded through centuries by people surviving conquest to the language of invention and modernity, North American English.
Hoffman describes the first shock of awareness at the abyss between word and feeling:
When my friend Penny tells me that she's envious, or
happy, or disappointed, I try laboriously to translate not
from English to Polish but from the word back to its
source, to the feeling from which it springs. Already, in
that moment of strain, spontaneity of response is lost.
And anyway, the translation doesn't work. I don't know how
Penny feels when she talks about envy. The word hangs in
a Platonic stratosphere, a vague prototype of all envy,
so large, all-encompassing that it might crush me--as might
disappointment or happiness.
The result is a profound, paralyzing alienation:
I am becoming a living avatar of structuralist wisdom: I
cannot help knowing that words are just themselves. But
it's a terrible knowledge, without any of the consolations
that wisdom usually brings. It does not mean that I'm free
to play with words at my wont: anyway, words in their naked
state are surely among the least satisfactory play objects.
No, this radical disjoining between word and thing is a
desiccating alchemy, draining the world not only of
significance but of its colors, striations, nuances--its
very existence. It is the loss of a living connection.
Sensing one's
...
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