Customer Reviews

Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

For many years, I have been involved in the preparation of teachers, both graduate and undergraduate, to work in the multicultural, multilingual climate of our nation's schools. Teachers can be successful ONLY if they have a real sense of what is going on in the minds of the children they teach. All too often, they make assumptions about what a child knows and is able to do or what a child is actually feeling and why. Such assumptions can wreak havoc in the lives of the thousands of immigrant children who come to our classrooms from their home cultures each day speaking a language other than English. Eva Hoffman's book, more than any other work I know, allows a teacher to learn and FEEL what it is really like to make that ultimate journey from the culture and language of one's birth, of one's heart, into the English-speaking world. This is one of the most brilliant books that I have ever read, and it is a MUST for every teacher!

I am a woman born from a multi-cultural marriage (an American mother and a Jewish Hungarian father who met in Florence, Italy) a neutral third ground. I deeply appriaciated Eva Hoffmann's description of her life in two places. For me who has always lived in one, I feel divisions in identity at a different leve. But as a daughter of parents from different cultural backrounds, I recognize the constant sense of loss and tension between and among memories and experiences originating in different places under different sets of values. I am deeply interested in this topic and have found few books that I appreciated more than Ms. Hoffmann's. I would like to suggest to people with similar interest a book that seems to me to take up where "Lost in traslation ends". It is called "Mother Tongue, An American life in Italy". The author, Wallis Wilde- Menozzi, lives in Italy and describes the divisions and syntheses in her experience of bi-culturalism in a complex and lyrical way that touches finally the minute core of being. Alessandra Pauncz

I started reading this wonderful book 6 months before I left Brazil towards Israel. After finishing the first Part (Paradise) I just could not keep on reading, and I abandoned the book for a while. After I landed in Israel I re-took the book and was delighted again with the realness of it. A thought occurred to me that the reading was so descriptive of the immigration sentiment that I just could not understand it before immigrating myself.

The book helped me to understand and to organize the infinite sensations that come with the leaving/arriving to another country. How the language affects the way we think and act, how sadness and happiness are mingled into one strange feeling, how we cope and forget without noticing, and how we urge to succeed and prove that we can be part of the new country.

In addition, the book also brought to me new feelings and curiosities about my grandparents, whom also escaped from Poland and Russia in the late 40's. Hoffman describes so well how the old traditions and languages influenced the new live of those who left their country because of prejudice and persecution!

One passage that I am specially fond of: "No, I'm no patriot, nor was I ever allowed to be. And yet, the country of my childhood lives within me with a primacy that is a form of love. (...) All it has given me is the world, but that is enough. It has fed me language, perceptions, sounds, the human kind. It has given me the colors and the furrows of reality, my first loves. The absoluteness of those loves can never be recaptured: no geometry of the landscape, no haze in the air, will live in us as intensely as the landscapes that we saw as the first, and to which we gave ourselves wholly, without reservations." It reminds me of Wordsworth when he writes about Tintern Abbey.

A wonderful life-changing book.

I loved this book when it came out and I love it still many rereadings later. So glad Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language is now on Kindle

Being an immigrant myself I can relate to this story. It shows very realistically how difficult it is to be accepted in a new country, where priorities and values are different. But it is also an American success story, when one can achieve anything starting from nothing.

I picked up "Lost in Translation" because I enjoyed Eva Hoffman's book "Shtetl" and I was interested in her experiences with culture-shock and feelings of alienation after she moved from Poland to Canada back in the late 1950s. Some of her experiences are probably similar to those of other immigrants, but to me, most of her problems with fitting-in and finding happiness seemed to have more to do with her own personality than the fact that she was from a foreign country. Her aspirations to be a concert pianist and then a professor of English literature were actually what made her different than most of those around her, not the fact that she was Polish or Jewish. She would have been outside of the mainstream regardless of where she was from. Even if she'd become a concert pianist in Poland, she may have gained people's admiration, but it would only have helped her to "fit in" with other elite musicians. For an author who seems to have such a reflective nature and who obviously is no stranger to the therapist's couch, it's amazing that she doesn't seem to grasp this distinction.

Also, in the final third of the book she writes as if her friends and acquaintances (mostly people involved in the NYC/East Coast literary scene) are typical Americans and contrasts their attitudes and habits with "Polish" ones. Really, she's comparing the attitudes of a very small subset of American society with those of an even smaller subset of Polish society (expatriate political dissidents). This is really more of a commentary on the political sensibilities of different social groups than about language or national culture. Once again, if Eva Hoffman felt out of place with these people, it was probably due more to personal issues than to broader cultural ones like language.

"Lost in Translation" offers some insights on Post-war Poland and some interesting descriptions of Vancouver and Texas during the 1960s, but for reasons given above as well as in some other reviews, I don't recommend this book. Not surprisingly given the author' training, her writing style often resembles that of literary critique. It's wordy and her analysis draws heavily on old-fashioned Freudian psychoanalytic theory.

This book is a must. It explores the difficulties of learning to express oneself in a new language. Although I have never experienced this myself, it does make you consider the link between language and experience and how sometimes there are no words available to say what you really feel. Hoffman draws you in to her narrative with ease, despite the difficulties she expresses. It is a moving insight into her life as an immigrant and her fellings of alienation.

Eva Hoffman, born in Cracow, Poland in 1945, emigrated to Vancouver, B.C. with her family in 1959 when life in post-war Poland became increasingly difficult for the relatively few remaining Jews. This is a story about learning about life be struggling with a new language. The prose is dense and difficult, but for linguists and other scholarly folk, it is a joy.

The author traces her teen-age years in Vancouver, describing through adolescent trauma through the eyes of an "other", her college years in Houston, and subsequent years at Harvard and beyond. Family relationships, love life, and friendships are explored through the medium of one who thinks in two languages for years and inherent difficulties as a result; ultimately she triumphs when she begins to think almost exclusively in English after many years.

The reader is advised to have a dictionary handy when perusing this book. Though interesting, it is not a good "read" for the casual reader.

The experience of Eva is similar to mine. I was born in Poland, in Krakow just like Eva, but I left it in 1993 to start my graduate studies in the US. I agree with her, it is difficult to leave your country, your birth place and start living somewhere else. I also agree that it broadens our world view, although it is painful experience often.
The only difference - Eva was Jewish and part of her leaving Poland was political. I was worried that this book would be too much about anti-semitism, which is still a trendy subject. But this was not the case. Eva does not try to make the impression that Poles are anti-semitic, quite the contrary. She also feels Polish, even if she feels American and Polish-Jewish in the depth of her heart.
Eva had a gift of describing het thoughts including very fine, ultra-fine subtle emotional, language-related and cultural differences. I agree with her almost in every aspect. I also agree that however difficult it is to move somewhere else, we need to try to learn the most of it.

This book was recommended to me by many people, not only Polish, but other foreigners that live in the US. I think, it does help all of us to deal with our daily struggles.

I wish I could sit with Ela in the cafeteria and spend some time to talk to her. She is a great observer of human life! She sounds like a great person.

I had to read this book for a college course on Polish history and absolutely loved it. Only the parts of the book that took place in or concerned Poland were assigned, but I loved Hoffman's writing and narrative style so much that I went out and bought the book to finish the rest. I recommended this book to a few friends who also thoroughly enjoyed it. The story, characters, and places were so real and well described that you truly feel as if you know these people and these places. A great book!