Lost in Translation

Despite my pretentious airs (I do apologize for those) and attachments to all things literary, I tend to avoid contemporary literature the way one would avoid lunch-dates with the in-laws or scheduling that overdue appointment with the gynecologist. So, why pooh-pooh these potential greats?

They’re scary.

Contemporary lit is scary because, well, it’s unfamiliar terrain. I feel safe with my classics – they’ve been identified as such because smart men with doctorates and expensive cars have deemed them so, and you know what? I trust those smart men. It’s this everyday, new stuff that we’re not so sure about.

Cue English 416: Modern World Literature.

This has been my saving grace this semester. So far, I’ve encountered Japanese, African, Polish, and Canadian writers…and there are more to come. All of them published post-1960. My favorite book thus far: Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language by Eva Hoffman, an autobiography published in 1989.

OK. Here’s the gist – Eva migrated from Poland to Vancouver, Canada with her family when she was 13 years old (1959). She struggles to forge a new identity in her foreign environment, but finds it near impossible under the unwieldy weight of the English language. During her college years, Eva finds herself in the United States (Texas) where she continues to toil under a false identity, along with her counter-cultural American peers.



This book is chock-a-block with Eva’s shrewd insights – this girl has a keen understanding of relationships, the nuances of cultural rituals, the effects of a lingering nostalgia. Her description of what she refers to as a generation of “willed in-articulation” is spot-on. While her long-haired, drug-riddled peers welcome Eva without question, she still grapples with their fragmented sense of identity, their rejection of articulated clarity.

Also, I could not get over the fact that English was Eva’s second language – she handles the language masterfully and deftly – it is smooth and luxurious writing, while retaining the capacity to cut through even the most frozen sympathies with its razor-sharp emotional sword.

Hoffman is funny, perceptive, poignant. Definitely a worthwhile read – it’s not difficult to get through, but it is packed with profound insights that you won’t want to skim over lightly.

I could write a blog devoted entirely to this book, but I won’t. And I won’t go into a laborious explication (just yet, anyways). But I will leave you with a few words from Eva, herself, regarding her struggle with a new language and her subsequent loss of identity in the foreign landscape of North America:

“But mostly, the problem is that the signifier has become
severed from the signified. The words I learn now don’t stand for things in the
same unquestioned way they did in my native tongue. ‘River’ in Polish was a
vital sound, energized with the essence of riverhood, of my rivers, of my being
immersed in rivers. ‘River’ in English is cold – a word without an aura. It has
no accumulated associations for me, and it does not give off the radiating haze
of connotation. It does not evoke” (Hoffman, 106).

“What has happened to me in this new
world? I don’t know. I don’t see what I’ve seen, don’t comprehend what’s in
front of me, I’m not filled with language anymore, and I have only a memory of
fullness to anguish me with the knowledge that, in this dark and state, I don’t
really exist” (108).

Does Eva finally learn to navigate through this foreign setting? Will she ever penetrate the particular nuances of this new language and culture, while salvaging her fragmented sense of self? I’d love to divulge that delicious mystery, but I’m sorry – you’ll have to read to find out.