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Between Two Worlds |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Juliana Geran Pilon |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 12/1/1989 |
| Size: 2,115 Words, 12,134 Characters |
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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 translat...
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...g the delicious nuances of one's childhood language; in the attempt to preserve a sense of humor amid an awareness of cataclysm and injustice of tragic proportions; but above all, through the memories of picturesque, decaying Eastern European landscapes and their anachronistic, unadapted, yet resilient inhabitants. Eva Hoffman has given us an extraordinary book. We must hope for more to come.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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