Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language

by Eva Hoffman

Overview

The late poet and memoirist Czeslaw Milosz wrote, “I am enchanted. This book is graceful and profound.”

Since its publication in 1989, many other readers across the world have been enchanted by Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language, a classic of exile as well as immigrant literature, as well as a girl’s coming-of-age memoir. Lost in Translation moves from Hoffman's childhood in Cracow, Poland to her adolescence in Vancouver, British Columbia to her university years in Texas and Massachusetts to New York City, where she becomes a writer and an editor at the New York Times Book Review. Its multi-layered narrative encompasses many themes: the defining power of language; the costs and benefits of changing cultures, the construction of personal identity, and the profound consequences, for a generation of post-war Jews like Hoffman, of Nazism and Communism.

Lost in Translation is, as Publisher's Weekly wrote, “a penetrating, lyrical memoir that casts a wide net,” challenges its reader to reconsider their own language, autobiography, cultures, and childhoods.

Hoffman’s subsequent books of literary non-fiction include Exit into History, Shtetl, After Such Knowledge, Time and two novels, The Secret and Appassionata.

Lost in Translation is one of a series of memoirs by women from Central Europe published by Plunkett Lake Press as eBooks that includes Heda Margolius Kovaly’s Under A Cruel Star and Helen Epstein’s Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for her Mother’s History.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940012261700
Publisher:	Plunkett Lake Press
Publication date:	03/01/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	1,043,052
File size:	281 KB

About the Author

Eva Hoffman grew up in Cracow, Poland, where she studied piano at the Cracow School of Music, before emigrating in her teens to Canada and then the United States.

After receiving her Ph.D. in English and American literature from Harvard University, she worked as senior editor at the New York Times, serving for a while as one of its main literary critics. She has taught literature and creative writing at various universities, and has written and lectured internationally on issues of exile, memory, Polish-Jewish history, politics and culture.

Her books include Lost in Translation, After Such Knowledge and Time, as well as two novels, The Secret, and Appassionata. She has presented radio programmes and curated a series on "Writing and Music" at the South Bank Centre in London. She is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Kosciuszko Foundation award for Shtetl, and the Prix Italia for radio. She now lives in London.

Editorial Reviews

"As a childhood memoir, Lost in Translation has the colors and nuance of Nabokov's Speak, Memory. As an account of a young mind wandering into great books, it recalls Sartre's Words. … As an anthropology of Eastern European émigré life, American academe and the Upper West Side of Manhattan, it's every bit as deep and wicked as anything by Cynthia Ozick. … A brilliant, polyphonic book that is itself an act of faith, a Bach Fugue."

John Leonard

"Handsomely written and judiciously reflective, it is testimony to the human capacity not merely to adapt but to reinvent: to find new lives for ourselves without forfeiting the dignity and meaning of our old ones."

Jonathan Yardley

"Nothing, after all, has been lost; poetry this time has been made in and by translation."

Pater Conrad