ABSTRACT
Eva Hoffman in Lost in Translation (1991) gives voice to her journey from Cracow to Vancouver, aged thirteen. For Hoffman’s Polish Jewish family, the scars and fractures precipitated by this move caused profound dislocation. Hoffman speaks of Poland with full tones; the first section entitled ‘Paradise’, portrays a satisfying life before the unwelcome exile to the ‘New World’. She muses thoughtfully on the ‘nature’ of language, emotional complexity, identity, feelings of belonging and marginalisation. The narrative moves back and forwards through a maze of emotional material in order to reach a more ‘settled’, ‘satisfying’ place and way of being. Hoffman confronts the difficulties of exile and the emotional consequences of having to leave that which is known and those who are loved. The book ends, however, with a new life in place. When I first read Lost in Translation I devoured it, grateful to discover that I was not alone; my explicit and implicit reliance on Hoffman’s analysis will be apparent here.
