Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language - Couverture souple

Hoffman, Eva

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0749390700 ISBN 13 : 9780749390709

Editeur : Vintage, 1991

Synopsis

In 1959 13-year-old Eva Hoffman made a voyage that took her from the familiar, loved country of her childhood to the unknown New World. Her life was irrevocably divided in two. In this personal memoir, she evokes the landscapes of postwar Poland - recently war-torn, suffering oppression, yet also the land of friends, first love, first home. She then sets out to convey the shock of the disruption of exile from that home and the struggle to comprehend a suddenly alien world, in which she experienced hardships among the well-manicured lawns of suburban Vancouver. The view of an adolescent thrust into a new world with no familiar references is offered via comments on a succession of American landscapes - college education in Texas; counterculture at Harvard; the literary milieu of New York. The reader is given an insight into the profound consequences of living a bicultural identity, the risks of nostalgia, the conflicting pulls of freedom and family knowledge. The book also explores the condition of being caught between two languages - a condition that literally offers different answers in moments of important decision - and tells how Hoffman learned to rewrite herself in the splintered, challenging English idiom.

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur

“A marvelously thoughtful book . . . It is not just about emigrants and refugees. It is about us all.” –The New York Times

When her parents brought her from the war-ravaged, faded elegance of her native Cracow in 1959 to settle in well-manicured, suburban Vancouver, Eva Hoffman was thirteen years old. Entering into adolescence, she endured the painful pull of nostalgia and struggled to express herself in a strange unyielding new language.  

Her spiritual and intellectual odyssey continued in college and led her ultimately to New York’s literary world yet still she felt caught between two languages, two cultures. But her perspective also made her a keen observer of an America in the flux of change.
A classically American chronicle of upward mobility and assimilation. Lost in Translation is also an incisive meditation on coming to terms with one’s own uniqueness, on learning how deeply culture affects the mind and body, and finally, on what it means to accomplish a translation of one’s self.

“Hoffman raises one provocative question after another about the relationship between language and culture . . . and about the emotional cost of re-creating oneself.” –Newsday
 

Revue de presse

"A deep and lovely book. The author manages to capture the very essence of exile experience, in beautifully human terms against a background of keen and searching intellect. This is how tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people felt in this century. Eva Hoffman speaks movingly for all of them" (Josef Skvorecky, author of The Engineer of Human Souls)

"Eva Hoffman's elegant and elegaic autobiography is something different... It is the story...of a paradise lost but regained...a tender and memorable book" (Independent)

"Hoffman takes her experience into the realms of universality, expressing herself in a way which has echoes and points of recognition for others who leave their history, their roots, their known identity adn must try to recreate themselves in another culture... An exquisite feast" (Angela Neustatter Literary Review)

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Vintage
• Date d'édition: 1991
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0749390700
• ISBN 13: 9780749390709
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 288
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: WordUnited GmbH; distribution@wordunited.com; ; Theodorstrasse 105; DUSSELDORF; 40472; Allemagne