Lost in Translation

"I think it was a brilliant idea to approach one’s past through language. Eva Hoffman grew up in post-Holocaust Poland. At the age of 13, because of anti-semitism, her family emigrated to the west coast of Canada. And she spent the bulk of her middle years in the United States before she came to live here in England. She tells us in Lost in Translation that she felt very rooted in Krakow, Poland – her life was flourishing, and against her will she was transported to a different country and a different language. So there is the trauma of someone who for a certain period in her life feels that she is – she uses the word “oxymoron”. “Could I be an oxymoron?” she asks, “or could I be a hybrid?” If biography is to be an art, language is important. It’s not just facts, it’s how they are stated. Yes. There’s a telling detail in the middle of the biography, a section titled “Exile”, when she is very shaken by the complete destruction of the “me”. Her’s is a searching mind. She is an intellectual. Looking for the meaning of existence, she feels that language makes it. That you can’t search for meaning without the language in which meaning is encased. She decides to keep a diary, and she is in the space between two languages, a kind of no-man’s land. She thinks of keeping the diary in Polish, because that is her real self, that’s where her kernel lies. But she decides she’d better keep it in English, because Polish is now the past and English is the present. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter She admits in this powerful passage that she doesn’t fully write as herself in English. She writes a language of abstraction. Later on, she says that Polish feels to her a warm language, full of emotive words. She uses the word tesknota , which she says is “nostalgia” but with tonalities of sadness and longing – that’s the Polish Eva speaking in her native language. To her, English is a language of will and abstraction. Only a foreigner can tell you that. For you and me, English is filled with all our emotive output, because it’s not a language of just will and abstraction – but it’s interesting that an outsider to English sees it that way. She writes: “The diary is about me, and not about me at all. On one level, it allows me to make the first jump. I learn English through writing, and in turn writing gives me the written self. Refracted through the double distance of English and writing, this self, my English self, becomes oddly objective. More than anything, it exists more easily in the abstract sphere of thoughts and observations than in the world. For a while this impersonal self, this cultural negative capability, becomes the truest thing about me. When I write, I have a real existence that is proper to the activity of writing. This language is beginning to invent another me.” That seems to me the critical sentence. It is through writing and speaking English that she begins to invent her English self. The advantage with memoir is it can be endlessly introspective. But Hoffman is also disciplined. There’s a lot she doesn’t tell you about her life. She tells you more deeply about her past, because it’s over. We learn about a young man whom she adored and was parted from forever. That is a deep sorrow in the book, and she can write about him. But she doesn’t reveal intimate details in the last part of the book, in America. She chooses very carefully what she writes about. I admire the book for being the opposite to a misery memoir. It’s not slam-slam, tug-tug, feel-feel. It’s refined in its intellectual cogitation."

"Migration is about going to a foreign land, as anthropologists do. Migrants go to a new place, new language, new culture. You are an outsider there. As an outsider, you see things an insider does not see, because he or she who is an insider takes things for granted. It makes you like an anthropologist, because you try to understand the new culture. You see similarities, and you see differences. As an immigrant you try to get in the minds of people like an anthropologist does. Dislocation is the norm. Not being in one place is the norm of our time. There is no centre. She says that we are in the centre and periphery at the same time. It depends on how we look at the world. If you are in Tehran, if you are in Stockholm, or if you are in New York, centre and periphery differ. Each centre is a periphery for others. I think she lost one centre in Poland but found another in New York. She’s a very successful journalist and writer. I don’t know, actually. Migration is about a sense of guilt generally. Migration is about a sense of guilt, to leave people behind in poverty, in armed-conflict situations, and how you can help them, sending money, or writing in that language and not forgetting your cultural background. Language is very central for Eva Hoffman. The title Lost in Translation concerns how she was lost in translation – not translation literally from Polish into English but translation from Polish culture into North American culture. The second part of the title is Life in a New Language , which is about how to find a new centre, how to find a new language, how to express yourself in a new culture. It’s a very interesting question about the relationship between language, culture and selfhood, which is very complicated. You can see some nostalgia or some sadness in how she writes about the loss of unity of her Polish self. It’s like Edward Said talks about exile – not being at home anywhere. It’s about lostness, it’s about disorientation in the world. We don’t use the word “assimilation” here [in Sweden], we use “integration”. I think it’s a much better word. What it’s about is participation in society – political participation, social participation. All these immigrants participate in American society in different ways. They work, they pay taxes, they consume. Their kids go to school, they go to churches, etc. So they participate. But what we demand from them is that they have to behave like us. So this is what we mean by “assimilation”. They should be like us in religion, in way of life, etc. I’m afraid that even we in Europe are going toward that policy."