Lost In Translation: A Life in a New Language [Idioma Inglés] - Softcover

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.. NOTA: El libro no está en español, sino en inglés.

Eva Hoffman was born in Cracow, Poland, and emigrated to America at the age of thirteen. She was an editor of the New York Times Book Review and has written on a variety of cultural subjects. She is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Award and an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She is currently living in London.