Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language

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.

This remarkable book is Eva Hoffman's personal story of her experiences as an emigre who loses and remakes her identity in a new land and translates her sense of self into a new culture and a different language.