Ekin Cotuk has been a member of the Visualising Peace team since Spring 2023. Her research is on language, linguistics, and peacebuilding.
She has written a total of 5 blogs on the subject of peace linguistics, using a variety of case studies and providing bibliographies for each. The third of these appears below, and links to the others are included at the end of this post.
Lost in Translation by Eva Hoffman is an autobiography that details the author’s migration from Poland to Canada and later, the United States. After the emigration ban on Jews is lifted in 1957, her family migrates to Vancouver, Canada, and Eva is confronted with the challenge of translating herself into a new language: English. Much of the novel’s exploration of Hoffman’s cultural integration and immigrant identity is conducted through tracing the evolution of her identity as it manifests in English, as opposed to Polish, which she sees as the expression of her more legitimate, ‘real’ self. The novel is divided into three sections: the first is ‘Paradise’, wherein Eva reconstructs her childhood in Poland, the second is ‘Exile’, detailing her arrival and experiences in Vancouver, and the third is ‘The New World’, focused on her move to the United States and start to university.
The second part of the novel, ‘Exile’, features some particularly powerful excerpts in which Eva is confronted with the struggles of forming and expressing her identity in a new language. The first instance of this is on the sisters’ first day of class, when they are given English names to ‘replace’ their Polish ones. ‘All it takes is a brief conference between Mr Rosenberg and the teacher […] My sister and I hang our heads wordlessly under this careless baptism’ (p. 105).38 She notes that ‘nothing much has happened, except a small, seismic mental shift […] Our Polish names didn’t refer to us; they were as surely us as our eyes or hands. These new appellations, which we ourselves cannot pronounce, are not us’ (p. 105).
In this passage, Eva expresses a clear disconnect between her identity, her inner self and her new linguistic environment. Words and phrases such as ‘careless baptism’ and ‘appellations’ emphasise this discrepancy. This disconnect further materialises in relation to the expression of Eva’s inner monologue and thoughts. Her sense of self is disrupted as she is caught between two languages: the Polish of her past, and the English of her present. As she continues to learn English, and the role of Polish continues to reduce, Eva’s loss of an inner language causes her to feel she is losing her identity:
‘I wait for that spontaneous flow of inner languages which used to be my nighttime talk with myself, my way of informing the ego where the id had been. Nothing comes. Polish, in a short time, has atrophied, shrivelled from sheer uselessness […] In English, words have not penetrated to those layers of my psyche from which a private conversation could proceed’ (p. 105).
Eva’s disconnect from her new linguistic environment is also expressed in terms of a lack of personal connection to the English language: she distinguishes between a ‘Polish’ river, the language in which the word ‘was a vital sound, energized with the essence of riverhood, of my rivers, of my being immersed in rivers’ (p. 106). In contrast, river in English is ‘cold—a word with no aura’ (p. 106). The lack of lived experience Eva has in English further cements her in a sort of linguistic non-place: Polish is too disconnected from her present, and English is not yet sufficiently connected. The presence of English in her life means she ‘no longer fully identifies with the source culture’ which is disruptive because she loses ‘a univocal cultural model.’39 The acquisition of this new language is directly related to the fissure of Hoffman’s identity, producing an inner conflict.
Since the publication of Lost in Translation, Hoffman has stated that her experience immigration led to her realising ‘that to some extent [she] was constructed and that led to a great deal of self-alienation or detachment.’40 This self-alienation manifests itself as Eva envisions her two selves, one aligned with her Polish self and the other with the Canadian, conversing with one another. As Eva hasn’t yet figured out her relationship to English, she imagines her immigrant self, living in and absorbing another culture, interacting with the Polish Ewa, the identity of her childhood. In dialogue with herself, Eva agrees that the Ewa she left behind in Cracow is ‘the real one’ (p. 120), even though she doesn’t exist. This is also due to the struggle Eva has in expressing her identity through her speech while in the process of learning a foreign language, and she is ‘enraged at the false persona [she is] being stuffed into’ (p. 119), feeling ‘that her new language and reality suddenly estranges her from her past known self.’41 Although intercultural and intergroup contact can be seen as a peace-building activity, Lost in Translation sheds light on the possibly destabilising implications of this contact on individual identity.
The third part of the novel, ‘The New World’, traces a slow reconciliation and fusion of Eva’s split English and Polish identities. This reconciliation takes the form of drawing on her childhood experiences in Poland to forge a new identity in the United States. By the end of the book, Eva accepts the hybridity of her immigrant identity, and recognises the impossibility of ‘returning’ to a purer, monolingual, Polish self.
What helps Eva construct her way forward in the United States and achieve the reconciliation of her two identities, and consequently foster a sense of inner peace, is a statement she makes about herself in ‘Exile’: ‘I decide that my role in life is to be an “observer”—making a poor virtue out of the reality that I feel so very out of it’ (p. 131). However, her limited command of English, and her lack of personal attachment to it, nurtures a great gift of analysis and abstraction, which paves the way to her academic success. Her experience in learning English and the way in which she positioned herself within the language empowers her, and although she tries to fulfil her past ambition of becoming a pianist, she realises that this dream no longer aligns with the life she wants to lead. It’s by connecting her Polish self’s love of music and her English self’s love of literature that she breaks ‘the last barrier between [herself] and the language’ (p. 186): reading ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, Eva is ‘back within the music of the language […] Words become, as they were in childhood, beautiful things’ (p. 186).
A great milestone in the cohesion of Hoffman’s two identities is when she starts dreaming in English, which signals that finally, English has spoken to her ‘in a language that comes below consciousness’ (p. 243). Eva’s obsession with expanding her vocabulary to encompass as many words in English as possible finally pays off in shaping the language into ‘a medium through which I can once again get to myself and to the world’ (p. 243). Towards the end of the novel, Hoffman reframes her therapy as ‘translation therapy’—she identifies the process of telling the story of her childhood in English as the way to ‘reconcile the voices [within her] with each other’ (p. 272). The language of her conscious is finally united, and she no longer experiences the fragmented identity dialogue between Polish Ewa and English Eva.
Lost in Translation is a powerful testament of how closely language is linked with the expression of identity. Through a deeply engaged account of her experience in finding herself in a new language, Hoffman gets us thinking about the complex interplay between second language acquisition and inner peace. She illustrates the power of the inner self, the inner dialogue, and the disorientation felt when a new language becomes the dominant one. Eva’s journey of translating her identity is ultimately a journey of finding and cultivating a sense of inner peace that was disrupted with the loss of Polish as the primary means to express herself but was ultimately enriched with the translation of her identity into English. Finding a passion for English literature, connecting it with her Polish love of music, and tracing the story of her childhood in one language are all things that allow her to build an inner peace, and reconcile her internal conflict.
Read Ekin’s other blogs…
How do we visualise peace in English? (next blog)
Visualising peace across different languages: the Turkish language in protest
Why is language important when we talk about peace?
Linguistic diversity and visibility for peace: education and community radio in Myanmar
Bibliography
Carrá-Salsberg, Fernanda. “A Psychoanalytic Look into the Effects of Childhood and Adolescent Migration in Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation.” Language and Psychoanalysis 6, no. 1 (2017): 10–32. https://doi.org/10.7565/landp.v6i1.1565.
Frittella, Francesca Maria. “Cultural and Linguistic Translation of the Self: A Case Study of Multicultural Identity Based on Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation.” Open Cultural Studies 1, no. 1 (December 20, 2017). https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2017-0034.
Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation : A Life in a New Language. London: Vintage, 1998.
Webster, Brenda. “Conversation with Eva Hoffman.” Women’s Studies 32, no. 6 (August 2003): 761–69. https://doi.org/10.1080/00497870390221927.