„Lost in Translation“. Übersetzung und Exilerfahrung bei Eva Hoffman (Polen/Kanada/USA) und Jacques Poulin (Québec, Kanada)

Author(s):  
Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink
2011 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 347-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helma Lutz

In her famous memoir Lost in Translation (1989), the journalist and psychoanalyst Eva Hoffman describes her childhood metamorphosis from a Polish into a North American girl by reconstructing her experience with learning a new language. She equates this with loss and acquisition of identities. This article focuses on Hoffman’s interest in language as an identity issue since this is a highly relevant theme for migration researchers, particularly for those working with narrative material. The article explores the role of language in biographical interviews with migrants and discusses language use as an instrument for data collection. It argues that we need to ensure a sensitive and vigilant handling of language in the interview setting, which takes into consideration context, coding, articulation and hybridity. The final part raises questions about the ways in which gender comes into play in migrants’ narratives.


2005 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-222
Author(s):  
Anne Malena

AbstractThis paper explores the writing of Haitian writer Edwige Danticat from a perspective of (im)migration and translation which is different from that elaborated by Eva Hoffman inLost in Translation. By contrasting the traumas suffered by both authors and the way they deal with it, different conclusions can be reached concerning the theory of self they propose. Hoffman is resigned to translate herself in order to fit into the American context but never gets over the loss of her Polish self. Danticat, who realizes upon her arrival in New York that she was already a translated being, delves into the Haitian collective past for the creation of fictional characters who find in the translation of their selves the strength to live in two languages and two cultures without abandoning their personal and collective past.


Scripta ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (42) ◽  
pp. 117
Author(s):  
Valéria Silveira Brisolara

<p> Grande parte da literatura contemporânea é escrita em uma língua adicional. Muitas dessas obras produzidas em língua inglesa são de cunho autobiográfico ou memorial, enfatizando aspectos relacionados ao aprendizado de uma língua adicional e a posterior transformação dessa língua em uma língua de escrita, ou seja, à construção de uma autoria em uma língua adicional. Essas narrativas revelam e discutem o efeito de uma língua adicional sobre a primeira e sobre a identidade do sujeito ao tematizar o exílio e fazer dele matéria prima para a escrita. Nesse contexto, este artigo tem por objetivo apresentar e discutir o conceito de memórias ou autobiografias de linguagem e exemplificar tal conceito a partir da obra: <em>Lost in Translation </em>da escritora canadense Eva Hoffman.</p><p><strong> </strong></p><p> </p>


Author(s):  
Anita Jarczok

This article focuses on two memoirs authored by a bilingual and a multilingual author – Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation and Ilan Stavans’s On Borrowed Words, respectively – to examine how their authors construct their linguistic selves, what they tell us about living in two (or more) languages, and how the process of recalling their past contributes to the construction of their self and what the role of language is in that process. The first part of the essay shows that language, narrative, memory, and self are mutually dependent and constitutive, and that memory, especially in its individual manifestation, is not given enough attention in autobiographical research. The second part examines how the interplay between these four concepts is captured in the memoirs of Eva Hoffman and Ilan Stavans. Both authors show what it means to be trapped in the space between languages, when one feels that no language adequately captures the events of the everyday life, and how it influences the sense of self and the formation of memories. 


ergopraxis ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (10) ◽  
pp. 41-41
Author(s):  
R. Xu
Keyword(s):  

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 187-204
Author(s):  
Tomás Espino Barrera

The dramatic increase in the number of exiles and refugees in the past 100 years has generated a substantial amount of literature written in a second language as well as a heightened sensibility towards the progressive loss of fluency in the mother tongue. Confronted by what modern linguistics has termed ‘first-language attrition’, the writings of numerous exilic translingual authors exhibit a deep sense of trauma which is often expressed through metaphors of illness and death. At the same time, most of these writers make a deliberate effort to preserve what is left from the mother tongue by attempting to increase their exposure to poems, dictionaries or native speakers of the ‘dying’ language. The present paper examines a range of attitudes towards translingualism and first language attrition through the testimonies of several exilic authors and thinkers from different countries (Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Hannah Arendt's interviews, Jorge Semprún's Quel beau dimanche! and Autobiografía de Federico Sánchez, and Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation, among others). Special attention will be paid to the historical frameworks that encourage most of their salvaging operations by infusing the mother tongue with categories of affect and kinship.


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