AustLit

'The immigrant experience of having to 'translate oneself' from one's mother tongue into a foreign language and losing part of oneself in the process, shows how deeply selfhood is bound up with natural language. Lost in Translation (1989) - the title of Polish- Canadian author Eva Hoffman's signal memoir - conveys with particular force the potential loss of self, of key aspects of what a person has been, in the course of migrating between languages. It is the author herself who is imagined as "lost in translation ", by analogy with the meaning of a text. The metaphor of fidelity to an original has immediate resonance in the context of an immigrant's life: are the cultural assumptions with which he or she arrives susceptible to extension and revision, and to what extent can a "self" be identified with them? Hoffman's metaphor of self -translation offers insights into the nature of relations between language, culture and selfhood which are of a broad theoretical and experiential interest, illuminating the condition of what I call 'language migrants' and native speakers alike.' (Paragraph one, Synopsis)