Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation as a Transcultural Literacy Memoir

Transcription

1 Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation as a Transcultural Literacy Memoir 依娃 霍夫曼的 在翻譯中迷失 跨文化素養與自傳書寫 doi: / NTU Studies in Language and Literature, (21), 2009 作者 /Author: 張淑麗 (Shu-Li Chang) 頁數 /Page: 1-27 出版日期 /Publication Date: 2009/06 引用本篇文獻時, 請提供 DOI 資訊, 並透過 DOI 永久網址取得最正確的書目資訊 To cite this Article, please include the DOI name in your reference data. 請使用本篇文獻 DOI 永久網址進行連結 : To link to this Article: DOI 是數位物件識別碼 (Digital Object Identifier, DOI) 的簡稱, 是這篇文章在網路上的唯一識別碼, 用於永久連結及引用該篇文章 若想得知更多 DOI 使用資訊, 請參考 For more information, Please see:

2 NTU Studies in Language and Literature 1 Number 21 (June 2009), 1-28 Eva Hoffman s Lost in Translation as a Transcultural Literacy Memoir Shu-li Chang Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literature National Cheng Kung University ABSTRACT Eva Hoffman s 1989 Lost in Translation chronicles her family s emigration from Poland in 1959 to Canada, and her subsequent migration to the United States. Ever since its publication in 1989, Hoffman s memoir has received quite a lot of attention. While most critics agree to read the book as an American immigrant story, Sarah Philip Casteel deplores the lack of critical attention to the Exile section of the novel which has its setting in Canada. Casteel proposes to read this much discussed memoir as literature of double emigration in which Canada has to be (mis) represented as a site of exile to facilitate the narrator s second departure (from Canada) and arrival (at the United States). In this paper, I propose to complicate Casteel s perceptive argument and read, against the grain, the narrator s final statement, I am here now, more as a testimony to the narrator s arrival at a language than as a declaration of her arrival at the American heartland. I argue that the section on Eva s exile in Canada is thematically and structurally important for her exile in Canada, other than allowing Eva to express her anger and frustrations, registers the psychic efforts she makes in managing separation and the loss of self. I take Hoffman s Lost in Translation as a tale both of the immigrant self s loss of linguistic naivety and of the difficult labor of translation she deploys so that loss may be rearticulated, through the medium of English as a transnational language, into an aporetic understanding of the relation between lived experience, its representation, and theoretical discourse on experience as well as its representation. English per se, however, does not help her gain this aporetic understanding; rather, English is the medium through which she can make her way back to home, which is available to her in writing. Keywords : immigration, exile, literacy memoir, global English, cultural translation, autobiography

3 2 NTU Studies in Language and Literature 依娃 霍夫曼的 在翻譯中迷失 跨文化素養與自傳書寫 張淑麗 國立成功大學外國語文學系教授 摘要依娃 霍夫曼 (Eva Hoffman) 於 1989 年發表 在翻譯中迷失 (Lost in Translation) 全書共分三部分( 天堂 流放 新世界 ), 分別她紀錄她與家人於 1959 年由波蘭移民至加拿大, 之後再移居至美國的歷程 自從該書於 1989 年發表後, 頗為學界重視 學界有人認為這又是本美國式的移民故事, 莎拉 菲力普 卡斯蒂爾 (Sarah Philip Casteel) 則認為學界討論都聚焦於書中移民前 ( 波蘭 ) 與移民後 ( 美國 ) 的部分, 忽略了該書主角移民至加拿大的這段經驗 ( 也就是標題為 流放 的部分 ) 卡斯蒂爾以 再次移居 的觀點詮釋 流放 這個章節, 且指出霍夫曼為了要強化她離開加拿大遷居美國的正當性, 必然要 誤讀 加拿大為 流放的場域 筆者在此文中則由卡斯蒂爾的觀點出發, 但筆者認為第一人稱敘事者在書末的宣言, 此刻我在這裡了, 並不宜視為敘事者抵達美國國土的誓詞, 而應視為敘事者領悟到她終於得以進入 語言 殿堂的感嘆 由此觀點觀之, 流放 章節與這本回憶錄所擬闡述的主題密不可分 霍夫曼不僅可在這部分毫無忌憚地發洩身為移民的沮喪與憤怒, 同時亦可紀錄她的心情起伏與情緒管理 筆者認為霍夫曼的 在翻譯中迷失 提供幾個層次不一的詮釋可能 : 首先, 這本回憶錄凸顯移民主體所經驗的語言與文化的失落, 並詳述移民學習第二種語言的歷程, 也是種無法言喻的 翻譯苦差, 藉由 翻譯苦差, 移民主體學習新的語言, 也進入新的文化象徵體系, 從而轉換失落為無法言喻的 文化翻譯, 使得主體得以不斷折衝在生命經驗 經驗的再現與後設的論述之間 在翻譯中迷失 凸顯, 英語 的學習, 不足以讓移民主體獲得跨文化的素養, 而跨文化的素養, 也無法在 英語 的文字符碼中養成, 而是以離散的形式, 流動在文字

4 Eva Hoffman s Lost in Translation 3 與文字 文化與文化的交會之處 翻譯之間 但是, 霍夫曼亦承認英語雖不足以養成文化素養, 但對她個人而言, 卻是通往跨文化交流的必要媒介與橋樑 關鍵詞 : 移民 流放 學習回憶錄 文化翻譯 自傳書寫

5 4 NTU Studies in Language and Literature Eva Hoffman s Lost in Translation as a Transcultural Literacy Memoir Shu-li Chang How does one stop reading the exterior signs of a foreign tribe and step into the inwardness, the viscera of their meanings? Every anthropologist understands the difficulty of such a feat; and so does every immigrant. Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation (209) For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to life. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (qtd. in Said 184) Eva Hoffman s Lost in Translation, published in 1989, chronicles her family s emigration from Poland in 1959 to Canada, and her subsequent migration to the United States. It is chronologically and spatially divided into three sections Paradise, Exile, and The New World with section one, Paradise, being a nostalgic account of her carefree childhood in Poland, section two, Exile, a classic immigrant tale that registers the sense of displacement she experienced in Vancouver, Canada as a young girl, and section three, The New World, a retrospective speculation about her relatively successful assimilation into New York s intellectual world. Ever since its publication in 1989, Hoffman s memoir has received quite a lot of attention. It has been variously described as a classic American immigration autobiography, a literacy memoir, a language memoir, or a postmodern autobiography. 1 While most critics agree to read the book as an American immigrant story, Sarah Philip Casteel deplores the lack of critical attention to the Exile section of the novel, set in Canada, even though it is in this section Hoffman gives free vent to her immigrant rage. 2 Not only is the Canada section strangely 1 2 Eva C. Karpinski considers Lost in Translation as an immigrant autobiography in her Negotiating the Self: Eva Hoffman s Lost in Translation and the Question of Immigrant Autobiography Canadian Ethnic Studies 28.1 (1996): ; Susan Fanetti reads it as a language memoir ; Danuta Zaworna Fjellestad approaches Hoffman s book as an example of postmodern autobiography. Katarzyna Marciniak points out that given that an immigrant is usually required to behave in ways

6 Eva Hoffman s Lost in Translation 5 ignored by critics, but, as Casteel points out, in term of Hoffman s own tripartite narrative schema, Canada is firmly excluded from the categories of the New World modernity, success, new beginnings that will ultimately make the United States a place of possibility for her (288). Calling attention to Hoffman s treatment of Canada, Casteel chooses to read this much discussed memoir as literature of double emigration in which Canada has to be (mis)represented as a site of exile to facilitate the narrator s second departure (from Canada) and eventual arrival (at the United States). In this paper, I propose to complicate Casteel s perceptive argument and read, against the grain, the narrator s final statement, I am here now, more as a testimony to the narrator s arrival at an exile s language than as a declaration of her arrival at the American heartland. I argue that the section on Hoffman s exile in Canada is thematically and structurally important, for her exile in Canada, other than allowing Hoffman to express her anger and frustrations, registers the psychic efforts she makes in managing separation from and loss of language and self. During this transitional period in Canada, Hoffman acquires linguistic, cultural, and transcultural literacy, while she is still mourning for the loss of the coherence and unity of her Polish self. Given that it is in arriving in Canada that young Hoffman suffers the traumatic fall out of paradise, as she has to translate herself from one symbolic order to another, with her emotional ties to the old order still strong and her understanding of the rules of the new system yet tenuous, it is no wonder that Canada should emerge, under the gaze of a paranoid immigrant, as a site of exile that is neither hospitable nor civilized. If Lost in Translation is about loss and the fall out of plenitude, this traumatic fall is articulated by Hoffman both as a fall out of Polish and a fall into English. Moreover, it is also a fall out of innocence into knowledge as well as a fall out of a singular identity into a hybridized subjectivity. As such, the Canada section shall be viewed as the transitional phase that an immigrant almost always has to go through in acting out her immigrant rage before she may eventually reconcile the many different voices within her into a voice that is uniquely hers, without surrendering either to self-disgust or nostalgia. It is in this sense that I take Hoffman s Lost in Translation as a tale both of the immigrant self s loss of that meet the expectations of the host country humble, appreciative, hard-working, and disciplined, theirs is thus a hygienic identity. However, the immigrant often feels angry with the kind of demands placed on her. In this respect, Marciniak argues, Hoffman s articulation of immigrant rage is a welcome challenge to the hygienic identity imposed on immigrants.

7 6 NTU Studies in Language and Literature linguistic naivety and of the difficult labor of translation, to borrow a phrase from Judith Butler, she deploys so that loss may be rearticulated, through the medium of English as a transnational language, into an aporetic understanding of the relation between lived experience, its representation, and theoretical discourse on experience and its representation. English per se, however, does not help her gain this aporetic understanding; rather, English is the medium through which she can make her way to distill my own meanings; and it s only coming from the ground up that I can hit the tenor of my own sensibility, hit home (276). Lost in Translation thereby ends by proffering itself both as a translation and as an illustration of Theodor Adorno s famous dictum, cited by Edward Said in Reflections on Exile, that the only home truly available now, though fragile and vulnerable, is in writing (184). Yet, it is a writing that is facilitated by English, which, because of its global spread, allows Hoffman to connect with peoples in cities as far apart as New York, Warsaw, Tehran, Toyko, Kabul, so that these cities may make claims on our imaginations, while reminding us that in a decentered world, every competing center makes us marginal (275). Emigration as Exodus/Immigration as Paradise Lost Given that Hoffman intends to register in her memoir the psychic impact of emigration as exile, 3 she rewrites the classical narrative pattern of immigrant tales, modeled after the Exodus story, in which the protagonist moves from hardship in her homeland to the freedom and liberation of America, into a tale of Paradise Lost, in which the protagonist, instead of entering into a Promised Land, is taken out of the paradise and experiences a fall out of grace. While the second section of the book, Exile, does suggest the loss of paradisical plenitude, the last section, The New World, depicts less a world of unconditional bliss and harmony, than a postmodern and post-assimilation world of differences and heterogeneity. Mark Krupnick contends that not only does Hoffman rewrite the core pattern of immigrant tale, but she also complicates the paradigm further by shifting emphasis from civil values and virtues to questions of language (458, 3 In an interview conducted by Judith Vidal-Hall with Eva Hoffman and Raja Shehadeh, Hoffman begins by saying that she wants to talk about the internal experience of immigration, the internal trajectory I felt I needed to go through, certainly the internal experience we have to go through, in the experience of transculturation. In the same interview, she later sums up this internal experience that she wants to discuss as the psychic impact of exile (104).

8 Eva Hoffman s Lost in Translation 7 emphasis added). In other words, two of the three sections of her triptych are about her losses and, more importantly, they are also about efforts she makes to translate losses into a different kind of gain. To develop her innovative idea that the departure from her homeland is an Edenic fall rather than an entry into the promised land, Hoffman resorts to portray the time before the fall as paradisical, as a time and space of plenitude and wholesomeness, to effectively bring out the contrast between the before and the after of the fall. Moreover, Hoffman articulates this fall, not only in terms of spatial separation, but also in terms of linguistic dispossession, cultural trauma, and bodily confinement. As such, to be culturally assimilated, she takes up two kinds of culture work simultaneously. On the one hand, she mourns for her losses, and on the other, she also has to learn a heretofore unfamiliar language in this case, English and the culture that accompanies it with its many semiotic and cultural codes and regulations. With a newly acquired identity as a Jewish immigrant woman whose command of English is primitive, she feels ashamed, indignant, and oftentimes angry. Against this profound sense of loss and rage is Canada set and depicted as a country/land with a monotonous and uninspiring landscape, an alienating and harshsounding language, and treacherously devious customs. The young Hoffman, to be specific, deploys a so-called immigrant gaze to imagine and represent Canada through three layers of culturally biased veils: spatial, linguistic, and gender. With this awareness of her foreignness as a fall from grace, Hoffman structures her autobiographical narrative self-reflexively, as she constantly shuffles between her own observations of others and her observing others observing her; that is, between look and gaze, departures and arrivals, here and there. This self-other dialectics, though filtered through the autobiograpchial I/Eye, eclipses and blurs the distinction between the self and the other, subject and object, foreground and background, rendering Canada an uncanny double of Poland, with one bearing an unreal resemblance to the Sahara desert and the other an sentimental likeness to the Garden of Eden. Canada is everything that Poland is not. Whatever rage Hoffman may have expressed at Canada as an inhospitable host country is, in this sense, directed at her own emigrant self, her own otherness and liminality. In the same vein, English is perceived to be the exact opposite of Polish, harsh-sounding, unintelligible, illogical, but a necessary evil. Given that her recollection of her Polish life is colored by sentimental romanticism, what is registered in the first section of her book, Paradise, is

9 8 NTU Studies in Language and Literature then, an imagined world of bliss undisturbed by anti-semitism and unburdened by racial strife or existential dilemmas. The second section of her book, Exile, which is set against the landscape and cultural milieu of Hoffman s imagined Canada, follows the dual trajectory of translation, both linguistic and cultural. Hoffman initially experiences this translation as a disempowering imposition which makes her a stranger in a strange land, so that, as a defense mechanism, she chooses to indulge in tęsknota or nostalgia. Unlike other immigrants who subscribe to the success story of American Dream, Hoffman is painfully aware of her differences from others and, faced with the difficult choice of either clinging to her ethnic otherness, at the cost of social exclusion, or, forgoing her otherness, thereby severing Eva now, the English name given to her upon her arrival at Canada, from the Ewa then, which is what she was called back in Poland, she becomes stranded in between two different cultural and linguistic systems, experiencing a psychic life of dispersion and fragmentation but yearning for a life of stability and acceptance. In defense of her difference, Hoffman thus casts the young Hoffman as a self-conscious immigrant beset by rage and guilt, while eagerly negotiating with the threat that Canada signifies. There is therefore a double movement at the core of the Canada section of Hoffman s book; on the one hand, she experiences a fall from linguistic plenitude, integrity of identity, control of her body, and familiarity with the cultural codes of the society she left behind; on the other hand, she also experiences what Paul de Man calls the upward fall into knowledge 4 ; that is, her acquisition of both competence in English and the traumatic knowledge of her fallibility and otherness. It is in Canada that Hoffman begins to realize that the acquisition of English not only helps her re-reconfigure her identity out of the fragments of her Polish self, but it also brings her to a see herself as doubled, even tripled, as she is both disturbed by and intrigued with the self s multiple guises and transformations. Hoffman describes the young Eva in Canada as gradually becoming English (146); that is to say, in the eyes of her mother, Hoffman becomes 4 Paul de Man writes, To the eventuality of the fall corresponds the possibility of an equally involuntary ascent the feeling of being carried away by an act of pure imagination, a feeling of levitation that is familiar to readers of Keats and Wordsworth (27). Cathy Caruth, in Unclaimed Experience, uses de Man s notion of the fall to explicate and justify de Man s war-time fall ; she writes, rather enigmatically, that What theory does, de Man tells us repeatedly, is fall; and in falling, it refers. To capture the reality of this falling is the crucial task de Man s theoretical work is engaged in, and it is the task that falls upon us as we read the very particular story of de Man s writing (90).

10 Eva Hoffman s Lost in Translation 9 colder, more rational, and emotionally more disengaged. Becoming English is a rational strategy that Hoffman practices in order to survive in a symbolic order dominated by codes of behavior drastically different from those she was used to while in Poland. Yet, she dislikes having to learn English; she finds the Canadian ways of life strangely conformist; she even finds the gender codes in Canada rendering her less attractive or feminine. As such, becoming English as an immigrant in Canada is experienced as a fall from grace. Since she has already fallen, her emigration out of Canada is then experienced and described as a fall out of exile into the new world. In contrast with the negative tone she gives to the experience of becoming English in Canada, Hoffman describes her arrival, stay and study in the USA in very positive terms, as a rite of passage to Americanization, which, according to her own explication, refers to the acquisition of a multicultural literacy that enables her to finally disavow her old stubbornness and construct instead a stable and coherent self so that she may live with the multiple versions of her identity as well as to appreciate the doubleness of her vision. If, in Canada, she learns English as a second language because her social survival demands it; in USA, since she already has the language skills, she is then ready to use English as a medium to fill herself with the material of language (191) so that she may live within the skin of language, feeling its beats and rhythms, approaching it, approximating it, and allowing it to function as a medium for her to transcend ethnic exclusivity and to articulate an aesthetics of difference and an ethics of recognition, an aesthetics/ethics, in other words, that brings her to acknowledge her own strangeness in a strange land which is now her home. In this sense, her memoir is about English, but it is more about what English allows her to do than English per se as a global language of communication. What is registered in her memoir is her quest for a language that is old enough to plow under the superficial differences between signs, to the deep strata of significance (212). Hers is a language that, one may go so far to say, echoes and resonates with Walter Benjamin s notion of the pure language whose political value lies precisely in its departure from the functional and symbolic functions of natural language as well as its movement towards that which language yearns to communicate, and which does so in setting itself off from all of language s natural and mythical qualities, as Rodolphe Gasché explicates it (16). Hoffman, who places herself in the company of other immigrant and exilic writers such as Mary Antin and Vladimir Nabokov, positions herself as a translator; that is to say, she takes it to be her task, as a translator, to articulate that pure language

11 10 NTU Studies in Language and Literature which is exiled among alien tongues, to use Benjamin s own words (261). To do so, Hoffman finds it a blessing in disguise that she was lost in translation, for, the experience of getting caught in the labyrinth of alien tongues, rather ironically, gives her an Archimedean leverage from which to see the world afresh and otherwise (275). However, to bear witness to this productive event of getting lost in translation, she needs not only to grow out of Polish, her mother tongue, into English, a heretofore alien tongue, but also to measure the stories of her life against those of other diasporic writers. As such, she finds in the language and structure of autobiography a coherence that helps to translate her life out of the fragments of her disjointed memories, while lending it a redemptive trajectory from paradise lost to paradise regained. Jewish Immigrant Autobiography and its Tripartite Formula Hoffman confesses that she feels a lot of affinity with Mary Antin and she also claims that she has been deeply inspired by Antin s seminal autobiography The Promised Land, even though there are more differences than similarities between their parallel texts. 5 In terms of narrative structure, however, Hoffman s autobiography resonates, rather uncannily, with Anzia Yerierska s Bread Givers published in 1928, even though Yerierska s book is a fictional account of a young Jewish immigrant daughter s struggles to acquire literacy and achieve freedom in the new world. Bearing a curious resemblance to Yerierska s book, which is a linear narrative chronologically divided into three books, Hester Street, Between Two Worlds, and The New World, Hoffman s Lost in Translation also uses a tripartite structure Paradise, Exile, and The New World to chronicle Hoffman s struggle to assimilate herself into American culture and her determination not to get lost in translation. However, Hoffman s memoir, which was published in 1989, differs significantly from Yezierska s, published in Yezierska s Bread Givers is both a piece of protest writing against the imposition of patriarchal injunctions on immigrant daughters and 5 Hoffman sees Mary Antin as her ancestress, for Antin reminds her to what degree Hoffman is a creature of her time, as Antin is a creature of hers (162). As Antin was optimistic of self improvement and social mobility, Hoffman wonders what the story of her life is going to be look like. With that note of wonder, she concludes the second section of her book, Exile. For further study about the different trajectories of self-making that Antin and Hoffman have mapped out, see William Proefriedt s 1989 and 1990 articles, both of which were published in Journal of Ethnic Studies.

12 Eva Hoffman s Lost in Translation 11 a feminist manifesto declaring the will of the daughters to seek freedom and independence in the land of the free. Hoffman s memoir is interested less in casting the home that she has to leave behind as oppressive and suffocating than proffering her own experience as an example to offer a sophisticated explanation about what it means for her to declare at the end of her memoir that I can make my way through the medium of language to distill my own meanings [and] hit home (276, emphasis added). In saying that through the medium of language she is able to construct an identity for herself as well as to hit home, Hoffman proves that immigration is not merely a journey across national borders but also a quest for a life in a new language, as the subtitle of her memoir clearly states. Hoffman, unlike Yezierska who is concerned with proffering further biographical evidence to celebrate American Dream as a core myth of immigrant America, deals primarily with the psychic impact of exile, as mentioned above. Whereas the trajectory of Yezierska s Bread Givers is an upward movement that takes the protagonist away from the urban slum where early immigrants were condemned to inhabit, through purgatory and finally to paradise, Hoffman s is more complicated for it is modeled after the biblical narrative of paradise lost rather than paradise gained. By finding an alternative structure to articulate her post-assimilation sentiments, Hoffman also manages to tackle with questions of language (Krupnick 458), thereby introducing into this genre a curious psychic energy with the protagonist s disgust with the other becoming increasingly a paranoid expression of her disgust with her own schizophrenic self, and her fear of assimilation accompanied by an urgent attempt to acquire linguistic and cultural literacy. What warrants further scrutiny is that, for Hoffman, before she can finally acquire a life in a new language, she first has to lose her first language, Polish, and, then, she also needs to get lost in English when she first arrives at Vancouver, Canada, before she finally acquires competence in English and learns to appreciate the ironic pleasure of getting lost in the funhouse of language. Literacy is then an integral part of the rags-to-riches tale of immigration. The tripartite structure of Hoffman s memoir offers three different theories about immigration, while giving three different definitions to what literacy is, and what benchmark is used by an immigrant to measure her assimilation to English and American/Canadian culture. In the three sub-sections of her memoir, Hoffman registers, retrospectively and sequentially, the formation and reformation of three identities: the existence of a pre-immigrant singular self, the emergence of an immigrant self in

13 12 NTU Studies in Language and Literature conflict with and at odds with her older self, and, finally, her eventual reconciliation with exile and acceptance of exile, along with the self-division it initiates, represented here as the archetypal condition of contemporary lives (197). Paradise in Poland: A Life in Old Language In the first section of her memoir Hoffman gives a rather lyrical description of her early life in Poland. As its title well suggests, Hoffman thinks back of her early life with a kind of immigrant nostalgia that is both sentimental and melancholic. Born right after World War II to Jewish parents who are holocaust survivors, Hoffman spends the first 13 years of her life in communist Poland, in which Jews are still the excluded minority. Upsetting the expectations of readers who tend to see life in Poland as oppressive and regulated by rigid communist rules and ideologies, Hoffman depicts her Polish childhood as blissful and paradisical. In her moving reminiscence, she does not dwell on the material deprivations or racial intolerance that should have plagued Polish Jews before and after the second WWII; rather, for the child Hoffman life in post-holocaust Poland is a romance, with her playing the role of the girl in love, and the plot of her life emulating that of the East European romance literature that she has read extensively as a child. Yet, as Krupnick notes, the very notion of a cheerful evocation of Poland by a Jew may indeed seem a contradiction in terms to any reader who tends to think of communism as a socially confining and politically oppressive system (457). Why then does Hoffman evoke Poland in such sentimental terms, painting it as a land of fantasy, a nation that allows chivalry, gallantry, and heroism? Danuta Zadworna Fjellestad explains, rather convincingly, that, quite to the surprise of those readers who subscribe to the cold war rhetoric that gives a bleak depiction of the life in a Communist country, in the Communist system, with its explicit rules and principles aimed at regulating every aspect of the citizens lives, even their ideology and mortality, Hoffman can perceive herself as a free agent (136). In so depicting herself as one who is totally at home in communist Poland, Hoffman by no means intends to eulogize the communist regime and its social control; rather, a close scrutiny of Hoffman s romance with Poland reveals that Hoffman is quite happy in Poland not only because Poland gives a set of explicit rules and principles to allow her to construct a coherent sense of self, but also because there is a curious fissure in the Polish political system that allows local acts of resistance, with her

14 Eva Hoffman s Lost in Translation 13 father making a handsome income by adventuring into the bootlegging business and with Hoffman herself proudly and rebelliously identifying herself as a Jew in a deliberate gesture to resist the policy of the government to expel the Jews from its national territory. In Poland, Hoffman acquires the linguistic and cultural literacy which enables her to effortlessly maneuver her way into sociability. Also, in Poland, she is introduced to the tantalizing pleasure of social transgression and political resistance. Not only does she know when to use what expressions to produce the desired impressions among her acquaintances, but she also feels comfortable with the language of intimacy, confident of what love is, how it is performed, and what social consequences it may have. In Poland, young Eva Hoffman acquires a fervent, though innocent, fantasy of romantic love by reading extensively. Her interest in literature is not nation or culture bound, but extends to Polish patriotic literature, Russian masterpieces, and American young teen literatures. 6 While reading fuels her fantasy life and gives her erotic imagination the language it needs, her Jewishness allows her to derive additional pleasure from defying, in thoughts rather than in deeds, Polish government s many practices of anti-semitism. Yet, she does not consider herself a patriot, nor is she taught to embrace Jewish exclusivity. The country of my childhood, she explains, lives within me with a primacy that is a form of love. She remains devoted to it for Poland, she writes, has fed me language, perceptions, sounds, the human kind (74). In Poland, she acquires a language, and, with it, an identity. The departure from Poland is experienced by Hoffman as a loss that is akin to a symbolic death: I am thirteen years old, and we are emigrating. It s a notion of such crushing, definite finality that to me it might as well mean the end of the world (3). Paradise Lost in Canada: Transition and Translation Whatever cultural and ideological baggage Hoffman may have to carry within herself as a Jewish girl in communist Poland, she nevertheless does feel secure with who she is and she also knows how to negotiate with her acquaintances, most of whom are Jews, so as to maintain the integrity of her identity. More importantly, she even feels free and frivolous with the occasional acts of resistance she is able to perform. This surety of hers 6 These include, among others, boarding school novels, Alice in Wonderland, Doctor Dolittle, Quo Vadis?, Decameron, Anne of Green Gables, and War and Peace.

15 14 NTU Studies in Language and Literature informs her narrative of Poland with a tone of confidence tinged with a touch of playfulness, suggesting a narrative control that extends both to the narrator, the older and wiser Hoffman, but also to the autobiographical character Hoffman, who was then certain that her reading of the cultural codes in Poland is valid and creditable. However, once she leaves the familiar cultural landscape of Poland and immigrates to Canada, she loses her cultural capital while navigating in a society with a political and socio-cultural system that operates in a way that is foreign to her and whose complex system of cultural and gender codes is opaque. For Eva Hoffman, her arrival at and stay in Canada is such a pivotal stage in her life that she suffers the traumatic experience of losing her mooring, finding her linguistic and cultural literacy of limited use to her in her attempts to understand her own position in the new world. Even before she actually lands in Canada, she has already read in an article that describes Canada as a cultural desert and a country in which no one cares about fineness, or music, or art (88). Equipped with this stereotypical understanding of Canada, she feels indignant and questions her parents for taking me to a cultural desert (88). Psychologically, she resists emigrating from the familiarity of Poland to the strangeness of Canada. Upon first seeing Canada, she already finds the Canadian geography lie beyond her comprehension. Given that she has set her mind to misread Canada, it does not surprise any reader to find that her representation of the Canadian landscape does not suggest a natural landscape; instead, it emerges as different and therefore dull. The dullness of the Canadian geography does not suggest to the young Hoffman all the predicable motifs of travel literature, romance and mystery; rather, the dullness of the Canadian landscapes presages a tale of disappointment and self doubt. This psychic resistance of hers brings her to insist on misreading Canada and its people, intent as she is in reducing Canada into a singularity; that is, a cultural desert. Immediately upon her arrival in Canada, she feels disoriented and is angry with being caught in between two cultural networks. She feels as if she is thrown out of the net of meaning into the weightlessness of chaos (151). Against this profound sense of disorientation, she inevitably finds everything in Canada vast, dull, and formless (100). Her reading of Canada is, in this sense, biased as well as harsh, for what interests her is not the real of Canada itself, its landscape, its people, and its culture, but the real of her interior landscape, which is, rather ironically, rendered dull and formless by the experience of being caught in between two cultural systems. As such, her narrative swerves from nostalgic lyricism to dry irony, as the Canadian

16 Eva Hoffman s Lost in Translation 15 landscape registers, in a mimetic fashion, the atrophy of her imagination, and the racist ways Canadians treat her parallel her own racist responses. For example, on the second day upon her arrival at Vancouver, her family is brought to live with Mr. Rosenberg, an assimilated Jew. She finds the Rosenbergs house a matter of utter bafflement with its smooth and velvety lawn yielding an unreal look, and the circles of geraniums looking almost artificial in their perfect symmetries (101). Yet, despite her awareness that everything in the Rosenbergs house is so arranged to signify good taste and wealth, she nevertheless finds an incongruity between the message I m supposed to get and my secret perceptions of these surroundings (101-2). Her bafflement with the incongruity between the messages she receives from the interior décor of the Rosenbergs and her interpretations of them, to probe it further, arises from her desire to impose the rules she has acquired in dissecting the cultural landscape of Cracow, Poland, upon the new landscape of Canada. To her, Poland is the center of her conceptual universe against which Canada is measured. So, the plain and flat landscape in Canada, unlike the curves, niches, odd angles, nooks or crannies she is accustomed to encountering in Poland, defies her interpretative efforts, as she is disappointed to find that in Canada everything is designed to give everyone full view of everyone else, to declare there s no mystery, nothing to hide (102). Here is a classic case of old rules encountering unfamiliar reality. To her, the Canadian landscape is the unfamiliar Other, whose vast, dull, and formless landscape poses a substantial threat not only to her competence as a reader of culture but also to the integrity of her identity. Her recognition of the ambivalence of her reading of an alien space is significant in her self-definition. As such, to protect herself from further disintegration, she resolves to misread the Canadian landscape, determined as she is to reduce it to an Other that is devoid of imagination and ingenuous (102). While she sees the Canadian landscape as a vast flatness without any cultural depth, the Rosenbergs also see her and her family as the immigrant others and frequently laugh at our incredulity (103). This tale of mutual misreading, it goes without saying, is a refrain that is frequently heard in immigrant tales, with the narrative inevitably concluding with the immigrant other experiencing a splitting of the self, while learning to live with a double vision (132). For example, occasionally, when the Rosernberg women give them used clothes as charity, Hoffman is angry at being the recipient of so much mercy and, moreover, at having to express

17 16 NTU Studies in Language and Literature her gratitude for these acts of generosity. Her rage is concomitant with what she calls the Big Fear, an affect that afflicts her during her six-year sojourn in Canada. She first realizes that she is experiencing this Big Fear when she wakes up from a terrible nightmare on the second night upon her arrival in Canada. In her nightmare, Hoffman finds herself cast adrift in incomprehensible space and drowning (104). Terrified that she has stepped through a door into a dark place she wakes up in the middle of a prolonged scream. In hindsight, the older and wiser narrator looks back at the Big Fear experienced by her younger and more innocent self, and describes this stage of her life in which she experiences both immigrant rage and fear as an important turning point of her rite of passage into both adulthood and assimilation. The older Hoffman imputes an arching significance to this event and asserts that The primal scream of my birth into the New World is a mutative insight of a negative kind and I know that I can never lose the knowledge it brings me (104). By mutative insights, the narrator clarifies, she has in mind both those insights that she gains after a traumatic experience and those old biases or neuroses she manages to disavow or outgrow. That is, Hoffman is initiated into the ironic knowledge that immigrants come to possess; that is, the awareness that the Fall can often proffer, through a twist of fate, a productive lesson about the truth of immigration. What is the truth that Hoffman gains a glimpse of? What is opened up by her nightmare? As Hoffman puts it, Perhaps it is my cherishing of uncertainty as the only truth that is, after all, the best measure of my assimilation; perhaps it is in my misfittings that I fit (164). This narrative about Hoffman s traumatic initiation into assimilation is split within itself, from this moment on, with the young Hoffman making an earnest and conflict-fraught effort to impose any control on the words that emerge from me (118), and the older and wiser Hoffman, the narrator, retrospectively speculating on and theorizing about the psychic difficulties that the younger Hoffman has experienced in the process of transforming herself, especially when she has to negotiate with a country that expects every immigrant to shed her immigrant otherness in the shortest time possible. There is, however, very little tension between the young Hoffman s effort for assimilation and the mature Hoffman s speculation on it, for the narrator, the mature Hoffman, has projected her critical perspectives onto the younger Hoffman, investing in the young Hoffman with a critical faculty that is quite beyond the comprehension of her youthful mind. What then emerges from the fusion between the young Hoffman and the mature Hoffman s perspectives is

18 Eva Hoffman s Lost in Translation 17 the mixture of showing and telling, scattered anecdotes and authorial speculations, as the young Hoffman voicing her rage while practicing a non-identification tactics of detachment, and the mature Hoffman assuming the position of a cultural critic, not only commenting with insights on the psychic violence the young Hoffman undergoes while trying to acquire linguistic and cultural competence, but also defending and justifying young Hoffman s consistent misreading of Canada and the Canadian people. Before Hoffman is finally at home with the cultural logic of the postmodern and post-assimilation era, which is uncertainty and ambivalence, she nevertheless finds ambivalence and uncertainty terrifying. Disappointed as Hoffman already is, she comes to realize that the exile s fall from paradise is also a prolonged and deferred event. She is always falling, slowly but steadily, but never arriving. Having severed her ties from her homeland and arrived at Canada, Hoffman is also forced to relinquish her mother tongue; along with which, the whole set of symbolic rules upon which her Polish identity rests. Emigration marks a new birth for the family, one that is painful for young Hoffman. Hoffman so describes this new beginning in a tone that suggests reluctance and compromise: We have no place to go, no way to pay for a meal. And so we begin (104). They begin a doubly tortuous task of cultural translation. As a second language learner, she finds herself stranded in between two linguistic systems. Unsurprisingly, on her first day of class, she is silenced: Shut up, shuddup, the children around us are shouting, and it s the first word in English that I understand from its dramatic context. (104) In describing and reflecting on her own experience about learning English and by foregrounding issues of language acquisition and cultural literacy, Hoffman writes in the generic tradition of the language memoir. By definition, a language memoir is a genre, almost always autobiographical, in which the narrator describes the predictable stages that she goes through in acquiring linguistic and cultural literacy in a second language: silence, resistance, compromise, and, eventually, competence. Hoffman s is no exception. What distinguishes hers from other similar language memoirs is that she restrains from giving readers anecdotes after anecdotes to illustrate her point; instead, she theorizes on second language acquisition and turns herself into an essayist (Krupnick 459). For example, in describing how she was given the new name Eva to replace her Polish first name Ewa, Hoffman the narrator posits that The twist in our names takes them [our old

19 18 NTU Studies in Language and Literature identities] a tiny distance from us but it is a gap into which the infinite hobgoblin of abstraction enters (105). This is how Hoffman turns herself into an essayist on second language acquisition. What is more important is that the very style of her essays seems to follow the principle of abstraction which assumes an even greater importance in the latter sections of her book, as it becomes its main structural principle. To theorize on the strangeness of learning English, Hoffman describes, with an amazing degree of sophistication, the severance of the signifier from the signified (106). As a consequence of her coming to the realization that words do not necessarily refer to things, she concludes I am becoming a living avatar of structuralist wisdom; I cannot help knowing that words are just themselves. But it s a terrible knowledge, without any of the consolations that wisdom usually brings. It does not mean that I m free to play with words at my wont; anyway, words in their naked state are surely among the least satisfactory play objects. No, this radical disjoining between word and thing is a desiccating alchemy, draining the world not only of significance but of its colors, striations, nuiances its very existence. It is the loss of a living connection. (107) Failing to find the exact English words to express herself, she comes to the sophisticated knowledge about the artificiality of meaning formation. Feeling linguistically incapacitated, Hoffman goes through a linguistic castration that leaves her feeling powerless and angry. In order to become a speaking subject, however, Hoffman tries, with concentrated efforts but also with intense psychic reluctance, to insert herself linguistically into the new symbolic order, as she persists in conducting a torturous process of translating back and forth between Polish and English. Yet, as anyone who has attempted translation knows quite well, translation is an impossible task, for there is always something that either is left out or is inserted into the host or the target language. Hoffman is no exception. She also comes to realize that translation doesn t work for she can never know for sure how to match the signifier with the signified. As such, she also comes to know that this awareness of the severance of the signifier from the signified is a curse in disguise, for it does not mean that I m free to play with words at my wont ; instead, this painful wisdom is a desiccating alchemy, draining the world not only of significance but of its colors, striations, nuances its very existence (107). Other than coming to a painful realization that those behaviors which strike her to be silly and dull are phrased in English as kindly and

20 Eva Hoffman s Lost in Translation 19 pleasant, for in English there is an unstated prohibition against uncharitable words (108), she also learns to master the trick of performing her body in a racially and sexually acceptable ways. When Hoffman first becomes aware of the inapplicability of her Polish notion of femininity in the Canadian context, she feels as if she were an exile from her own gendered body (Fjellestad 139). With her insufficient control of English, she cannot enter into an exchange of humorous witticisms, nor does she have the ability to make the sparks fly (118). Therefore she feels she has lost her sense of humor. As long as she cannot tell a joke properly, she is regarded by her peers as prim and serious. In her turn, she also regards the behaviors of her peers with prim disapproval for they are, in her eyes, quite unnatural. In Poland, she is considered a pretty young girl ; however, after the passage across the Atlantic, I ve emerged as less attractive, less graceful, less desirable, and a somewhat pitiful specimen (109). The lady friends of her parents energetically set out to rectify these flaws by teaching her how to pluck her eyebrows, what lipsticks to put on, what bra to wear, and how to walk in her high-heeled shoes. These rigorous measures used by these lady friends to discipline her body and to render it docile and complicit with the dominant notions of femininity are described by Hoffman as an act of violence, bringing her to an even acuter awareness that she has lost her beauty as well. The more frantically she nods to indicate my agreement with others, and the more sweetly she smiles at people to show I mean well, the more aware she is of her stooping shoulders and receding chests, both of which are mannerisms of a marginal, off-centered person who wants both to be taken in and to fend off the threatening others (110), the more alienated she feels from herself and from the host society. This othering of her body is a symbolic violence for the dominant society operates in such a way that Hoffman needs to cooperate to have these linguistic, gender, and cultural rules inscribed on her body before she can be accepted by the others as one of us. In other words, she has to suffer many losses and pay a high price for cultural assimilation. To be accepted, she has to translate or transform herself, linguistically and culturally, making her a stranger to herself. The psychic tugs-of-war between Poland, an imaginary country, and Canada, an equally imaginary country, is so poignant and difficult for a teenage immigrant that Hoffman resolves to deploy the logic of binary opposition to ease her anxiety. She knows that she has to make a choice between Poland and Canada, Polish and English, but before she finally choose[s] English,

21 20 NTU Studies in Language and Literature for a long time, she hesitates and pains over it. However, both before and after she makes this painful decision, she remains ambivalent, and this ambivalence causes her language to veer between confidence and diffidence, shame and rage, nostalgia and complacency, lyricism and criticism, arrival and departure. Paradise Regained in America: A Life in New Language Such an idea that in the midst of the homelessness a traveler may feel as she encounters different cultures, crosses borders, and lives among peoples of different colors and languages, the only haven that a disoriented traveler may still claim as her home is in writing, however, is not new. Edward Said cites Theodor Adorno to argue that for the intellectual in emigration who finds himself in his forced emigration alienated from both the home and the host cultures, estranged from his mother tongue, and disoriented with a culture whose complex social rules and cultural codes ungraspable, he can only seek solace in the space of literature. Said thus claims that Adorno s reflections are informed by the belief that the only home truly available now, though fragile and vulnerable, is in writing (184). For Said, in saying that home is not geographically specific, but is found only in the space of literature and available only to exiles, who, in crossing borders, break barriers of thought and experience as well. In drawing up this rather idealized analogy between writing and home, Said, or Adorno, betrays what Caren Kaplan calls in Questions of Travel, his modernist aesthetic principles (119). Kaplan finds in Said s evocation of the writer/artist as the alienated prophet figure who is able to, through the medium of language, work through the alienation and disorientation that plagues displaced persons, be they refugees, immigrants, or self-exiled artists, an elitist undertone so that the relationship between the exile (or border intellectual ) and the ever-expanding numbers of displaced persons remains uneasy and unresolved (120). Hoffman is not Edward Said, but she also finds Being an alien myself in the midst of all this alienation turns out to be no disadvantage, for at Rice University she is initiated to New Criticism which is an alienated way of reading meant for people who are aliens in the country of literature. So, even though she knows very little of the social landscape of America and the world to which the literature she reads refers, she finds herself becoming an expert in identifying and decoding the many symbolic patterns that she