Such is the empathy elicited by Eva Hoffman’s intimate, exploratory prose that, reading Lost in Translation, I was filled with a powerful sense of tesknota – the Polish word for nostalgia which Hoffman uses, presumably because it conveys better than our word that sense of longing for something understood but unreachable. I wanted to share the raw intensity, the clarity of purpose, the sensuousness of struggle in the author’s early years and later her zealous, desperate, anguished, transcendent pursuit of a new culture through its language. I wished to cling to her skirts and be taken on the rigorous intellectual journey she has made. An outsider, nose against the window of Hoffman’s relentless mental gym, I wanted to experience the sweat of exhaustive effort, the delight of feeling the expansion and growth which follows.

This is a book about the quest for language as a tool for survival. Words, with their particular, precise meaning, their nuances, their imagery, are the mechanism by which we can truly know one another, by which we explore the intimate depths of each other, by which we convey our differences and similarities. It is language which enables the naked savage, the alien, the outsider to touch each other’s minds and hearts; without language we can get no further than communication about shared and well understood experiences.

I was much struck by this, travelling recently in Ethiopia. In a bleak, wind-blown region of desperate poverty where most people survived on a bowl or two of rice a day, an old man thrust a basket of eggs into my hands, insisting, by his gesture, that I take it