SOURCE: Baranczak, Stanislaw. “The Confusion of Tongues.” New Leader 72, no. 3 (6 February 1989): 16-18.

In the following review, Baranczak discusses the importance of language to the immigrant experience as related in Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language.

Emigré, exile, expatriate—there may be more synonyms for these in Roget's Thesaurus, most of them probably beginning with an “e-” or “ex-,” those sad prefixes of exclusion. But the excluding “e-” has its antonymous companion, “in-,” as in inclusion or immigration. I suppose just about anybody who has ever crossed the frontier line between “e-” and “in-” has at least once experienced a profound sensation of semantic incongruity invading his existence. For the sake of brevity, let us call the sensation “the Babel syndrome.” I had my first touch of the Babel syndrome a couple of weeks after arriving in this country, at some crowded wine-and-cheese reception. Nursing a...