Life in a New Language

"My voice is still a highly unreliable instrument. At the oddest moments, it betrays me, buckles, rasps, refuses to go on. It plays only in flat, shallow registers, and sometimes I literally cannot find it. Sometimes it seems to be lost in an echoing well; or else it shifts location to someplace high within my throat, from where it emerges tight and choked."

from "Lost in Translation" Eva Hoffman