“When Nabokov started translating [his English-language memoir] into Russian, he recalled a lot of things that he did not remember when he was writing it in English, and so in essence it became a somewhat different book,” Pavlenko says.
At NPR’s health blog, Shots, Alan Yu explores the controversial linguistic idea that the language(s) we speak helps shape how we perceive the world.
Examples include using compass points (southwest, north) instead of directional words (left, right) to discuss location, as well as the above memoir-translation quandary, which eventually prompted Nabokov to re-translate the Russian version back into English, resulting in the version English-speakers read today.
