One cannot visit Nabokov’s Berlin in the way one can visit Joyce’s Dublin or Kafka’s Prague. It no longer exists. There are, of course, certain ghosts. We know that he hunted for butterflies at Grunewald, and that he taught tennis on Kurfürstendamm. Charlottenburg was once home to so many Russian expatriates that it was nicknamed
Author: Nicola Goldberg
The Impossible Sweetness of Untranslatable Words
Lacunas, or semantic lexical gaps, are words whose meanings cannot be concisely translated into other languages. Some, like the Italian culaccino, refer to specific, tangible things – in this case, the mark that a cold glass leaves on a table. Others refer to emotions so particular that one experiences a kind of epiphany upon learning