How Language Conditions Thought

Following-up on yesterday's post about translating Yoko Tawada, I noticed this in a recent interview with Bernofsky:

Rail: In an introductory note to Yoko Tawada's The Naked Eye, you say that as she wrote the book certain sentences occurred to her in German and others in Japanese, so that she eventually wound up writing two versions of the same book. Do you have a sense of why this happened?
Bernofsky: Yoko Tawada's very interested in the way our lives look the moment you start talking about them in a foreign language. And she's right?words and experiences in different cultural contexts tend to have a different weight, different implications, and so walking on the border between two cultures as she does means constantly being confronted with one's own experience as the experience of an other. I think that's fascinating, and it's very true to my own experience of living in Germany and traveling to yet other countries. I wish I could read The Naked Eye in Japanese to see how it differs from the German version I read, but I don't speak a word of Japanese. I hope someone translates it into English someday.