I’ve been reading Michael Igniatieff’s biography of Isaiah Berlin.  At this time (1949) Berlin was a pleasant but sexless Oxford don who suddenly, at age forty, fell violently in love.  While teaching at Harvard that year, he was translating Turgenev’s First Love into English and unsure of how to translate the hero’s sudden rush of feeling when the beloved responds to his interest. Ignatieff tells us that Berlin was asking friends if it was correct to say “that your heart ‘turned over’ when your loving glance was first returned? Or should he say that the heart ‘slipped its moorings’?”  and totally misses the comedy when he reports what happened when Berlin asked Nabokov for help:

While at Harvard, Isaiah actually consulted Vladimir Nabokov—then a research fellow in Lepidoptera at the Harvard zoology department—on how to translate this particular passage. Nabokov’s suggestion—‘my heart went pit a pat’—left Isaiah unimpressed.  Finally, he settled on ‘my heart leaped within me’.