> I've often wondered how much of my opinion I could chalk up to translation. Whenever I think about this I'm reminded of a book of Voltaire stories I once rea

> I've often wondered how much of my opinion I could chalk up to translation. Whenever I think about this I'm reminded of a book of Voltaire stories I once read, where the translator's note ended: "...but mostly I've tried to say out of Voltaire's way, for I find that he speaks very good English". It stuck in my mind because I kept thinking how hard it is to imagine an EN↔JP translation with a similar kind of note. I'm no expert but my gut feeling is that the translator's style plays a bigger role for highly dissimilar languages, since "just staying out of the author's way" isn't really an option. On the other hand, some years ago Murakami did a JP translation of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye. I'd read the original a bunch of times so I was really curious to find out what Murakami would do with it, how different it would be, etc. But everywhere I checked, it seemed to be very much a rote, practically word-for-word translation, to the extent that it seemed flat and overly explanatory to me (as a non-native reader). It felt more like he'd gone to pains not to leave any imprint on it. But of course Murakami isn't mainly a translator, so maybe I'm reading too much into this.