When asked on a podcast for the New Yorker’s website in 2011 what is untranslatable about Japanese author Haruki Murakami, one of his longtime translators Jay Rubin said, “Pretty much everything. I strongly advise people not to read literature in translation because I know what happens in the process.” If his suggestion were to be heeded, most of us would not be edified by the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Albert Camus, Italo Calvino and Saadat Hasan Manto.
