Edward Seidensticker

 After reading Edward Seidensticker on Nagai Kafu and Kawabata Yasunari, I found it really interesting to see a professional translator's point of view of translating from English to Japanese and from Japanese to English. One of the things I found interesting was that he thinks of translators as counterfeiters. I do agree with him on translators being like counterfeiters in the sense that they "must imitate, he must reproduce every detail of his original to the best of his ability, not changing anything. " There are always struggles in translation that you can't come up with the exact expression of words or whatnot, and the best thing we can do is to imitate the author's voice the best we can and his or her intention with the wordings.  

I also found it interesting to hear from him that "Translation is not interesting unless it's difficult. It becomes boring when it's easy." I absolutely agree with him that translating is absolutely hard; however, it is fascinating because you get both intrigued and frustrated by a specific word and try to come up with a better way to say it like the original text. I found it enjoyable to have choices of words to translate to, and compare them to which fits the best in the context and the author's style.

- Airi Hatori