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After reading a few heavier books, I'm reading I Am A Cat by Natsume Sōseki. I really wish I read more Japanese! Everything I've read talks about what a challenge it was to translate, starting with the "I" Sōseki used in the title: it's usually the personal pronoun used by royalty. I've done my fair share of translating religious works and have spent days (sometimes) trying to "get" a phrase to a point where it begins to do justice to the original in content and the beauty of the spoken language. (I'm quite odd of a person. I do this knowing it may never be looked at with its original intent, but merely an academic "work", while I hold the passages to be sacred. I still wouldn't trade the opportunity to participate in translating a single word, for gold.)
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