Seidensticker - Aaron

 Seidensticker corroborates a lot of the ideas we have seen in the readings thus far: translating between English and Japanese is inherently an infinite number of difficult choices; and translation should not try to improve upon the original.

I thought his way of describing these aspects were interesting, though. He calls the choices of translation a "big sacrifice", since every choice sacrifices something. Do you preserve clarity at the expense of the flow of the work? Or do you preserve the flow at the expense of clarity? He also called translators "counterfeiters", since their job is to imitate the original as accurately as possible, and not try to improve upon it (like how a counterfeiter has to reproduce George Washington's warts, not "prettify" them).

Even in the case of counterfeiting, though, the counterfeit does not form an adequate substitute for the original. So Seidensticker seems to make the implication that translations are a paler imitation of the original. I don't know if I agree with this sentiment (and I'm not sure if he does, either; that was not necessarily his point here), but I will concede that a translation will be a very different work as compared to the original, because translations between English and Japanese will suffer from choices that sacrifice the original intention of the author. As was mentioned in a previous reading (I forget which one it was specifically), the experience of reading a work will be very different in different translations. The translator must do their best to minimize this, but it seems to be unavoidable as a rule.