--Leonard Cohen, "Tower of Song" As a working bilingual translator (to and from English and Japanese), I constantly confront the perennial dilemma every translator must face in trying to recapture the meaning of the original text in a different language: the degree to which one errs on the side of literalist loyalty or on the side of necessarily paraphrased, "natural" language-use. The novelist Haruki Murakami, who has made various translations of modern American fiction, once spoke on this contrary polarity of translation in terms of his two major American translators and his own attitude as a translator:
