JM Coetzee on Translation

Good article.

ARE my books easy or hard to translate?
Sentence by sentence, my prose is generally lucid, in the sense that
the syntactic relations among words, and the logical force of
constructions, are as clear as I can make them.

On the other hand, I sometimes use words with the full freight
of their history behind them, and that freight is not easily carried
across to another language. My English does not happen to be embedded
in any particular sociolinguistic landscape, which relieves the
translator of one vexatious burden; on the other hand, I do tend to be
allusive, and not always to signal the presence of allusion.

Dialogue comes with its own set of problems, particularly when
it is very informal and incorporates regional usages, contemporary
fashions and allusions, or slang. My dialogue is rarely of this kind.
For the most part its character is formal, even if its rhythms are more
abrupt than the rhythms of narrative prose. So hitting the right
register ought not to be a problem for the translator.