: How do writers feel about translations of their works? Looking for examples I'm looking for examples of bilingual (or trilingual, etc) writers who actually read foreign translations of their works

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An artical about Murakami: www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/lost-in-translation
excerpt: ...Jay Rubin, one of Murakami’s longtime translators, told me in Tokyo last month, explaining what he says to American readers, most of whom prefer to believe otherwise. “Murakami wrote the names and locations, but the English words are mine.” Murakami once told me that he never reads his books in translation because he doesn’t need to. While he can speak and read English with great sensitivity, reading his own work in another language could be disappointing—or worse. “My books exist in their original Japanese. That’s what’s most important, because that’s how I wrote them.”...

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Milan Kundera is a Czech author, who has lived in France since 1975. He wrote his first novels in Czech, but he switched to French after going to exile in 1975 after Soviet invasion to Czechoslovakia. He was stripped of Czechoslovak citizenship in 1979 by the Czechoslovak communist regime.

He can speak Czech, of course. That is why he rarely allows his French novels to be translated to Czech by Czech translators; his opinion is he can translate his own work better than any translator. Czech readers must wait for the translation many years longer than the rest of the world.

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