notes from underground

“I’m terrible at finding the right words for things. I’m sure Tolstoy would have been able to come up with exactly the right word.” - Haruki Murakami, in Sleep, from The Elephant Vanishes.

This, of course, is read in English after being translated from the Japanese, not to mention its being a statement in Japanese about a novel (Anna Karenina, as it turns out) written originally in Russian; it is a statement, moreover, that can only fully be understood by English readers if they have read the novel in translation from the Russian (as I have). Somehow, we all understand each other. I’m impressed.