The same passage,
in every translation.

Tolstoy wrote in long, deliberately rough sentences, kept the French of the Russian aristocracy on the page, and repeated words on purpose.

The first question is the biggest: verse or prose?

A Roman emperor’s private notebook, never meant to be published.

Cervantes wrote the first modern novel as a comedy, four hundred years ago, in a mock-heroic style that sends up the chivalric romances it imitates.

The Iliad opens on a single word, the rage of Achilles, and how a translator renders it sets the key for everything after.

Tolstoy opens with one of the most quoted sentences in the novel, so the very first line is already a translation problem: how do you keep an aphorism sounding like an aphorism and not a paraphrase?

Dostoevsky writes fever, not polish.

Dostoevsky’s last and largest novel is a chorus of voices, and that is the translator’s problem.

Dante wrote the Inferno in tight three-line stanzas (terza rima), rhymed in a chain that pulls you down through the circles of Hell.

Flaubert agonised over every sentence, hunting for the one exact word and a prose so controlled it reads like cut glass.

Hugo wrote a vast, surging, digression-loving novel: the story of Jean Valjean is forever pausing for a hundred pages on the Battle of Waterloo, the Paris sewers, or the argot of thieves.

Proust writes the longest, most winding sentences in the canon, clauses nesting inside clauses for half a page as a single memory unfolds.