I found J. Phillip Gabriel's comment on the struggles of translating between languages with such different grammatical structures really interesting, that it sometimes feels like he's "giving away the punchline" since the verb is always at the end of a Japanese sentence. It reminds me a little bit of watching a sitcom with subtitles - seeing the punchline written out before it actually happens in the scene. I wonder if there are cases where translators try to work around that constraint, modifying the phrasing to reveal information at a pace more comparable to the original text?
I also thought it was really interesting that an author would reach out to a translator and ask them to remove/add text to the original. It puts translated works in a unique position of allowing the original work to continue to evolve, but it also invites questions about what the role of a translator is.
The comparison of two translations of Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in Wendy Lesser's article was eye-opening. In Birnhaum's translation, the phrase "spaghetti-cooking music" caught my eye, because that phrasing just felt very Japanese to me (à la な adjectives...), in a way that Rubin's "music for cooking spaghetti" doesn't. On the other hand, since it's a somewhat unexpected phrasing in English, it does catch me by surprise in a way that the original Japanese sentence might not have intended to, so I can see arguments for both strategies, I'd be interested to see what the original text was!
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