[eozoon]

First of all, few "literary great" are untranslated, the existing translations may not be perfect, as an amateur I would not presume that I can do any better.

In addition, I think there's a different mind set when people consume translated literature versus pop culture works (games, anime, manga, light novel, pop music etc). With literature, the reader expect that the translated work should stand on its own - when you read All Quiet on the Western Front, you don't constantly remember that it was originally written in German, when you listen to Les Miserables, you probably don't think how the French version sounded. So you'd have to think of how to work around the clever rhymes, the double meanings, the local idioms, so you don't take too much liberty with the words but also don't take away the intended meaning.

Whereas with people who consume fan translation understand that it's there to help the viewer enjoy something both the viewer and translator like, it is not meant to be a stand-alone piece of art. So when needed, you can stick in a translator notes to explain the rhyme that got lost in translation, or put a full essay on how a throw away line is actually a historical reference that imply something different to what was said. It's much headache inducing and more fun to do.

Besides, let's be honest, do you really think a modern translation of Ulysses will get more views than even the most obscure "NY Times best seller" from the last 5 years? In terms of effort : enjoyment people get, I'd argue it's more worth your time to translate pop works.

[uxp100]

I more or less agree with you, but I would note there are some fairly well known Japanese Novels (maybe not literary great) that remain untranslated. I mainly know them from sites like this one, where some fully translated popular anime will reference some novel that remains completed untranslated, and good translation notes will note that then say, well, you're on your own on actually reading this lol.

At the moment I am thinking of Dogra Magra, which has a fan translation on a blogspot somewhere that only covered the first few pages IIRC, and a Machine translation bootleg being sold on amazon. No other translation I am aware of, though I have not searched exhaustively.

[eozoon]

Dogra Magra is a tough one, it is known to be hard to get through even for native speakers. From what I've heard (I have not attempted to read it), it's both dense in information, but very sparse in progression, so it's can be simultaneously boring to read while being extremely confusing, even famous mystery writers like Edogawa Ranpo and Yokomizo Seishi have commented that they were confused and didn't understand the story (they mean it in a good way, I think).

I've polled the 3 Japanese colleagues in my team and none of them have finished it, so I doubt it's something a lone translator would be able to tackle without spending years on it. The blogspot translator probably got into it and hit wall once the story starts going. That said, it sounds like a fun team project if someone were to organize it and keep everybody on track for at least a few months.

[uxp100]

Yes, makes sense to me. I think translation of novels (maybe particularly modernist novels, which I think Dogra Magra is considered) is not just harder than anime or other pop culture, but more, uh, conceptually strange? I was just thinking of Virginia Woolf's "To The Lighthouse", like, what would it mean to translate that novel, which for me is very much about the words themselves. I liked it because of how much I struggled with its particular sentences (Some people can read it fluidly, certain portions really baffled me for a while).

So I searched for To The Lighthouse translations, and of course it has been translated to several languages, but also among the first results were academic papers discussing the implications of how it was translated, which makes sense to me, it's interesting.