My first reaction on reading Snow Country was that I had to read it again. It is a strange book, a lot is left unsaid, but many of the descriptions are very beautiful. My second reaction was that I should probably try to read it in Japanese after all. Just the first three lines are already better in Japanese than in English:
国境の長いトンネルを抜けると雪国であった。夜の底が白くなった。信号所に汽車が止まった。
The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country. The earth lay white under the night sky. The train pulled up at a signal stop.
This translation is very good but the first line in Japanese does not mention the train, and the very first word 国境, "border", is not translated. Also, I feel the Japanese expresses better the suddenness, more like "and there was the snow country", using the formal である for "to be". In the second line, there is no mention of the earth. 夜の底 is the darkness of the night (literally it means the depth or bottom of the night), and the line is more like "the darkness became white". So quite a bit of nuance doesn't come through in translation.
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