>Vini, Vidi, vici
>I came, I saw, I conquered.
Notice Latin doesn't require the pronoun I. But literally translating "Came,saw, conquered" sounds like it was written by a petulant 14 year old. Secondly, Caesar's clauses are a nice triplet of two syllables. The English version does pretty well there, until it reaches "conquered," which throws the rhythm off. I said it was a stupid example, because the English translates pretty well IMO, but hopefully I demonstrated the difficult work of the translator.
Off the top of my head, I think these would be tough to translate.
-Shakespeare. Too many puns, and the meter is tied to a rhythm natural to English. All poetry is difficult really.
-Huckleberry Finn. Heavy dialect, which often involves the racial prejudices of the time. How can you translate that part? Nothing will be as disrespectful as the word is in English. Furthermore, how do you translate something like: >It must a been close on to one o’clock Do you preserve the grammar error? What's the difference between "close" and "close on"?
-Faulkner. Same as Twain, plus some very heavy rhetoric.
-Joyce. Same as Faulkner, but more puns, heavier rhetoric. If there's anything harder to translate than Finnegans Wake, let me know.
-Gadsby. This book does not contain the letter E! E is the most common vowel in English, but it's not in many other languages. Is the translator "cheating" if constrains the same letter? Amazingly this problem has been tackled in the translation of a different book, La Disparation, a French novel also without any e's either. The English translation, A Void, avoids the character too. However, omitting the E would be too easy in Russian, so that version doesn't contain any O's.