On That Anvil, the Pounding of Translation

Primo Levi's work is full of puns which are always difficult to translate… And in Levi's case his use of dialect and neologisms make that loss significant…
Many of the terms Levi used for laboratory equipment were wrongly translated. In Moments of Reprieve, (12) the translator, Ruth Feldman, writes of Levi's 'glass refrigerator' - an innovative if impractical conception - when Levi wrote condensatore di vetro. The Sansoni English-Italian dictionary gives condenser (chem), condensatore, refrigerante.  A condenser, for crying out loud!
… In his Postfazione to his translation of Kafka's The Trial Levi wrote, (my translation):-
'.......Now translating is more than reading;...... Translation is tracking the tissue of the book under the microscope; you penetrate it, you stay there, stuck fast and involved.......Right from the very first sentence one is precipitated into the nightmare of the unknowable, and in every page one comes up against obsessive outbursts,..... by avalanches of confused words......'
'I do not believe that there is much affinity between Kafka and me. Often, during the process of this translation, I have had the feeling of collision, of conflict, of the immodest temptation to unravel, in my own way, the knots in the text; in sum, to correct, to exploit the dictionary choices, to superimpose my own way of writing on Kafka's. I have tried not to yield to this temptation.'
'Since I know that there is no such thing as the 'right way' to translate, I have trusted more to instinct than to reason, and I have adhered to a line of interpretative correctness, as honestly as possible, even if not always coherent from page to page, because not all the pages present the same problems…[Primo Levi]