Han Kang’s Nobel Is a Testament to The Power of Translators

I came upon the Korean author Han Kang through a friend who came upon her through the music act BTS. We came upon both Han Kang and BTS thanks to translators. Korean culture is a well liked zeitgeist now, so the time is ripe to consider the vehicle on which it rides into our lives – translations and the people who do it.

Han Kang has won the literature Nobel, her books have sold out anew in Seoul and the world has entered a phase of engagement with this novelist that can only be described as frenzied. Many have discovered her now, but to many she was already a favourite author.

This is largely thanks to the fact that Han won the International Booker Prize in 2016. The book she won it for – a book without adequate adjectives to do it justice – was one she wrote between 2003 and 2005. 채식주의자 was published in Korean in 2007. In the intervening decade, Han’s work was visited by the British translator Deborah Smith, who taught herself Korean, read it in the original and decided to not let it go untranslated. The result was The Vegetarian, published in the UK in 2015.

Han’s work is spartan and she is well known and well liked for sticking to an austere economy of expression that somehow does the job better than busy sentences do. As her father, the novelist Han Seungwon, has said, there is nothing to discard in Han Kang’s novels. Smith has, through her multiple translations of Han’s novels, short stories, publicity material and more, treated this style in a way that has robbed the reader of the niggling awareness that they are reading a work in translation.

But her impact has been a lot more than the already gargantuan propelling of a very gifted author to the global stage. One of the most well known Korean translators active today, Anton Hur, told The Wire this August that Smith’s work had few fans in Korea at the beginning. This was, according to Hur, largely because Smith struck at Korean conservatism.

“In Korea, while I was coming up, the approach was that translation had to be very literal. That was [part of] a very conservative approach to Korean cultural products. I believe that is why Korean books just did not really sell well,” Hur had said. In 2022, two books that Hur translated from Korean were shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.

Hur says that there were exceptions to the literal-or-nothing rule for translation and cites Please Look After Mom, translated by Chiyoung Kim and written by Kyung Sookshin. This book was the first and only Korean New York Times bestseller until Hur and two others translated BTS’s memoir, Beyond the Story.

But, Hur said, it was only when The Vegetarian won the International Booker Prize that the shift began. “It was really Deborah Smith’s translation that changed the face of Korean literature in translation, and allowed translators to be more daring, more literary and to consider the target language culture as much as the source language culture – which was not a position that Korea espoused at that time,” he said.

But before she set the standard for Korean to English translators who would come after her, there were trials. Errors were pointed out. Heated debates were executed. There was deep unease. In an interview with the Booker Prize, Han was asked how it felt when there was a level of controversy around the translation. The authoritativeness in her reply is telling. She said:

“Contrary to the concerns expressed by many, I do not believe that the translator has deliberately undermined the original, nor do I believe that she has created a new work that is completely different from the original. The errors have been corrected and translation is by its very nature an extremely difficult and complex act that involves loss and exploration. Lyricism, rhythms, poetic tension, subtlety, the layered meanings, the deeply inscribed cultural context of the departure language – everything that is possible only in that language – is inevitably lost in the transition to the arrival language. The challenging task for any translator is to navigate through this dark tunnel of loss and find the closest equivalents or analogies to be as faithful as possible to the original text.”

Korean depends more on the translator’s discretion than many other languages. As any learner will tell you, this is because of the dastardly omission of subjects in it, especially in the written form. “Eating.” “Sleeping.” “Feeling blue because the skies are grey.” Who is? Korean doesn’t deign to tell you. You arrive at the answer by paying close attention to the situation and nuance. To add to this, any translator would also have the imperative to not pander to an English expectation of Korean culture, and to strike a cultural balance.

Smith and Han laboured on, with corrections, revisions, and a wholehearted refusal to let literary traditions dictate style. It is curious that in Han’s novels, society which is so deep in Korea is peeled off layer by layer to facilitate an excruciating immediacy of feeling, and it is Han’s novel which was subjected to societal expectations of what goes in literature.

“Indeed, Deborah was attacked a lot in Korea because her translation was so innovative. But now everyone translates like her – except for the ones that are not successful,” Hur said.

The literature Nobel is a strange prize – for long it has been considered an expression of global politics. For a while, your popularity as a writer ruled you out. It served to draw the author out from their corner and make a global concept out of them. Giving the prize to a person – not an author, but a person – like Han goes some way in restoring faith in the prize. The New Republic called the decision a “kind of defense of literature in an era when it is constantly sullied and devalued.”

Han speaks almost entirely through her books – she is no recluse but her public presence is not big. At events, she speaks in the gentlest of tones, one that matches her authorial voice to a frightening degree. As the writer Jen Calleja wrote on The Quietus:

“[When Han began speaking at an event], everyone shuffled around, worried that they wouldn’t be able to hear. But then we adjusted. The room shifted from silence, to an absolute void where Kang’s voice was the only sound, as if whispered to each person individually. It’s a voice that commands your attention because you must listen carefully.”

Indeed, you must listen carefully when Han refuses to organise a press conference in celebration of her award because two wars – in West Asia and Ukraine – are intensifying.

You must listen carefully to the core of Han’s novels, to their obstinate refusal to give in to any kind of normalisation of oppression.

You must listen to the clarity of Han’s voice, despite the men complaining in Korea’s (and the world’s) consistently misogynistic landscape that a woman’s Nobel win is a reflection of deep distress for them.

And while you listen, you must know that the words come to you via a translator or two. Almost all of Asia’s literature Nobels are thanks to the work of translators – which in one case, dear to India, was the author himself. As a literary tool in a fractious world, there is perhaps nothing as valuable as a translation is.