Among the bookworms who browse the fiction shelves of Waterstones, say, or Foyles, the person most likely to end up buying a novel written in English is, research tells us, a 64-year-old woman. When it comes to translated fiction, though, the story is very different.
According to Nielsen BookScan, the UK’s top data cruncher on literature, two million volumes of translated fiction were sold in Britain in 2022. Half of these were bought by people under 35 (equally by men and women), and half that number—500,000 books—were picked out by readers aged 17 to 24. Generation TF, you could call them. In contrast with older readers who soaked up the Russian or French classics, Generation TF’s preferred books were: first, translations from Japanese; second, from Korean.
Glimpses of this trend were already visible a decade ago: 2016 was the first year that the International Booker Prize—the UK’s premier award for fiction in translation—was presented for a single book published in Britain and/or Ireland in the preceding year. After 10 years as a biennial award for a body of work, the new-look International Booker Prize became the mirror image of the longer-standing Booker Prize for Fiction, only for a work translated into English rather than one written originally in English. The £50,000 prize money was to be divided equally between author and translator. It has become the world’s most influential award for translated fiction.
Among the six works on the shortlist in 2016 was a short novel in three parts, by a 46-year-old poet and creative writing teacher from Korea named Han Kang. The Vegetarian tells the story of a young woman who gives up meat, not just renouncing eating anything that comes from animals, but refusing even to cook it for her husband, a decision that would have consequences in patriarchal Korea. “I wanted to describe a woman who desperately didn’t want to belong to the human race,” Han has said. “Humans commit such violence.” Her English translator, Deborah Smith, was just 29; a Cambridge graduate who was the first person from her school to go to university and who had taught herself Korean in her spare time.
The shortlisting of The Vegetarian attracted considerable attention. In the runup to the announcement of the winner at a dinner in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, Korean TV crews jostled with waiters ferrying glassware and cutlery from vans parked at the curb to try and get into the venue early. But the reaction from Korean officialdom, when Han’s novel was declared the winner, was far more muted.
The reaction was unusual, if not unexpected. For a decade, the Korean government had been pouring millions into raising the nation’s cultural profile. Since the 1990s, pop music, cinema and literature—the foundations of the Korean Wave—were all regarded as prime instruments of soft power.
Korea wanted nothing more than to win a Nobel prize in Literature. But literary plaudits, conservative Koreans believed, should only be given in turn. Han was a generation younger than some of the country’s more venerated (male) poets and novelists, and therefore not considered to be at the front of the queue for honours. Among those who had a greater right, it was believed, were older men, such as Ko Un, Korea’s premier poet (whose candidacy would be undone during a #MeToo moment in 2018) and Hwang Sok-yong, a long-standing novelist and chronicler of the Vietnam and Korean wars.
A woman—particularly a relatively young woman—casting a light on Korean patriarchy made for uncomfortable reading. A woman who did so in a style that was “both lyrical and lacerating”, according to the chair of the 2016 International Booker judges, was perhaps someone to be feared. Korean officialdom, it seemed, was more interested in the power of prestige than the power of great literature. It did not know what to do about Han Kang.
A woman casting a light on Korean patriarchy made for uncomfortable reading
There was another problem, too. By the time Han won the International Booker Prize, she had written another book, which had been published in Korea but had not yet been translated. Human Acts takes on one of the most shameful episodes in recent Korean history, the Gwangju uprising of May 1980.
During a period of martial law following the assassination of the military strongman Park Chung-hee in 1979, paratroopers were sent in to the southern city of Gwangju to help the police deal with the ever more vocal pro-democracy demonstrations. The military opened fire on students and civilians. Many hundreds were killed. The exact figure has never been confirmed. The dead, “piled up, reeking, unclaimed, and thus unburied”, presented “a logistical and ontological dilemma,” writes the translator Smith in her introduction to the new paperback edition of the book, which lays out the official coverup that followed the killings.
Han was born in Gwangju and lived there as a child. She and her family moved to Seoul just a few months before the uprising, and she only learned what happened there three years later, when she discovered an album of photographs taken by a German journalist, Jürgen Hinzpeter, which had been circulated secretly among her parents’ friends and was hidden in a bookshelf in her childhood home, its spine to the wall.
Shy and prone to debilitating migraines, Han has occasionally spoken about how the discovery affected her. The boy at the centre of Human Acts, one of the many whose ultimate fate was unknown, is taken from the pictures she discovered in that album. “Writing the boys was a struggle for me,” Han told Claire Armitstead of the Guardian in 2016. “I’m a person who feels pain when you throw meat on the fire.”
For the reader, Human Acts is like peeling an onion. The book begins in a makeshift mortuary, where young volunteers are preparing the bodies of those killed in the uprising to be identified and claimed by their relatives. Lyrical memories of being at school with friends are interspersed with crushing descriptions of what these young bodies have been subjected to: “Every time you pull back the cloth for someone who has come to find a daughter or younger sister, the sheer rate of decomposition stuns you,” Han writes. “Stab wounds slash down from her forehead to her left eye, her cheekbone to her jaw, her left breast to her armpit, gaping gashes where the raw flesh shows through.” The toes of the dead swell up “like thick tubers of ginger, turning black in the process”. A woman in school uniform wipes “the face of a young man whose throat has been sliced open by a bayonet, his red uvula poking out”.
With each successive chapter, another layer of history is revealed. Friends take it in turn to recount their experiences of the uprising. Most have survived. But some have not, and many of the book’s sweetest passages are recounted by the dead.
These dead were never meant to have a voice. Han gave them one. For her Korean readers—of which there were some but not many in those early years—she was both conscience and keeper of the past. For the Korean establishment, she was a renegade. “She was blacklisted,” explains her agent, Laurence Laluyaux, head of RCW International. “It was never official. She was just not included in official tours or promotions. It was all very insidious; no-one ever told her. It took her a while to work it out.”
For the Korean establishment, she was a renegade
First published in Korean in 2007, The Vegetarian sold just 20,000 copies at home in the nine years before Smith’s translation won it the International Booker Prize. That award might have made Han a vital ambassador for Korean literature, especially abroad, where new translations of the book were being signed up on a regular basis. Instead, the opposite happened.
Much of the criticism in the press took the form of attacking Han through her translator. Huffington Post Korea insisted that the translation was completely “off the mark”. Attendants at a literary conference were told: “10.9 per cent of the first part of the novel was mistranslated. Another 5.7 per cent of the text was omitted. And this was just in the first section.” Charse Yun, a Korean-American academic who teaches translation in Seoul, took up the charge, first in Korea Exposé and then in the Los Angeles Times. “Smith amplifies Han’s spare, quiet style and embellishes it with adverbs, superlatives and other emphatic word choices that are nowhere in the original… This doesn’t happen once or twice, but on virtually every other page.” It’s as though “the plain, contemporary style of Raymond Carver” had been made to sound like Charles Dickens, he went on.
Beneath the jealousy lay a very real issue about what constitutes a “good” translation—a highly accurate word-for-word rendering or something that is more faithful to the spirit of a book than to each sentence? And who has the right to decide: can a white Englishwoman who is not a native Korean speaker have an opinion? Or should a translator from Korean only ever be a native Korean?
Smith offered a spirited defence, arguing in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2018, “To say that my English translation of The Vegetarian is a ‘completely different book’ from the Korean original is, of course, in one sense entirely correct. Since there is no such thing as a truly literal translation—no two languages’ grammars match, their vocabularies diverge, even punctuation has a different weight—there can be no such thing as a translation that is not ‘creative’.”
It would take her another six years to fully explain what she meant by that. In her introduction to a new paperback edition of Human Acts that came out last year, Smith focuses on the power of words, not just for the translator, but also for the storyteller and the historian. “One of this translation’s working titles was Uprisings. As well as the obvious connection to the Gwangju Uprising itself, a thread of words runs through the novel—come out, come forward, emerge, surface, rise up—which suggests an uprising of another kind. The past, like the bodies of the dead, hasn’t stayed buried. Repressed trauma irrupts in the form of memory, one of the main Korean words for ‘to remember’ meaning literally ‘to rise to the surface’—an inadvertent, often hazy recollection which is the type of memory most common in Han Kang’s book… Her novel, then, is both a personal and political response to these recent developments, and a reminder of the human acts of which we are all capable, the brutal and the tender, the base and the sublime.”
Han’s latest novel, We Do Not Part, a story of love and remembering set during the violence that led up to the Korean War, came out in English in February, translated by e.yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. The French translation won the Prix Médicis étranger in 2023.
The presentation of the 2024 Nobel prize in literature to Han Kang—the first time the award has gone to an Asian woman—coincided with another period of political turmoil in Korea, when the president of Korea was suspended and later arrested for trying to impose martial law. The day before the award, Han was struck down by one of her terrible recurring migraines. She spent the day in bed, she told a friend, thinking about what she was going to say to the assembled dignitaries in her Nobel lecture.
“When I write, I use my body. I use all the sensory details of seeing, of listening, of smelling, of tasting, of experiencing tenderness and warmth and cold and pain, of noticing my heart racing and my body needing food and water, of walking and running, of feeling the wind and rain and snow on my skin, of holding hands. I try to infuse those vivid sensations that I feel as a mortal being with blood coursing through her body into my sentences. As if I am sending out an electric current. And when I sense this current being transmitted to the reader, I am astonished and moved. In these moments I experience again the thread of language that connects us,” she said in that lecture.
Han certainly touches readers. Her work has now been translated into more than 50 languages, including most recently Basque, Azerbaijani, Hindi and Malayalam. Since the Nobel announcement, she has sold 120,000 copies of her work in French, 250,000 in Spanish and more than one million in Korean. And in Gwangju a banner of congratulations was hung on a building that had once been fired on by a military helicopter.
