It was a pleasant surprise to learn that this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature goes to Han Kang. It also reminded me of the public fervor of 2016 when she won the International Booker Prize. (Of course it’s way much fierier this time.)
– 2024: Choo elected for the sixth time / Coldplay announces 2025 Korea tour / Han Kang wins the Nobel Prize / (???)
I was also reminded the controversy back then about the translation of The Vegetarian, which had been around before the winning of the prize but only gained a traction after the prize. Being a translator myself, I took a keen interest in the controversy and delved a bit into it. (I wrote an interview piece with an American literary agent specialized in East Asian literature about the controversy and Korean literature in general.)
It didn’t take long for me to realize, from the mistakes the translator made, she didn’t have a good command of vernacular Korean. But we all make mistakes. I used to be very harsh about mistakes in translations before I get to work on translations for publication myself.
What did strike me as appalling was something else: there was no another pair of eyes to check the translation. Ms Han has her own regrets:
I was so absorbed in writing Human Acts at the time that, to be honest, I spent about three or four hours reading the manuscript without even looking up words in a dictionary. […] Later, when a heated debate erupted over the translation of The Vegetarian, I wished I had spent as much time reviewing the translation as I had with Human Acts. In fact, perhaps I should have commissioned an expert to compare it sentence by sentence with the original.
I have a similar story myself.
In 2015, when Pyongyang got to celebrate its 70th anniversary, the Guardian wanted to run a series of stories about North Korea—including a novel with North Korea theme. Private Life of a Nation, such one in a backdrop of a dystopian united Korea devastated by organized crime with former NK soldiers who lost job after the Pyongyang regime collapsed, was what they found.
Getting a good translator is often the hardest thing, but Literature Translation Institute of Korea already hired one to translate a part of the novel, long enough to be a sample for western literary agents who would be interested. The publisher immediately shared the manuscript with the Guardian editor.
Then I got a phone call from the author Lee Eung-jun, who is an eloquent stylist of Korean language and one of the few novelists I know in person. He sounded agitated.
“Would you take a look at the manuscript I just sent you?” he said. “The Guardian said that they can’t publish it with this level of translation.”
The translation appeared sloppy even from a skimming. How did it get through the review, or are there reviewers at all? LTi Korea spends taxpayers’ money to translate Korean literary works to promote Korean literature across the world.
Well, at least to a certain part of the world that is a British newspaper based in London, it just achieved the opposite.
“I think it’s a goner,” I called back and said. “You’re going to need a completely new translation.”
“I don’t know anybody else,” he said. “I’ll talk to my publisher—would you do it for me?”
I took some time to mull over. I have done a lot of translations, but literary works wasn’t among them. But at least I could do it better than this one.
This was how my first literary translation ended up in the Guardian.
In the age of political polarization, you get to see a whole lot more of detractors. Ms Han has pretty much left-leaning view on the modern Korean history. Some right-wingers saw her winning the most prestigious prize in literature as another win for communism in the world stage. So they tried their best to deny communism a win.
One of the major criticisms about the translation of The Vegetarian was the translator not only misunderstood some Korean words but also twisted what the author tried to represent: some lines read different from the original, some original paragraphs were gone missing, and there was some lines which you don’t see in the original.
The work that gave Ms Han conferred a global recognition by winning awards was a corrupted version of it, not the original, some say.
It is ludicrous to think that the Nobel Prize is given by an achievement of a single work, but it is worth considering what is allowed or not in translation. Furthermore, what the role of translation in literature is.
What I noticed during my time as a translator was that there is a power relationship, or, if you let me go a bit further, a system of hierarchy working on between languages and cultures.
Maintaining originality usually becomes a serious issue when translating down—from more respected languages like English, French to lesser ones. Some translators’ obsession about maintaining originality often leads to translations that is quite hard to understand even for native speakers of the language of the translation.
In the cases of translating up, translators and editors tend to wield more freedom: readers couldn’t stand the unfamiliarity!
Right after the Guardian published my translation, I realized the editors wielded their part of the freedom: all the tenses, for example, were altered to present tenses which Korean writers rarely use. I felt slightly offended at that point of time, because I felt like that the Koreaness in the translation is being degraded.
Coming to think about it again almost a decade later, I have less resentment as I became more neutral about the differences. My resentment at the time was mainly based on my perception of alleged hierarchy. In a way, I was also thinking within the frame of hierarchy.
One of the great achievement of Ms Han, I think, is that she opened up wide Korean literature to the entire world. Lots of Korean novels have been introduced into the western world since. I still remember another pleasant surprise while reading an interview of a NYC-based musician: she and the interviewer were talking about Bora Chung’s works as if they are the literary staples of cultured people nowadays.
However, I still believe in maintaining originality of the language in literary translations and I think it was unwise for the editors of the publisher to remove some lines and paragraphs in The Vegetarian. But no need for indignation: we can condescendingly lecture them about what true Korean literature is like.