The English-language versions of Han’s work have won wide acclaim. Are they faithful to the original?
By Jiayang Fan
How literal must a literary translation be? Nabokov, who was fluent in three languages and wrote in two of them, believed that “the clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.” Borges, on the other hand, maintained that a translator should seek not to copy a text but to transform and enrich it. “Translation is a more advanced stage of civilization,” Borges insisted—or, depending on the translation you come across, “a more advanced stage of writing.” (He wrote the line in French, one of several languages he knew.)
The controversy reached many American readers in September of last year, when the Los Angeles Times published a piece by Charse Yun, a Korean-American who has taught courses in translation in Seoul. (The article extended an argument that Yun had first made, in July, in the online magazine Korea Exposé.) “Smith amplifies Han’s spare, quiet style and embellishes it with adverbs, superlatives and other emphatic word choices that are nowhere in the original,” Yun writes. “This doesn’t just happen once or twice, but on virtually every other page.” It’s as though Raymond Carver had been made to sound like Charles Dickens, he adds. This isn’t, in Yun’s view, a matter merely of accuracy but also of cultural legibility. Korea has a rich and varied literary tradition—and a recent history that is intimately entangled with that of the West, particularly the U.S. But few works of Korean literature have had any success in the English-speaking world, and the country, despite its frequent presence in American headlines, does not register in the popular imagination the way that its larger neighbors China and Japan do. Han Kang seemed to fill that void—or begin to, at least. But if her success depended on mistranslation, how much had really got through?
To read the full article, click HERE:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/15/han-kang-and-the-complexity-of-translation
How to account for the success of The Vegetarian?
In the immediate aftermath of the Man Booker International Prize, a lot of the reporting speculated on what had led the judges to single out The Vegetarian. But though the MBI has created excitement on an unprecedented scale, The Vegetarian’s critical and commercial success has been ongoing since its original publication in 2007. Though never (until now) a bestseller, the book received strong critical acclaim when it first appeared, with its middle section taking home the Yi Sang Literary Award, and was already a cult “steady seller” before any of the MBI announcements started having an effect. In addition, by the time the contract for the English translation was signed the book had already been published in countries as far afield as Argentina and Japan, Poland, and Vietnam. This impressive feat was down to the tireless work and connections of Han Kang’s agents, Joseph Lee and Barbara Zitwer, and the book’s favorable reception in these countries was enabled by the skill and dedication of a range of translators as well as the strength of the original work itself.
Because of course, the most important reason for The Vegetarian’s unprecedented success is that it is an extraordinarily powerful work of literature.
To continue reading, click HERE.
First published in South Korea in 2007 and translated into English in 2015, The Vegetarian by Han Kang remains urgently relevant, almost 10 years after it was first picked up by readers. Constant relevance is perhaps both a mark of great literature and a demonstration of why it matters so much; our societies, our norms, our expectations change at such a glacial pace that we need books to keep us aware and to foment change, however slowly.
Yeong-hye is the subject of The Vegetarian, but not its protagonist or even quite its main character. Her voice is so rarely heard, her speech so rarely present, it would be more accurate to call her the object of the book if it weren’t for the fact that her actions speak louder than words. After a frightening dream involving intense violence, she becomes a vegetarian (really, she is a vegan as she refuses to eat any animal products). This infuriates her husband, Mr Cheong, the narrator of the first portion of the book. He thinks that Yeong-hye is being ridiculous, whimsical rather than determined. When he finds her clearing out all the meat products from their fridge, including expensive seafood, he is incredulous. How is it possible that his docile, dull, quiet wife has turned into someone like this? During this section, italicised portions give us a glimpse into Yeong-hye’s dreams, and they imply that while her behaviour may be new, the thoughts behind them are not: “Intolerable loathing, so long suppressed. Loathing I’ve always tried to mask with affection. But now the mask is coming off.”
To red the full article in the Guardian, click HERE.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/dec/23/the-vegetarian-by-han-kang-tells-a-dangerously-defiant-story
By Porochista Khakpour
Last August, Anne Rice posted a call to arms — on Facebook, of course — warning that political correctness was going to bring on literary end times: banned books, destroyed authors, “a new era of censorship.” “We must stand up for fiction as a place where transgressive behavior and ideas can be explored,” she proclaimed. “I think we have to be willing to stand up for the despised.” I, a fan of transgressive literature, could not pinpoint why I found her post to be so much more vexing than the usual battle cries of P.C.-paranoiacs. I finally had my answer after reading Han Kang’s novel “The Vegetarian”: What if “the despised” can stand up on their own?
All the trigger warnings on earth cannot prepare a reader for the traumas of this Korean author’s translated debut in the Anglophone world. At first, you might eye the title and scan the first innocuous sentence — “Before my wife turned vegetarian, I thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way” — and think that the biggest risk here might be converting to vegetarianism. (I myself converted, again; we’ll see if it lasts.) But there is no end to the horrors that rattle in and out of this ferocious, magnificently death-affirming novel.
When Yeong-hye awoke one morning from troubled dreams, she found herself changed into a monstrous . . . vegetarian. And that’s where the misleadingly simple echoes of a certain classic premise end. Han’s novella-in-three-parts zigzags between domestic thriller, transformation parable and arborphiliac meditation, told from the points of view of her lousy husband, who works at an office (Part I); her obsessive brother-in-law, who is an artist (Part II); and her overburdened older sister, who manages a cosmetics store (Part III). These three characters are largely defined by what they do for a living, whereas Yeong-hye stops doing much of anything altogether. “I had a dream,” she says in one of her rare moments of direct dialogue, her only explanation of her newfound herbivorism. At first she is met with casual disdain by family and friends; a dinner acquaintance passive-aggressively declares, “I’d hate to share a meal with someone who considers eating meat repulsive, just because that’s how they themselves personally feel . . . don’t you agree?” But soon her physical form creates the very negative space those close to her fear: weight loss, insomnia, diminished libido and the eventual abandonment of everyday “civilized” life.
To read the full article, click HERE:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/books/review/the-vegetarian-by-han-kang.html