Han kang she is the first South Korean writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (2024).
She was awarded "for her intense, poetic prose that confronts historical trauma and exposes the fragility of human life".
Jeong, the protagonist of Kang's best-known novel outside of South Korea, "Vegetarian", is actually a vegan. The word for veganism, however, does not exist in the Korean language.
In English, as well as in Montenegrin, there is no special word for an older sister, nor for an older sister's husband.
As expected, many South Korean realities cannot be translated into Indo-European languages at all.
Therefore, the translation of this work, which is set in the extremely patriarchal Korean society, caused heated polemics.
The author of the controversial English translation is British Debora Smit. She started learning Korean in 2009, and her translation of the novel Han Kang won the Booker Prize in 2016.
Six years of study, outside of the language environment, is not a lot for Korean, and for translating literature, it is even less.
In an article published in 2017, Charles Jun, a Korean-American visiting professor at the Korea National Open University in Seoul, prompted by translation errors, wondered: “Has the translation gone too far? A respected translator told me that the context and style are so different that it makes more sense to speak of Smith's work as an adaptation rather than a translation".
For the sake of comparison, the translator of the novel into Russian is Li San Jun (1959-2023), member of the Korean national minority in the Russian Federation, linguist, doctoral student in literature and assistant professor of the Department of Oriental Studies at St. Petersburg State University.
Korean is agglutinative (from Latin agglutinare: to stick), like Finno-Ugric languages: it is a type of language in which almost all grammatical categories and grammatical relationships are expressed by univocal and standard affixes added to the root of the word; the boundaries of these affixes are clearly divided, as for example in Turkish as if you were going to give it away: as if you're going to leave at any moment.
Korean alphabet or hangul it is considered an alphabetic syllabary, i.e. a mixture of the characteristics of alphabetic and syllabic letters. The shape of the consonant was created by the appearance of the position of the mouth and tongue during the pronunciation of that letter, and the vowels consist of horizontal and vertical lines. Due to its specificity and significance, the Hangul script was included in the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1997.
The translation into Russian is considered one of the best translations in the history of literature Goethe's "Fausta" whose author Boris pasternak. Allegedly, by comparing these two texts, it was concluded that about 25% of the original is lost in that translation.
Any work of more than 50.000 words ("Vegetarian" has about 50 words) will have many errors, minor or major, in translation. There is no perfect translation of the novel. At the same time, fifty thousand words is the lower limit for a novel, and until recently this limit was one hundred thousand words.
However, according to a research paper presented in 2016 at a conference at Ewha Womans University, 10,9 percent of the first part of the novel "Vegetarian" was mistranslated. Another 5,7 percent of the original text was omitted. And that refers only to the first part, and the novel consists of three parts, says Čars Jun.
Charles June further points out that the number of mistranslations in ""Vegetarian woman" is significantly larger than one would expect from a professional translator, but also that most of these mistakes disturb the plot very little, if at all. For example, an English reader will easily overlook the fact that Anbang, the master bedroom, translated as “living room”; likewise, few will notice that it is dakdoritang (spicy stewed chicken) mistranslated as "chicken and duck soup." No major damage.
What "stings the eyes" is that in several cases Smit incorrectly identified the subjects of the sentences, and in several places the actions and dialogues were attributed to the wrong characters.
Thus, comparing the Korean and English texts, one of the crucial sentences in the novel is attributed to the sister's husband, instead of the protagonist. Given that the story is told by everyone except the protagonist, and that she speaks very little at all, this is extremely important.
However, regardless of all the above, the question is whether and when the works of Han Kang would have been translated into English without the efforts of Deborah Smit.
Namely, in addition to being an associate of the University of Oriental and African Studies in London, she is also the founder of Tilted Axes Press, a non-profit publishing house, which publishes books that would otherwise have difficulty finding their way to the English-speaking world.
The very genre classification of Han Kang's novels in the English-speaking world has caused linguistic and other doubts.
If you consider all the politically correct criteria by which English-language literature is published today, this is transgressive fiction.
Many in the West were appalled by the descriptions of domestic violence, eating disorders, and explicit descriptions of sex in Han Kang's novel, although statistics show that most of us are, unfortunately, well aware of it.
In Europe, written in one of the European languages, such a novel would hardly be published at all, and would certainly be eliminated from the competition for some of the most prestigious awards. Because the criteria are well known: there must be no description of the use of prohibited substances, violence or sex. The latter classifies literature as transgressive (which also includes noir and erotic fiction), horror or psychological thriller.
When we ignore contemporary editorial policy, as well as the fact that fewer and fewer people globally read books at all, it turns out that Zola, Dostoyevsky, Nabokov i Henry Miller wrote transgressive literature.
Because judgments about what is politically correct are made by politicians, and how many of them actually read books is a big question. Namely, in the article Roza Horovic under the headline "Elite Students Who Can't Read Books", published in "The Atlantic" from October 1 of this year, it is stated:Nicholas Deims He has been teaching literature and humanities, a compulsory course in classical literature at Columbia University since 1998. He loves his job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overloaded with reading… Demes students now look confused at the very thought of reading multiple books in one semester. His colleagues noticed the same problem..."
It turned out that Columbia students had never read a book from cover to cover until then, during elementary and high school. They read passages, poetry and newspaper articles, but not a single book from cover to cover…
There are many reasons for this state of affairs, but not the least is the self-censorship of writers who avoid being canceled, as well as the decision-making rules that are internally forwarded to the jury members of many European awards, and which topics are classified as taboo.
We can only hope that Korean literature, K-lit, which gave us a much-needed literary infusion with Kang's novel, will achieve great success just like K-pop and K-drama before it.
Nota Bene: the novel "Vegetarian" was published in Serbian by the publishing house Dereta, translated from English (2016)
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