According to experts, the South Korean Han Kang, who became famous above all for her novel The Vegetarian, deserved the Nobel Prize for literature. Her translation of The Vegetarian into English, which was awarded the International Man Book Prize, brought her worldwide success. However, according to the translator Viktor Janiš, it contains significant errors. Although it is a nice read, it would not hold up in the Czech Republic.
According to Janiš, the English translation of The Vegetarian by Deborah Smith obscures Han Kang’s distinctive linguistic minimalism. “It is expressed sparingly and very matter-of-factly, which the English translation hides. On the contrary, it is superficially nice and polished, it is a certain English idea of how one should write. The Czech translation is more concise and more similar to the original,” compares Janiš. Deborah Smith learned Korean for this text.
The Vegetarian was also published in the Czech Republic in 2017 as Han Kang’s first work. Later, the prose works Where the Grass Blooms and the White Book also reached Czech readers. Next year will be followed by the author’s last novel called I’m Not Saying Goodbye.
“Her newer books have a certain mix of introspection, autobiographical features, and at the same time two of them deal with some historical events from the modern history of South Korea and their reverberations today,” says orientalist Petra Ben-Ari, who translated all four Han Kang titles into Czech , always for the Odeon publishing house.
As an example, he cites the massacre in Gwangju from May 1980 described in the novel Where the Grass Blooms. At that time, a dictator came to power in South Korea after the assassination of the president and martial law began to apply. The government brutally suppressed the demonstration, to this day there are 209 victims and 4,300 wounded. The protest is sometimes compared to the one that later took place in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China.
“She felt a certain debt that those events were not sufficiently reflected, and she used the opportunity as a world-famous author to deal honestly with these topics. The second reason why she began to reflect historical events in her work is probably also the then and current Korean situation, where the daughter of the aforementioned dictator was elected president in the democratic elections,” mentions Petra Ben-Ari. He is referring to Park Geun-hye, who ruled the country from 2013 to 2017 and whose father was the dictator Park Chong-hui.
According to the Orientalist, the awarding of the Nobel Prize is essential for all of South Korean literature and Asian literature in general. “At the same time, Han Kang’s works convey a kind of reflection for us, for example, in the approach to Asian politics and how the West played a role in it,” he thinks.
Han Kang comes from a family of writers. She studied Korean literature, starting with poetry and short stories. The fifty-three-year-old author was awarded by the jury of the Swedish Academy for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and reveals how fragile human life is. Han Kang’s work is characterized by revealing the relationship between mental and physical torment. It is closely related to Eastern thought.