Han Kang’s Nobel win underscores essential role of translators as literary tastemakers

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Han Kang’s Nobel win underscores essential role of translators as literary tastemakers

By Mike Fu Oct. 11th, 2024

Han Kang’s eminence in the literary world was reaffirmed by the Swedish Academy’s announcement on Thursday that she will be conferred this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature.

Though she has been publishing in her native South Korea since the early 1990s, the 53-year-old Han was virtually unknown to Western readers until the English translation of “The Vegetarian” in 2016. Her meteoric rise since attests to the outsize influence that individual translators can exert on the literary world and a burgeoning global interest in East Asian storytelling.

Deborah Smith, the British translator of “The Vegetarian,” decided to learn Korean in 2009 on a lark. Freshly graduated from college, she found herself floundering in the wake of the global financial crisis and thought that learning a language would be “useful and enjoyable.” She chose Korean specifically because there was “barely anything available in English ... so the work had to be out there.”

A few years later, Smith encountered Han’s writing while pursuing a PhD in Korean literature. She won over an editor with her sample translation of “The Vegetarian,” which had been released in Korea in 2007. The book, Han’s first to appear in English, was published by Portobello Books in 2015 and received the International Booker Prize the following year.

Since then, three more of Han’s novels have appeared in English: “Human Acts” (2016), “The White Book” (2017) and “Greek Lessons” (2023), all of them translated by Smith, the last in partnership with Emily Yae Won. A fourth — “We Do Not Part,” translated by Yae Won and Paige Aniyah Morris — is scheduled to be released in January 2025.

“The Vegetarian” has now been translated into more than 30 languages. The author acknowledged that the dramatic increase in translated literature from Korea in recent years may be partially tied to her high-profile Booker win, but is also connected to the country’s soft power cachet in the film and music industries.

Smith founded Tilted Axis Press in 2015, a translation-focused publishing house that has put out works such as “Tokyo Ueno Station” by Yu Miri (translated by Morgan Giles), winner of the 2020 National Book Award, and “Love in the Big City” by Sang Young Park (translated by Anton Hur), an English-language debut that was longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize.

A person examines a stack of Han Kang's novels in English at a book store in Seoul. Translations of Han into English and other languages paved the way for her consideration by the Nobel Committee for Literature.

The impact of these titles, among others, demonstrates that literary translators are not simply advocates of individual authors and facilitators of cultural flow, but have the potential to be outright tastemakers for a worldwide literary audience.

For better or worse, the prevalence of English as a global lingua franca means that anglophone translators wield more power than their compatriots. Years before Smith’s translation drew worldwide attention, the Japanese edition of “The Vegetarian” by Kim Hoon-ah had been published as “Saishoku Shugisha,” in 2011. Kim had majored in Japanese literature at university and was motivated to translate from Korean to Japanese, in particular, when she discovered the lopsided nature of the literary flow between the two countries.

Han’s other essays, poetry and fiction appear in Japanese translations by Ayako Furukawa, Shunsaku Ide and Mariko Saito. Meanwhile, more than a dozen translations of “The Vegetarian” appeared following Han’s global debut via the International Booker Prize.

Han’s Nobel win marks the first time a Korean-language author has received this top accolade. She is only the fifth author (and first woman) from East Asia to be recognized, after Yasunari Kawabata and Kenzaburo Oe broke ground in the 20th century, followed by Chinese writers Gao Xingjian and Mo Yan.

As recently as Tuesday, Han had been given 33-to-1 odds on winning the Nobel Prize by a prominent U.K. betting outlet. Rumors were flying that Can Xue, an avant-garde Chinese writer whose sensibilities have been described as Kafkaesque, would clinch the prize.

Besides the Nobel, major industry accolades like the U.K.-based International Booker Prize and the United States’ National Book Award for Translated Literature also have a record of spotlighting East Asian authors in translation — including Bora Chung (translated by Anton Hur), Ge Fei (translated by Canaan Morse), Yoko Tawada (translated by Margaret Mitsutani) and Yang Shuang-zi (translated by Lin King) — on their shortlists.

These nominations and awards may represent a peak in a writer’s career, but one must not lose sight of the fact that Western institutions and judging committees would have no access to these literatures at all were it not for the painstaking effort of translators and the publishing houses that make space for them. The abysmal statistic of 3% — the proportion of new translations published annually in the anglophone sphere, an already tiny number that gets further parceled out across all languages and comes with a heavy European bias — means that every title is a leap of faith.

“The challenging task for any translator is to navigate through this dark tunnel of loss,” Han ruminated in a 2023 interview with the Booker Prize Foundation, regarding the impossibility of finding perfect commensurability between languages. But only by moving through this tunnel can one find communion, on the other side, with readers who would never be able to undertake the journey themselves.