Max Kim, Los Angeles Occasions (TNS)
SEOUL, South Korea — You’d be exhausting pressed to seek out anybody right here who had anticipated that Han Kang can be awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in literature, the world’s highest literary honor.
Though the South Korean novelist had already tallied up plenty of different prestigious worldwide accolades and is broadly learn right here, she is 53, and the award historically favors writers within the twilight of their careers.
“I thought that she might win it one day, but I didn’t expect it to be so soon,” stated Jeong Kwa-ri, a literary critic and former professor of Korean literature at Yonsei College, Han’s alma mater. “Most of the South Korean writers who have been seen as top contenders are in their 70s and 80s.”
Acknowledged final week by the Swedish Academy “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life,” Han is the primary Asian lady to win the literature Nobel in its 123-year-old historical past and the second South Korean Nobel laureate. Then-President Kim Dae-jung was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000 for his diplomacy with North Korea.
Han has stored a low profile following the win, reportedly refusing a celebration her father deliberate, citing the wars nonetheless raging in Gaza and Ukraine. However the remainder of the nation has been abuzz with “Han Kang Syndrome.”
Salespeople show books by South Korean writer Han Kang, who gained the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, at a bookstore in Seoul on Oct. 11, 2024. From the president to Ok-pop megastars BTS, South Korea erupted into celebration on Oct. 10, after “The Vegetarian” writer Han Kang gained the nation’s first Nobel Prize for literature. (Jung Yeon-Je/AFP through Getty Pictures/TNS)
As of Tuesday, the nation’s e book retailers have reported greater than 800,000 gross sales of Han’s works and anticipate to hit the 1 million mark by the top of the week. Shops, coping with lengthy traces, are quickly promoting out, and printing presses have been working across the clock to provide extra.
Han, who was born in 1970 within the metropolis of Gwangju, comes from a literary household. Her father is Han Sung-won, a well-known novelist who has cheerfully famous that his daughter’s stature has eclipsed his personal.
“It used to be that Han Kang was known as Han Sung-won’s daughter, but now I’ve become Han Sung-won, the father of Han Kang,” he stated in an interview in 2016.
Lots of Han’s novels are intimate portraits of violence inflicted on peculiar lives, spanning each South Korea’s lengthy historical past of authoritarian rule and the feminist struggles of the current.
Amongst her best-known works in South Korea is “Human Acts,” a novel in regards to the Chun Doo-hwan army dictatorship’s bloodbath of civilians in 1980 following pro-democracy protests within the metropolis of Gwangju.
A person exhibits a e book of South Korean writer Han Kang at a bookstore in Seoul on Oct. 11, 2024, after she was introduced because the laureate of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature. From the president to Ok-pop megastars BTS, South Korea erupted into celebration on Oct. 10, after “The Vegetarian” writer Han Kang gained the nation’s first Nobel Prize for literature. (Jung Yeon-Je/AFP through Getty Pictures/TNS)
Public debate in regards to the bloodbath has lengthy been an irritant for South Korean conservatives, who’ve at instances sought to downplay the federal government’s function or promoted conspiracy theories that the protests had been an act of North Korean subterfuge.
Underneath the conservative administration of former President Park Geun-hye, the daughter of one other army dictator, Han was positioned on a blacklist in 2014, barring her from receiving authorities assist, together with different creatives deemed to be ideologically undesirable.
Instructed by a number of views, “Human Acts” attracts inspiration from real-life figures, together with Moon Jae-hak, a highschool pupil who was shot to dying by junta forces deployed to Gwangju.
“I was so happy that I thought my heart would stop,” Kim Kil-ja, Moon’s mom, stated of Han’s Nobel in an interview with native media. “Her book has managed to spread the truth about the incident to the world.”
Han’s personal advice for these simply diving into her work is “We Do Not Part,” a novel that explores a civilian bloodbath the South Korean authorities dedicated on the island of Jeju in 1948, a interval of anti-communist paranoia. The English translation of the novel, which gained France’s Prix Médicis award final 12 months, is due in January 2025.
However essentially the most well-known — and infamous — of Han’s oeuvre is “The Vegetarian,” a darkly surreal story a couple of lady who spirals into insanity after vowing to surrender meat. Lauded as a parable about feminine resistance in opposition to patriarchal South Korean society, the novel gained the 2016 Man Booker Worldwide Prize, an honor shared by Han and her British translator, Deborah Smith.
However the award positioned the e book on the heart of a fierce debate about literary translations. Critics stated the award-winning English translation by Smith, who had solely began studying Korean just a few years earlier, not solely dedicated primary errors — corresponding to complicated the Korean phrase for “foot” with “arm” — however altered the textual content far past the appropriate parameters of translation.
“Translations of Korean literature have long suffered from many obstacles, with more ‘pure’ translations failing to find success,” Jeong, the literary critic, stated.
The query has lengthy preoccupied the nation’s literary scene, which has watched South Korea’s movie and tv industries produce worldwide hits like “Parasite” or “Squid Game” whereas questioning why South Korean books have didn’t seize the identical stage of world curiosity.
“As a result of that, there has been an increasing tendency in translation to overlook disfigurations of the original text in favor of conforming to foreign readers’ tastes,” Jeong stated. “‘The Vegetarian’ is a prime example of that.”
Writing for The Occasions in 2016, Charse Yun, a Korean American literary translator, acknowledged Smith’s “exquisite” sentences however stated that the interpretation had “morphed into a ‘new creation.’”
“I find it hard to come up with an adequate analogy, but imagine the plain, contemporary style of Raymond Carver being garnished with the elaborate diction of Charles Dickens,” he wrote.
Defending her work in an essay for the Los Angeles Evaluate of Books in 2018, Smith, who has translated two extra of Han’s books, argued that, given the variations in any two languages, “there can be no such thing as a translation that is not ‘creative.’”
For a lot of critics, the interpretation query continues to be an open one. However for higher or worse, Han’s newest and most prestigious honor has now cemented the playbook for Korean literature’s international success.
Regardless of his doubts about Smith’s translation, Yun at the moment sees loads of causes to be optimistic.
“The field was greatly opened and more people were able to access Korean literature,” Yun stated of Han’s international rise.
“I’m just happy for my former students and other talented translators out there that now have an opportunity to bring other Korean voices to the field.”
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