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  • The night before

    Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith.

    I wrote this novel in the summer of 2009.

    On the 20th
    of January that year, the South Korean administration murdered evictees in Yongsan, central Seoul. In the course of a mass demonstration, a huge conflagration broke out and six people died in the flames. It was an illegal mass operation in which service workers (civilians) were employed. The day before the incident, police called these service workers inside the police line, which they were not legally supposed to cross, and sent them inside the building where the evictees had gathered. In the over eight hours that the service workers spent inside, they forced the evictees up onto the roof where they would be cut off, lit a fire on the stairs and sent the smoke up to the roof. Though several fire engines were sent out during this process, the service workers who had remained outside the building threatened to throw the firefighters out. Later, a firefighter who was present in the courtroom said in testimony, ‘even though we requested the police to collaborate, they did not accept our request, and each time we went back unable to extinguish the fire’. The fire broke out on the 20th
    January, as soon as police special forces were deployed onto the roof. The entire process was broadcast live via an internet news channel, and many people witnessed the moment of the fire breaking out. I was one of those people.

    After the incident, the incident itself became known as the ‘Yongsan Disaster’, and the site of the conflagration as ‘Namildang’. Families who had lost their loved ones and had the corpses taken from them by state bodies gathered at Namildang. They stood isolated there for over 300 days, demanding an apology from the government and the truth about the incident. Hundreds of police were constantly surrounding the building, cursing and attacking the bereaved families. There was also a court case centred on those who had died in the fire. In the case, the victim was the government authority and the assailants were the evictees. I attended the trial and wrote a five thousand word essay on it, titled ‘A Mouth That Eats A Mouth’ (this is the same as one of the chapter titles in One Hundred Shadows, but the content is different). Through the process of the trial, the circumstances of this disaster were revealed, in which money (capital) egged on evictees, service workers, and policemen to fight. Though the issue of who gave the order to suppress the evictees’ protest is extremely important, ‘no-one is the person who gave the order’ was the police executives’ consistent answer. The Lee Myung-bak government did not make public the 3000-page report investigating the police executives. The phrase ‘Yongsan disaster’ became a sensitive one for the duration of the Lee Myung-bak administration. Wherever you happened to be in the streets, if you were holding a picket with the words ‘Yongsan disaster’ written on it, a dozen police would rush over and encircle you.

    And yet, such wretched scenes do not appear in this novel. People who have died through great violence, burning buildings, smoke, people who cannot come away from the place where their father or husband had been at the last, the attacks and isolation that they would experience as everyday occurrences, are not mentioned in this novel.

    Over the course of the summer of 2009, I wrote One Hundred Shadows by day and at night I held a one-woman protest at Namildang. Because that place and the things that had happened there were so grim and miserable, I wanted to make something warm. It seemed at the time to be all that I could do. And so I wrote this story, and it became my first novel. There will be many readers who read it as a warm love story. Even in Korea, there were many readers who read it this way. But I was not constructing a love story while I was writing this novel. I thought of it as a novel about shadows. A story to do with despair and death and powerlessness, which, like shadows, exist universally throughout the human world. I thought that I had to write something in a place where people were crying every day, I wrote with the earnest wish for even a scant handful of warmth, and then, as I completed the final sentence and looked back at what I had written, I saw that it was love, that it was a song. I surprised even myself. Each time I am asked to talk about this novel, I find it difficult. And it is still more difficult to talk about it briefly. In general, I give two short answers: ‘One Hundred Shadows and ‘A Mouth That Eats A Mouth’ are twins with their backs to each other’, and ‘This book could also be titled The Night Before’. Before things at the electronics market come to a head, the way they did that night in Yongsan, seven years ago.

    One Hundred Shadows by Hwang Jungeun, translated by Jung Yewon, is published by Tilted Axis Press. Find out more and order the book here.

    PEN Presents helps literary translators to champion exciting books from around the world to be published in the UK. Submissions are now open for PEN Presents… East and South-east Asia. The deadline is Monday 5 December 2016.

  • How Korean it is

    If it’s a truism that translation is also and inevitably an act of interpretation, it can also be a misleading one. The translation doesn’t, or at least shouldn’t, produce an interpretation; rather, it needs to ensure that the multiple possibilities of the original are there for its new readers to find, while still leaving these readers space for their own interpretations, which will be shaped by cultural and political frameworks, but equally by individual experiences of both life and literature. The translator (like the editor, the cover designer, the publicist) has to tread a fine line, contextualising certain cultural particularities without being overly prescriptive as to how the book is read and understood.

    This is especially the case for a novel like The Vegetarian, Han Kang’s brutally poetic triptych of taboo and transgression. It’s not so much the main character Yeong-hye’s refusal to eat meat (though in South Korea this is still rare enough to be subversive in itself) as her refusal to explain herself which provokes such varied, and often violent, responses in those around her – a salaryman husband, a video artist brother-in-law, a dutiful older sister. By filtering her central character through these multiple lenses, Han allows Yeong-hye a radical passivity which challenges Eurocentric notions of what a ‘protagonist’ ought to be – precisely the notions which have long seen Korean literature criticised as ‘lacking agency’. Just as Yeong-hye acts as a vessel for her family’s own fears, preconceptions, and repressed desires, so too the book itself invites widely divergent interpretations as to its overall attitude and ‘meaning’ – between individuals, but also between cultures. But if this is part of the reason that The Vegetarian has already proved such a successful crosser of borders – having already been translated as far afield as Poland and Vietnam, Argentina and Portugal – it also poses certain challenges for the translator.

    How, then, at the same time as leaving room for this diversity of interpretation, to ensure that the translation gives English readers an experience as close as possible to that of the book’s original audience? Luckily, The Vegetarian gives the translator plenty of non-culture-specific features to be ‘faithful’ to. First was the considerable poetry of the writing – one of the distinctive features of Han’s prose, unsurprisingly so given that she’s also a published poet (and previously wrote on ‘My Literary Forms’ for PEN Atlas). It’s probably due to this double life that the mood of a given piece by her is always distilled for me into a specific image, which is a particularly useful thing for a translator to latch onto. In the case of The Vegetarian, originally published in South Korea as three separate novellas, each section of the triptych has its own distinct mood: clipped and matter-of-fact, a starched white shirt buttoned all the way to the top; fevered desire undercut with pathos, and experienced at one crucial remove; finally, bleached exhaustion, the blurred outlines of stark trees glimpsed through a grey wash of rain.

    But if this combination of style and tone forms a core that can hopefully ensure a unity of experience for readers otherwise separated by language, what about the diversity of interpretation? During the editing process, in which Han was a meticulous and humble participant, I learned about some of the ways the book had already been interpreted by translators into other languages. Some of these were fairly obvious – that Vietnamese publishers had felt the patriarchal family dynamic would form an easy point of identification for their market; or that the sexual content, unusually explicit for a South Korean novel, had been received as fairly sensational by that original audience (something which the director of the Korean film adaptation later played up in his promotional materials, much to Han’s chagrin – she felt that this focus on the sexual element was misleadingly reductive). Other readings were surprising and hadn’t occurred to me, though I could instantly see the logic behind them. When I was stuck on how to translate the epithet ‘May Priest’, in which ‘May’ refers to the May 1980 massacre in Han’s home city of Gwangju, Han wondered if the Polish translator’s choice of ‘Santa Maria’ might work for a UK audience. This led into a discussion of how a historically Catholic country like Poland would likely see Yeong-hye’s renunciation as a self-sacrificial mortification of the flesh, starving herself into some kind of near-religious and saintly ecstasy. Buddhism, on the other hand, which has deep roots in Korea and still flourishes there today, would see it as a quieter attempt at sloughing off the violence inherent in the human animal (without privileging her own interpretive framework over any other, Han mentioned to me during our discussion that she herself is a Buddhist).

    Our thoughts turned to how the book’s reception might differ in the UK, where, for example, readers would be unlikely to have an automatic appreciation of the rigid, Confucian hierarchy of social relations. As much as possible, I chose to retain the Korean practice of using relational titles (e.g. ‘my sister-in-law’s husband’, ‘Ji-woo’s mum’) rather than referring to people by their names. Given the surge of interest in feminism here in the UK, it seemed both inevitable and problematic that The Vegetarian would be seen as ‘representative’ of Korean women’s writing in particular – something Han experienced first-hand at last year’s London Book Fair, where she was lumped on an all-women panel discussing ‘Families and Relationships’ (the men got to talk about Politics and Art). A feminist reading will see Yeong-hye as a young woman asserting absolute control over her own body, a radical renunciation of the role South Korea’s conformist, patriarchal society has carved out for her. Which, of course, is no less right or wrong than any of the other possible interpretations, but which does run the risk of simplification, of reading the book as more of a socio-anthropological report than as literature. In the second section, where she allows her video-artist brother-in-law to paint flowers onto her body, Yeong-hye nevertheless seems to exert an uncanny power over this disturbed, fevered man. The question this invites – how far Yeong-hye is using those around her to effect her own transformation – is as troubling in its context of mental illness as it is in that of sexual politics; were more of Han’s work available in English, Anglophone readers would be more likely to read her explorations of desire and passivity as an exploration of the elision between artist and artwork. This elision could stem equally from her long-standing preoccupation with the figure of the artist and the nature of the artistic process as from her ‘Koreanness’ or gender.

    Of course, my translation choices have to respect the author’s intentions, and the gulf between how English and Korean work, which meant a lot of time spent finding syntactical/semantic options that would have the same effect, using a completely different feature of the original language. In the first section, for example, I chose to insert a number of adverbs (‘completely’, ‘naturally’, etc) that would hopefully make Yeong-hye’s husband sound both pedantic and self-exonerating, while the main challenge for the middle act was getting the sexual language right – not too purple, but not too clinical either. But my longest exchange with Han was prompted by the final page, where Yeong-hye’s older sister says to her ‘surely the dream isn’t all there is?’ Han was anxious that the speaker’s uncertainty comes through here, and I had to explain why, unlike in Korean, in English ‘surely’ gives the impression more of the speaker trying to convince herself than of any actual assurance.

    Above all, Han Kang wanted her book to provoke, to disturb, to ask questions that each reader will have to answer for themselves. I can only hope my translation does the same.

    The subject of the piece,  Han Kang, was born in Gwangju, South Korea, and moved to Seoul at the age of ten. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University. Her writing has won the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Today’s Young Artist Award, and the Korean Literature Novel Award. She currently teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. She has published collections of short stories including Love in Yeosu, A Yellow Patterned Eternity, and The Fruits of My Woman as well as novels including Your Cold Hand, Black Deer, Greek Lessons, and The Vegetarian.

  • My Literary Form(s)

    In the run-up to London Book Fair 2014, where Korea is the market focus, Han Kang writes about women that turn into plants, the intuitive process in choosing between prose and poetry, and what the future holds for her writing

    Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith

    In Spring 1997, I published a short story called “The Fruit of my Woman”. It was about a woman who starts to notice green blotches on her body, signalling that she is gradually becoming a plant, and about the man who lives with her, who ends up planting her in a pot on their balcony and watering her. She withers as winter sets in, disgorging a handful of tiny fruit. The story ends with the man clutching the fruit as he stares vacantly out from their balcony.

    Immediately after writing the story, I thought that I might like to return to this idea in the future. Rather than fleshing out a backstory, I wanted to write a longer work which would allow for variations on the theme, as in a piece of music. It wasn’t until I’d published two full-length novels, which I’d already been planning, that I was able to get started on what eventually became my third novel, The Vegetarian, published in 2007.

    The Vegetarian is made up of three parts, originally published in Korea as separate novellas; the first part is the one which shares a similar form to “The Fruit of My Woman”, in that it’s narrated from the husband’s point of view, with the voice of the protagonist, Yeong-hye, haunting the narrative in a series of monologues. But the tone and atmosphere are completely different. Unlike in “The Fruit of my Woman”, there are no paranormal events. The husband’s narration is chillingly matter-of-fact, and the nightmares which Yeong-hye’s monologues recount are particularly gruesome. Her hazardous attempt to ‘become vegetable – a pure being’ in order to vomit out ‘the violence of flesh/the human’ is constantly misunderstood as it progresses towards destruction. By the third part, “Flaming Trees”, Yeong-hye is refusing all food other than meat, believing that she is turning into a plant. The trees appear to blaze up like fireworks as the ambulance rushes her to the general hospital, in an agonising variation of the conclusion to “The Fruit of my Woman” – the withering of the tree-woman as winter approaches.

    The novel took me three slow years to write. In the final year, when I wrote “Flaming Trees”, I also wrote a lot of poetry. In-hye, who watches over her younger sister Yeong-hye in “Flaming Trees”, is having trouble sleeping, disturbed by a recurring dream. In this dream she is standing in front of the mirror. Blood runs from the reflection of her eye. She raises her hand to wipe the blood away, but her reflected self remains stock-still, and the eye carries on bleeding. That year, thinking of those suffering sisters, I wrote a seven-poem cycle called “Bleeding Eye”. I also wrote several poems featuring plant imagery.

    In this way, for me, poetry, short stories and novels are all closely intertwined.  So far, I’ve published three short story collections and five novels. Last year, my first poetry collection came out. Out of the hundred-plus poems I’d written, I chose sixty, and arranged them into five sections; I was able discern a similar feeling uniting those poems written while I was also writing a particular novel. Of course, these poems are independent from prose fiction, but they had undoubtedly been influenced by the questions and emotions that I’d lived with, the images that had absorbed me, while I was writing my novels.

    I’m sometimes asked about the difference between writing poetry, short stories, and novels. I’ll usually also be asked what makes me choose a given form. This process is extremely personal and intuitive, and so it isn’t easy to clarify – the only thing I can say with any certainty is that the most obvious difference is that of time. You need at least a week when writing a short story, twenty days at most, whereas if you want to write a novel you’ll need over a year (my fourth novel took me four and a half years to complete). Poetry, by contrast, can be written in a very short amount of time. Of course, some poems end up nagging away at you for quite some time, but this can’t be compared with the labour-intensive work of producing a novel, which involves a strict routine of writing a fixed amount every day.

    Selecting which form to use is a slightly more complex issue. When I write a novel I focus on internal questions. Questions are what motivates me to write; if I want take those questions as far as they can go, to see them through to the end, I need the novel’s tenacity. On the other hand, the idea for a short story will come to me as a single scene. I start to write and when I arrive at that scene, the one that gave me the idea in the first place, I know the story has come to its natural conclusion. A poem’s deepest connection is to language. It will come to me as a single line, which usually forms the beginning of the poem, but sometimes ends up in the middle or at the end. These intuitive flashes find their way to me whenever I’m unwell, or have to move house, when the flow of my life is interrupted by the trivial or significant. The year when I wrote the most poetry was the year when I felt most insecure. I wasn’t sleeping properly, didn’t have the concentration necessary for prose, and lines of poetry kept running around in my head. These eventually morphed into a play, so one afternoon I picked up my pen and turned it into a verse drama. The play would take an hour to read or perform, but took five hours to set down because I was limited by the speed of physical writing. Once I’d managed to drag that slow parade of images out of my head and onto paper I was utterly exhausted, but I also felt that I’d finally turned a corner.

    I first published poetry and short stories when I was twenty three. Now that twenty years have flown by, I’m moving forwards slowly but surely, trying to maintain a precarious balance between everyday life and writing. Now, while putting the final touches to my sixth novel, to be published in June, I’m also taking notes of ideas for short stories so I can get started on them in the summer, and of the next novel, which I’ll begin in autumn. Sometimes poetry demands to be written, and brings other work to a halt to create a breathing space for itself.

    Now and then I feel that I have nothing to fear, since, whatever the circumstances, I still somehow manage to write. Even when I find myself struggling, the agony of being unable to write will cleave open a fissure in life which I can then infiltrate. A new form, a new language, will be waiting there for me to grasp. And I do know now that this is neither optimism, or pride.

    About the translator

    Deborah Smith (@londonkoreanist) is an early-career translator of Korean literature, with The Vegetarian by Han Kang forthcoming from Portobello Books. She has received translation grants from the International Communication Foundation, and LTI Korea (forTheEssayist’s Desk by Bae Suah). English PEN funded her sample translation of Hwang Sok-Yong’s Princess Bari. She is currently studying for a PhD in contemporary Korean literature at SOAS.

  • The suffering healers

    Ahead of his appearances with English PEN at the Free Word Centre and London Book Fair 2014, Hwang Sok-Yong takes us into the shamanistic past of Korean culture, and how those creation stories can be used to write about globalisation and modern suffering

    Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith

    For many hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years, the structure and content of a shaman ritual, which helps the passage of the souls of the dead from this world to the next, has been passed down from generation to generation, retaining a remarkably similar form given the time span involved. This exorcism tradition, generically known as
    Hwangch’ŏn Muga (‘Shaman Songs of the Underworld’), includes 47 oral sub-stories 
    relating specifically to ‘Princess Bari’, a shaman narrative that has been recited across the Korean peninsula with very little local variation. Much like the Greek Myth of Odysseus and the Scandinavian tales of Odin, the plot is structured around a journey to the world of the dead, undertaken in order to rescue one of the souls there. Shamans, who are female in Korean culture, consider ‘Bari’ as their foundation myth, referring to ‘Grandma Bari’ as the original ancestor of all Korean shamans. They themselves are uncertain as to why the ‘Bari’ narrative came to be included in all exorcism rituals, but it seems that through recounting the sufferings and ordeals experienced by Bari, their progenitor, shamans have been able to claim for themselves her position as a ‘suffering healer of sufferings’, one who solves various ordeals while undergoing them herself.

    Together with my previous novels
    The Guest and
    Shim Chong,
    Princess Bari presents a reality which is recognisably that of our present world using a distinctively Korean form and narrative. If the period from the fall of the Berlin wall to the beginning of the Bush administration saw the beginnings of globalisation, 9/11 was the turning point after which a more openly enforced American unilateralism led to an increase in globalisation’s reach and intensity. Now, its effects can be clearly felt not only in Korea, but in every country, resulting in polarisation between nations.

    After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, North Korea suffered a famine which lasted for more than ten years, peaking as the period in the late 1990s known as the ‘Arduous March’. According to a UN survey, as many as three and a half million people may have died from starvation and the side effects of malnutrition between 1994 and 1998. Meanwhile in South Korea, only a very short distance away, we had everything in abundance. While recognising the responsibility of the North Korean government and seeking to call them to account, I also repeatedly criticised the hypocritical human rights logic of the Big Powers who instituted and subsequently managed the division of Korea into North and South, with other Communist countries previously supplying the former, and US troops still stationed in the latter. The reality of life in  North Korea has been obscured by ideological arguments and strategic preparations for the (highly unlikely) possibility of a ‘North Korean collapse’. Many aspects of the situation have been widely forgotten, or else used solely in propaganda intended to vilify the North Korean regime’s anti-humanitarianism. Every victim, every refugee in today’s world, must pass through the new ‘hell’ that has been brought about by the dark side of globalisation.

    For me, constructing a story overlaying the ‘movement through hell’ of present-day refugees with that of the Korean shaman myth ‘Princess Bari’ is a very symbolic act. Bari goes to the ends of the earth searching for the ‘water of life’, posing questions like: how, in this 21
    st
    century global village of dissolution, hatred and death, can we discover the road which leads to life? what is the real meaning of this ‘water of life’? How could a modern-day Bari go about finding such a thing? These questions were the seeds for
    Princess Bari. 

  • Capturing the mood

    In translating literature into English, tone and flow are everything. The right tone will capture the author’s intent and voice, magically transporting the reader into a different world created by the novelist. A not-quite-right tone makes the reading experience much like listening to a CD that keeps skipping— the reader will be pulled out of the story, unable to inhabit the fictional world the way she might if she were reading the original.

    As a translator from the Korean, I am constantly on guard against that reaction and therefore take very seriously the task of landing on the right tone. It can be challenging to capture, particularly when the author or narrator’s voice is so different from my own. To put myself in the right frame of mind, I read widely in English when I take on a new project. To translate a satirical, postmodern novel, I read several such English novels; when working on a novel about a poet and his poetry, I read various volumes of poetry. This ritual isn’t so much to gain direct inspiration, but rather to energize me, the way one might listen to upbeat music while jogging.

    I’ve translated many novels with alienated, lonely male characters, who often express their disillusion with life through destructive behavior I don’t relate to or talk in ways that feel foreign to me. In these cases, I pay particular attention to the way men of a certain age and epoch speak in movies, novels, and in life. Dialogue is revised and edited again, as I poll acquaintances, friends, and colleagues to craft an authentic voice. For example, in one project, a character is a middle-aged former baseball player, and to properly render the way he thinks about his past career and talks shop with a buddy, I read articles and blog posts about baseball to get a feel for the way people discuss the game, and asked baseball fanatics around me for their opinions on how they would talk about certain aspects of the sport. Little touches like these go unnoticed when done well, but are glaring when done poorly; they contribute greatly to the overall tone of the book.

    Using these methods, I have embodied the voice of a middle-aged North Korean spy, a guilt-ridden writer despairing at the loss of her mother, a 1940s Japanese prison guard, a coddled but neglected ten-year-old girl who feels like an outsider, a murderous sociopath, and an autistic math whiz.

    The most challenging, however, wasn’t any of these characters, but a hen named Sprout. In The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly by Sun-mi Hwang, recently published in both the US and the UK, the feisty, spunky, independent-minded hen, yearning to leave the battery cage to lay and hatch an egg, charts her own course, refusing to settle for anything less than the life she has in mind for herself. The author’s writing is spare and charged with emotion, and I wanted to convey that while keeping the prose elegant.

    As I read classic and modern-day fables, I went through several versions of the manuscript, editing, discarding, and reworking to get to the right tone. In one of my early drafts, I had rendered a passage this way:

    Sprout slowed down to match the baby’s gait. The female ducks fell back unwillingly. ‘The weasel, that terrifying hunter! I’m scared. And I hate him. He took everything precious to me. I wish I were stronger than the weasel so I could get revenge!’ It was a foolish thought. Revenge? Just thinking about living in the wide-open fields was enough to make her cry. But she didn’t, closing her beak firmly.

    Although more literally translated, the hen’s thoughts in single quotes were jarring in English. Eventually, I decided to do away with the single quotes throughout the text while retaining Sprout’s feelings and thoughts. In the end, I ended up with the passage below:

    Sprout slowed down to match Baby’s gait. The female ducks fell back unwillingly. Sprout felt surging hatred toward the weasel. He’d taken every precious being. She wanted to be stronger than the weasel to get revenge. But she knew it was foolish. Revenge? Just thinking about living in the wide-open fields again was enough to make her cry. But she held her tears at bay and set her beak.

    In the second version, Sprout’s fear and gumption are still on display, but the text reads more fluidly, encapsulating the mood of the novel more effectively. As this novel is a fable, I wanted to convey the deeper meaning while keeping to the lean style of writing. It was surprising how difficult this proved to be, but it is because works with more complex sentence and narrative structures that seem more difficult at first glance allow for a wider choice of words. My goal for every translation I do is to recreate the mood of the original novel—in this one, to transport the English language reader into Sun-mi Hwang’s universe of brave, singular animals.

    • Sun-mi Hwang  is speaking at the Cambridge Literature Festival at 10am on Sunday April 6th, in the Lightfoot Room at the Divinity School,  St John’s College, St John’s Street, Cambridge, as well as at the English PEN Literary Salon, at the London Book Fair, Earls Court, at 11.30 on Weds April 9th, all as part of the British Council Cultural Programme.
    • Please see here to buy the book The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly.
    • Please see here for an interview with Sun-Mi Hwang, author of The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly.