In response, Yeong-hye slits her wrist as the entire family watches in horror. (More than three hundred thousand Koreans served alongside American soldiers in that conflict.) During a family meal, orchestrated as an intervention of sorts, he attempts to shove a piece of sweet-and-sour pork down his daughter’s throat. Yeong-hye’s decision not to eat meat is received as an appalling rebuke by her entire family, especially her father, a Vietnam War veteran whose violent tendencies suggest the traumas of the battlefield.
Her muted non-reaction evokes, for him, images from Korea’s past as an occupied nation: it is “as though she were a ‘comfort woman’ dragged in against her will, and I was the Japanese soldier demanding her services.” Eventually, he is aroused by her insolence, and he begins to force himself on her. someone who puts food on the table and keeps the house in good order.” Now he feels embarrassed and betrayed.
She has become a vegetarian, she tells him, because she “had a dream.” Before, he could think of his wife “as a stranger . . . Cheong finds his wife discarding the meat in their refrigerator. She refuses to wear them, even in public, even in front of her husband’s friends, even though, he says, she doesn’t have the sort of “shapely breasts which might suit the ‘no-bra look.’ ” He considers this shameful. Cheong does find remarkable about her: she hates wearing bras-she says they squeeze her breasts. “The passive personality of this woman in whom I could detect neither freshness nor charm, or anything especially refined, suited me down to the ground,” he says. Cheong, who has “always inclined to the middle course in life,” this is part of her appeal. Cheong, as “completely unremarkable in every way.” For Mr. That body belongs to a housewife named Yeong-hye, who is described by her husband, Mr. It centers on the vivid self-destruction of a single human body. “The Vegetarian” (Hogarth) is fable-like in structure. But if her success depended on mistranslation, how much had really got through? Han Kang seemed to fill that void-or begin to, at least. But few works of Korean literature have had any success in the English-speaking world, and the country, despite its frequent presence in American headlines, does not register in the popular imagination the way that its larger neighbors China and Japan do. Korea has a rich and varied literary tradition-and a recent history that is intimately entangled with that of the West, particularly the U.S. This isn’t, in Yun’s view, a matter merely of accuracy but also of cultural legibility. “This doesn’t just happen once or twice, but on virtually every other page.” It’s as though Raymond Carver had been made to sound like Charles Dickens, he adds. (The article extended an argument that Yun had first made, in July, in the online magazine Korea Exposé.) “Smith amplifies Han’s spare, quiet style and embellishes it with adverbs, superlatives and other emphatic word choices that are nowhere in the original,” Yun writes.
The controversy reached many American readers in September of last year, when the Los Angeles Times published a piece by Charse Yun, a Korean-American who has taught courses in translation in Seoul. Though Han had read and approved the translation, Huffington Post Korea asserted that it was completely “off the mark.” Smith defended herself at the Seoul International Book Fair, saying, “I would only permit myself an infidelity for the sake of a greater fidelity.” In the Korean media, however, the sense of national pride that attended Han’s win-not to mention the twentyfold spike in printed copies of the book, which was a fairly modest success upon its initial publication, in 2007-was soon overshadowed by charges of mistranslation. student who had begun learning Korean just six years earlier, was praised widely for her work. In the English-speaking world, Smith, at the time a twenty-eight-year-old Ph.D. In 2016, “The Vegetarian” became the first Korean-language novel to win the Man Booker International Prize, which was awarded to both its author, Han Kang, and its translator, Deborah Smith. “Translation is a more advanced stage of civilization,” Borges insisted-or, depending on the translation you come across, “a more advanced stage of writing.” (He wrote the line in French, one of several languages he knew.) How literal must a literary translation be? Nabokov, who was fluent in three languages and wrote in two of them, believed that “the clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.” Borges, on the other hand, maintained that a translator should seek not to copy a text but to transform and enrich it. Photograph by Park Sung Jin for The New Yorker Korean critics have lamented the supposed overreach of Han’s English translator.
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