CANR
WORK TITLE: Greek Lessons
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NATIONALITY: Korean
LAST VOLUME: CA 392
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PERSONAL
Born November 27, 1970, in Gwangju, South Korea; daughter of Han Seung-won (a writer); divorced Hong Yong-hee (a literary critic); children: one son.
EDUCATION:Graduated from Yonsei University; studied at University of Iowa International Writing Program.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, poet, and musician. Seoul Institute of the Arts, Seoul, South Korea, professor, 2013-18; has also run a bookstore, until 2024.
MEMBER:Royal Society of Literature International Writer.
AWARDS:Winner, Seoul Shinmun spring literary contest, 1994, for “Red Anchor”; Hankook Ilbo Excellent Writer’s Award, 1995; winner, Korean Novel Award, 1999, for the novella Baby Buddha; Today’s Young Artist Award, Ministry of Culture and Tourism, 2000; Yi Sang Literary Award Grand Prize, 2005; Dong-ni Literary Award, 2010, for Breath Fighting; Manhae Literary Prize, 2014, and Malaparte Prize, 2017, both for Human Acts; Hwang Sun-won Literary Award, 2015; Man Booker International Prize, 2016, Malaparte Prize, 2017, and San Clemete Prize, 2019, all for The Vegetarian; Prix Médicis étranger, 2023; Nobel Prize in Literature, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 2024; Émile Guimet Prize for Asian Literature, 2024, for We Do Not Part.
WRITINGS
Also author of novels and prose, including Geom–eun saseum, 1998, Nae yŏja ŭi yŏlmae, 2000, Geudae–ui chagaun son, 2002, Param i punda, kara, 2010, Hoebok hanŭn in’gan, 2013, and Kŏmŭn sasǔm, 2017, author of story collections, including Yeosu–ui sarang, 1995, Bulgeun kkot iyagi, 2003, Cheondung kkoma seonnyeo beongae kkoma seonnyeo, 2007, Nunmul sangja, 2008, Norang munŭi yŏngwŏn, 2012, Yŏsu ŭi sarang, 2012, and Nae yŏja ŭi yŏlmae, 2018; author of essay collections, including Sarang–gwa, sarang–eul dulleossan geotdeul, 2003, and Gamangaman bureuneun norae, 2007; and author of poetry collections, including Sŏrap e chŏnyŏk ŭl nŏŏ tuŏtta, 2013. Contributor to Literature and Society.
Baby Buddha and The Vegetarian have been adapted for film.
SIDELIGHTS
Han Kang is a Korean writer, musician, and poet. The daughter of novelist Han Seung-won, she graduated from Yonsei University and additionally studied at the University of Iowa International Writing Program. Han is the recipient of numerous literary awards and honors, including the 1999 Korean Novel Award, the South Korean Ministry of Culture and Tourism’s Today’s Young Artist Award, the Dong-ni Literary Award, the Manhae Literary Prize, the Hwang Sun-won Literary Award, and the Man Booker International Prize. In 2024, Han was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel committee praised her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” She is the first South Korean winner of the prize.
In an article in the Guardian, Han talked briefly about her writing style. “My way of writing sentences corresponds with my lifestyle: it’s very controlled.” Han’s writing often focuses on a sense of loss, trauma, and violent conflict. In an article in the Yale Review, Yung In Chae reasoned that “Han Kang’s writing, her triumph, shows that histories of trauma from Gwangju to Gaza do not belong in the shadows. They belong to the world of literature. They belong to world literature.”
The Vegetarian
Han first published the novel Nae yoja ui yolmae in 2000. In 2015 it was translated by Deborah Smith and released as The Vegetarian. The novel won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. Divided into the sections, the story centers on Yeong-hye, who lives an unremarkable life with her family. After a gruesome dream, she declares herself a vegetarian and discards all the meat from the refrigerator. Her family is dismayed and worried for her as she begins a transformation into a totally new person.
Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Porochista Khakpour commented that “Han’s glorious treatments of agency, personal choice, submission and subversion find form in the parable. There is something about short literary forms—this novel is under 200 pages—in which the allegorical and the violent gain special potency from their small packages. The Vegetarian feels related to slender works as diverse as Ceridwen Dovey’s 2007 novella Blood Kin and Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener.” Reviewing the novel in the Independent, Julia Pascal suggested that “Han Kang is well served by Deborah Smith’s subtle translation in this disturbing book.” In a review in Slate Web site, Laura Miller mentioned that the novel “has an eerie universality that gets under your skin and stays put irrespective of nation or gender. But exactly what its business is there, I would not presume to say.”
Human Acts
In 2015 Han published the novel Sonyon i onda, which was introduced and translated into English again by Smith and published as Human Acts. At the heart of the novel is the 1980 Gwangju Uprising in South Korea and the way it has impacted many across time. Fifteen-year-old Dong-ho searches for his missing friend and is ultimately shot dead by soldiers. Subsequent chapters are narrated by those close to him, offering a rippling effect of how the uprising impacted individuals and families.
Interviewing Han in the White Review, Sarah Shin asked Han to explain her choice of using the second-person perspective. Han noted that “the second-person ‘you’ is a single person addressed by an ‘I’ who is themselves different from a third-person narrator. Through this calling out, ‘you’ comes into being in the time and space which ‘I’ inhabits.” Han continued: “Though the fifteen-year-old boy Dong-ho could not make it through May 1980, continued invocation can make him appear here, breaking the surface of the darkness and permeating the present. And so, Dong-ho is invoked and remembered by a continuous series of narrators, a different character for each chapter, which themselves present discrete slices of time, and eventually, after more than thirty years have gone by, he steps into our present.”
Reviewing the novel in the Guardian, Eimear McBride recorded that in “choosing the novel as her form, then allowing it to do what it does best—take readers to the very centre of a life that is not their own—Han prepares us for one of the most important questions of our times: ‘What is humanity? What do we have to do to keep humanity as one thing and not another?’ She never answers, but this act of unflinching witness seems as good a place to start as any.” In a review in the Independent, Arifa Akbar noted that “if it hopes to tie the personal with the political, it does the former so much more powerfully. … It is because Han does the personal so exquisitely that we end up wishing for less of the big political picture that takes us outside of her beautifully drawn interior worlds.” Writing in the Telegraph, Jonathan McAloon observed that “many of the sections in the book are told in the second person, which works well in Deborah Smith’s English rendering. Eventually we realise this is because it is relating a conversation of which we rarely hear both sides: the living talking to the dead, and the dead speaking back.”
Writing in the Financial Times, Francesca Wade recalled that “torture, one character suggests, is designed to ‘prove to you that you are nothing but filthy stinking bodies. That you are no better than the carcasses of starving animals’. As he ponders whether humankind is fundamentally cruel, his painful memories render the novel’s title ironic: there is a stark absence of humanity in these all-too-human acts. Like The Vegetarian, Human Acts portrays people whose self-determination is under threat from terrifying external forces; it is a sobering meditation on what it means to be human.” In a review in the Irish Times, Eileen Battersby opined that “Human Acts is an important novel, moving and heartbreaking in its dignity. It is also not particularly accomplished or coherent. Sometimes, though, that really doesn’t matter.”
The White Book
(open new)In the novel The White Book, a nameless narrator is at a writing residency. She associates her inner pain with the color white, using it to access these feelings in her thoughts and writings. In particular, she reminisces on the loss of her older sister. She considers the ephemerality of life, linking it to snowfall. While digging deep on these feelings, she constructs a story on how grief is ever present and the various ways the world manifests around each person differently.
Writing in New York Times Book Review, Katie Kitamura stated: “Among other things, The White Book is an urgent plea for the ritual power of mourning—for its significance in terms of both personal and historical restitution.” Kitamura remarked that “Han explores occupation in multiple forms and contexts, from the Japanese occupation to political demonstrations, always tracing the ‘radioactive spread’ of trauma. But she also makes a case for empathy, one that recognizes both its power and its limitations.” In a review in the New Statesman, Megan Walsh reasoned that “The White Book is about trying to part with the burden of being alive because someone else has died. Han’s non-linear, disembodied prose is the perfect medium wherein the sisters can coexist.” Walsh determined that “the tragedy—and consolation—is that we are all as coloured by the greener grass of a life unlived as we are by the one we are living.” Reviewing the novel in Spectator, Claire Kohda Hazelton lauded that “this is a breathtakingly beautiful, compassionate, open, moving book. It is immensely special. In its pages are evidence of a true genius.” A contributor to the Economist said that the author “has fashioned a winter book made up of beautiful, tantalising fragments. Its snow-crystals of prose settle into an eerily moving sequence of meditations on destruction, bereavement and rebirth.” The same critic pointed out that Deborah Smith’s translated the novel “with exquisite craft and tact.”
Greek Lessons and We Do Not Part
With Greek Lessons, a young woman loses her ability to speak while in her Greek language class in Seoul. The teacher, in turn, begins losing his sight while also falling for his student. As they get to know each other, they realize that both are plagued by deep pain. She recently lost her mother and a court case for custody of her nine-year-old son. He grew up in Korea and Germany and fears losing his independence by being divided between his loyalties to both places. Despite their anguish, they find unity in their suffering.
In a review in Publishers Weekly, Elina Alter stated: “Centered on one woman’s attempt to accomplish something existentially important, Greek Lessons is in some ways a thematic complement to Han’s other works, which tend to follow characters, often women, compelled to moral acts that people around them find unintelligible and threatening. The resulting conflicts are often violent, and characters not infrequently harm themselves.” Alter later mentioned that “the characters’ search for consolation—through philosophy, psychiatry, poetry, linguistics–carries them beyond language, toward touch. Finally alone together, they are ‘at once joined and eternally sundered’—a description that would have pleased Rilke, who thought of love as two bordering solitudes.”
A contributor to the Economist opined that “Han’s style creates mystery, yet snippets of back story gradually make things clearer.” The same reviewer noted that “Han uses the characters’ problems as a metaphor for the inadequacy of language in general.” Writing in New York Times Book Review, Idra Novey pointed out that “ample evidence emerges in this novel of the psychologically messier, more complex books Han is known for in the English-speaking world. In addition to her incisive writing about bodily responses to language, Greek Lessons contains some exceptionally poignant scenes about a mother’s growing estrangement from her child.” Novey reasoned that “this novel is a celebration of the ineffable trust to be found in sharing language, whether between parent and child, teacher and student, or between words spoken aloud and those traced, painstakingly, with a finger on someone else’s waiting palm.”
We Do Not Part is the first novel Han published since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. Here she returns to discuss South Korea’s bloody modern history. Kyungha narrates the story but does so without a firm grasp on what is real and what is not. She obsesses over writing a new will despite not having unpacked since moving into a new apartment in Seoul. She receives a message from her friend Inseon, who has been hospitalized. Inseon wishes for her to go to her home on Jeju Island to take care of her bird while she is in the hospital. Kyungha pushes through a snowstorm to get to the bird before it runs out of water and dies while considering the bleak history of the region. A Kirkus Reviews contributor claimed that “this is a mysterious book that resists easy interpretation, but it’s clearly addressing the violent legacies of the past.”(close new)
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Asian Review of Books, April 26, 2016, Rosie Milne, review of Human Acts.
Booklist, February 15, 2016, Biz Hyzy, review of The Vegetarian, p. 28.
Brooklyn Rail, May 1, 2023, Cat Woods, review of Greek Lessons, p. 98.
Economist, November 11, 2017, review of The White Book; April 19, 2023, review of Greek Lessons.
Financial Times, December 30, 2015, Francesca Wade, review of Human Acts.
Guardian (London, England), January 24, 2015, Daniel Hahn, review of The Vegetarian; February 5, 2016, Claire Armitstead, “Han Kang”; February 13, 2016, Eimear McBride, review of Human Acts.
Independent (London, England), January 10, 2015, Julia Pascal, review of The Vegetarian; December 30, 2015, Arifa Akbar, review of Human Acts.
Irish Times, January 30, 2016, Eileen Battersby, review of Human Acts.
Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 2015, review of The Vegetarian; December 1, 2024, review of We Do Not Part.
National (Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates), January 14, 2016, Lucy Scholes, review of Human Acts.
New Internationalist, January 1, 2016, Jo Lateu, review of Human Acts, p. 42.
New Statesman, February 20, 2015, Joanna Walsh, review of The Vegetarian, p. 51; January 22, 2016, Jane Shilling, review of Human Acts, p. 49; January 5, 2018, Megan Walsh, review of The White Book, p. 42.
New York Times Book Review, February 2, 2016, Porochista Khakpour, review of The Vegetarian; February 2, 2016, Alexandra Alter, review of The Vegetarian; May 17, 2016, Alexandra Alter, “Han Kang Wins Man Booker International Prize for Fiction with The Vegetarian;” March 3, 2019, Katie Kitamura, review of The White Book, p. 8; April 23, 2023, Idra Novey, review of Greek Lessons, p. 8.
Publishers Weekly, October 26, 2015, Gabe Habash, review of The Vegetarian, p. 50; March 13, 2023, Elina Alter, “Language Barriers,” p. 29.
Spectator, December 2, 2017, Claire Kohda Hazelton, review of The White Book, p. 33; May 6, 2023, Francesca Peacock, review of Greek Lessons, p. 37.
Telegraph (London, England), January 5, 2016, Jonathan McAloon, review of Human Acts.
Washington Post Book World, January 20, 2016, Lisa Zeidner, review of The Vegetarian.
White Review, March 1, 2016, Sarah Shin, author interview.
ONLINE
BBC News, https://www.bbc.com/ (October 10, 2024), Annabel Rackham, “South Korea’s Han Kang wins Nobel Literature Prize.”
Booker Prizes website, https://thebookerprizes.com/ (July 28, 2023), author interview.
Daily Northwestern, https://dailynorthwestern.com/ (November 12, 2024), Alice Oh, “Han Kang Is First South Korean Writer to Win 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature with The Vegetarian.”
Flavorwire, http://flavorwire.com/ (May 17, 2016), Jonathon Sturgeon, “Han Kang’s The Vegetarian Deserves Its 2016 Man Booker International Prize for Fiction.”
Han Kang website, https://han-kang.net (December 29, 2024).
Korea JoongAng Daily, https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/ (December 7, 2024), Lee Jian, “Truths Will Be Spoken.”
Nobel Prize website, https://www.nobelprize.org/ (December 29, 2024), author profile.
Slate, http://www.slate.com/ (February 3, 2016), Laura Miller, review of The Vegetarian.
Yale Review, https://yalereview.org/ (December 29, 2024), “Why Han Kang’s Nobel Matters.”
Han Kang
South Korea (b.1970)
Han Kang is the daughter of novelist Han Seung-won. She was born in Kwangju and at the age of 10, moved to Suyuri (which she speaks of affectionately in her work "Greek Lessons") in Seoul.
She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University. She began her writing career when one of her poems was featured in the winter issue of the quarterly Literature and Society. She made her official literary debut in the following year when her short story "The Scarlet Anchor" was the winning entry in the daily Seoul Shinmun spring literary contest.
Since then, she has gone on to win the Yi Sang Literary Prize (2005), Today's Young Artist Award, and the Korean Literature Novel Award. As of summer 2013, Han teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts while writing stories and novels.
Awards: Nobel (2024), Booker (2016) see all
Genres: Literary Fiction
New and upcoming books
January 2025
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We Do Not Part
Novels
The Vegetarian (2015)
Human Acts (2016)
Greek Lessons (2023)
We Do Not Part (2025)
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Novellas and Short Stories
Convalescence (2017)
Circus Freaka (2018) (with Hyonjun Yun)
Europa (2019)
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Non fiction hide
The White Book (2017)
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Awards
2024 Nobel Prize in Literature
2016 International Booker Prize : The Vegetarian
Han Kang is the recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature. Han Kang was born in Gwangju, South Korea. In 1994 she began her career as a novelist by winning the Seoul Shinmun Spring Literary Contest. THE VEGETARIAN, her first novel to be translated into English, won the 2016 International Booker Prize. Her following novel, HUMAN ACTS won Korea’s Manhae Prize for Literature and the 2017 Malaparte Prize in Italy. THE WHITE BOOK was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2018. She has also received the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Today’s Young Artist Award, the 25th Korean Novel Award, the Hwang Sun-won Literary Award and the Dongri Literary Award. GREEK LESSONS will be published widely in 2023/2024 alongside her most recent novel, IMPOSSIBLE GOODBYES, which was published in Korea in 2021 to great critical acclaim and won the Daesan Foundation Prize and the Prix Médicis Etranger 2023. Han Kang worked as a professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts until 2018 and is now dedicating herself entirely to her writing. She is published in more than thirty languages. She lives in Seoul.
Agent: Laurence Laluyaux
Han Kang is first South Korean writer to win 2024 Nobel Prize in literature with ‘The Vegetarian’
The silhouette of a woman’s side profile sits atop a red background and white lettering in the title. An illustration of the medal awarded for the 2024 Nobel Prize in literature is beside the silhouette.
Illustration by Shveta Shah
‘The Vegetarian’ by Han Kang wins the 2024 Nobel Prize in literature
Alice Oh, Reporter
November 12, 2024
Written by South Korean author Han Kang and translated by British writer Deborah Smith, “The Vegetarian” masterfully explores the lure of volatile human desire by challenging South Korean societal and sexual norms.
Published in Korean in 2007 and translated to English in 2015, Kang’s novel follows Kim Yeong-hye, an introspective middle-aged South Korean woman, and the reactions of her family when she is inspired — in vivid and unsettling dreams — to follow a strict vegetarian diet.
The novel follows the perspective of three characters: Yeong-hye’s husband, brother-in-law and older sister. Each character holds different sentiments toward Yeong-hye: repulsion, lust and love, respectively.
When Yeong-hye decides to stop eating meat, her husband’s indifference toward her turns to repulsion. He symbolizes the oppressive societal norms in South Korea, abandoning Yeong-hye when her new way of life becomes an embarrassment to him.
Meanwhile, Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law is fascinated with her new diet and develops a disturbing sexual obsession with her body. His new art project features Yeong-hye as the subject of his work and adorns her body with painted flowers.
Yeong-hye’s older sister, In-hye, struggles with the complexity of emotions that Yeong-hye faces in her dilemma. Unable to sympathize with her sister’s decision, In-hye’s life is characterized by social conformity and suppression of emotion.
Though it is impossible for a translation to hold all of the expressive depth and emotional connotation of the original edition, I was left wholly unsatisfied with some of the novel’s underdeveloped descriptions.
For example, Smith writes, “Why am I changing like this? Why are my edges all sharpening—what I am going to gouge?”
However, the original sentences in Korean can more accurately be translated to: “Why? Why am I withering and wasting away like this? Why are my edges all sharpening—what am I preparing to pierce?”
Line-by-line comparisons between the two versions exposed lost opportunities to convey the same level of nuance in the English translation.
Kang’s work embarks on a deep exploration of color, sound and the human body. Descriptions of Yeong-hye’s emaciated frame and the vibrancy of the flowers on her naked body skillfully contrast the dullness of her outer appearance with the emotional intensity within. Kang’s muted tone, which permeates throughout the novel, dramatizes the internal and external conflict throughout the story.
Contrary to what the title may suggest, “The Vegetarian” reveals more about the prejudices and character of Yeong-hye’s family in response to her quiet defiance than vegetarianism itself.
Though Smith’s translation may inevitably fall short, Kang’s effortless storytelling is a victory for highlighting the female oppression in South Korea and is well-deserving of its Nobel Prize in literature.
Han Kang was born in Gwangju in 1970. Since the age of ten, She grew up in Suyuri, Seoul after her family moved there. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University. She made her literary debut as a poet by publishing five poems, including “Winter in Seoul”, in the winter issue of Munhak-gwa-sahoe (Literature and Society) in 1993. She began her career as a novelist the next year by winning the 1994 Seoul Shinmun Spring Literary Contest with “Red Anchor”. She published her first short story collection entitled Yeosu (Munji Publishing Company) in 1995. She participated in the University of Iowa International Writing Program for three months in 1998 with support from the Arts Council Korea.
Her publications include a short story collection, Fruits of My Woman (2000), Fire Salamander (2012); novels such as Black Deer (1998), Your Cold Hands (2002), The Vegetarian (2007), Breath Fighting (2010), and Greek Lessons (2011), Human Acts (2014), The White Book (2016), I Do Not Bid Farewell(2021). A poem collection, I put the evening in the drawer (2013) was published as well.
She won the 25th Korean Novel Award with the novella, “Baby Buddha” in 1999, the 2000 Today’s Young Artist Award by Culture Ministry Korea, the 2005 YiSang Literary Award with “Mongol Spot”, and the 2010 Dongri Literary Award with The Wind is Blowing.
She was awarded Manhae literary prize for Human Acts (2014) and Hwang Sun-won literary award (2015) for the novella While One Snowflake Melts. Her recent novella Farewell won the Kim Yujung Literary Prize.(2018).
The Vegetarian won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. Atti umani (Human Acts) won the 2017 Malaparte Prize in Italy. She was awarded San Clemete Prize for The Vegetarian in spain(2019). She was selected as the fifth writer for the Future Library project in Norway in 2019. "Dear Son, My Beloved,"will be held in the Deichman Library in Oslo until its scheduled publication in 2114.
Her most recent novel ‘I Do Not Bid Farewell’ was awarded Medicis prize in France in 2023, Émile Guimet prize in 2024.
Han Kang
Facts
Han Kang
Ill. Niklas Elmehed © Nobel Prize Outreach
Han Kang
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2024
Born: 27 November 1970, Gwangju, South Korea
Residence at the time of the award: Seoul, South Korea
Prize motivation: “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”
Language: Korean
Prize share: 1/1
Work
Han Kang began her career in 1993 as a poet, but has since written mainly novels and short stories. In her oeuvre, she confronts historical traumas and invisible sets of rules and, in each of her works, exposes the fragility of human life. She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in her poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose. Among her works are The Vegetarian, Human Acts and We Do Not Part.
Why Han Kang’s Nobel Matters
My mother’s generation experienced unspeakable violence. Han found the words for it.
Yung In Chae
In her novels, Han Kang, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, serves as a "conduit for the memories of generations that suffered state violence," writes Yung In Chae. The Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images
On October 10, 2024—the day after Hangeul Day, which celebrates the invention of the Korean alphabet—I and millions of other Koreans were able to do something we had never been able to do before: read a novel by a Nobel Prize laureate in our native language.
And what extraordinary grace that the laureate should be Han Kang. Last year, I had the honor of interviewing Han about Deborah Smith and e. yaewon’s English translation of her novel Greek Lessons. We became friends who now meet up whenever I’m in Seoul, and I can testify that she embodies in real life the gentleness she demonstrates in her books. Beyond her individual worthiness, it is significant that South Korea’s two laureates—former president Kim Dae-jung received the Peace Prize in 2000—have both led careers shaped by the long fight for democratization. For decades, conservatives have denied or dismissed the Gwangju Uprising, the atrocity in which the military dictator Chun Doo-hwan killed hundreds of pro-democracy protesters, and wounded or maimed thousands more. Because of Han’s Nobel win, more of the world will know that it not only happened, but also that it continues to matter.
The Gwangju Massacre is central to Han’s magnum opus, Human Acts—a harrowing and clear-eyed yet somehow tender look at the weeks-long uprising against Chun that began on May 18, 1980, resulting in exorbitant death and enduring collective trauma. The novel also means a great deal to me personally: For as long as I can remember, my mother, who is four years older than Han, has resisted thinking about life under Chun in the 1980s, so much so that she avoids TV shows and movies set in that decade. She does not refuse to talk about it per se, but over the years I have gathered that discussing it causes her pain, so I prefer waiting for her to volunteer information rather than asking her for it. Once, we were wandering the campus of her alma mater in Seoul when she looked up at a building and remarked that her classmates set themselves on fire and jumped off the roof as a form of protest. And then, I fill the gaps in my knowledge with books.
It wasn’t until I read Human Acts, I recently told Han, that I truly understood my mother’s silence and was able to imagine what might lie on the other side. In the novel, an editor named Eun-sook tries to forget the seven slaps she received from a detective interrogating her about the translator of a banned book. As Deborah Smith writes in her English translation of Human Acts: “She was struck so hard, over and over in the exact same spot, that the capillaries laced over her right cheekbone burst, the blood trickling out through her torn skin.” An activist named Seon-ju recalls how the police brutalized her in jail with such force that she “[continued] to bleed for the next two years . . . leaving [her] permanently unable to bear children.” I don’t believe my mother had these experiences, but the novel offers a glimpse into what it was like to live with that fear. And while I did not grow up in that climate of violence, I did grow up in its aftermath. I took to heart Han’s belief, which she expressed in The New York Times, that “the last line of defense by which human beings can remain human is the complete and true perception of another’s suffering.”
Giving names to the nameless and, likewise, voices to the voiceless is something Han does consistently.
The literary critic Shin Hyoung Cheol notes that after the uprising, in which many students participated, the task of attending to the dead bodies fell mostly to high school girls who never received any kind of thanks, but “Han Kang gave those nameless young women the names ‘Eun-sook’ and ‘Seon-ju.’”* Giving names to the nameless and, likewise, voices to the voiceless is something Han does consistently. In The Vegetarian, the central character Yeong-hye never narrates her story in the first person, but her decision to stop eating meat is comprehensible to the reader even when it baffles those around her; in Greek Lessons, one of the protagonists has literally lost her ability to talk. Han’s latest novel, We Do Not Part—which, thanks to e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris’s forthcoming translation, will be available in English this January—is about a different historical massacre: the Jeju Uprising of 1948–1949, when the government killed tens of thousands of citizens in the name of anticommunism.
This is the power of Han Kang: With little more than paper and ink, she acts as a conduit for the memories of generations that suffered state violence, passing them on to generations that inherited these traumas but not necessarily the long-suppressed facts beneath them. She makes that pain legible, indelible, meaningful. Human Acts forced me to reckon with my inheritance, this formless and weighty thing, to recognize at what cost South Korea’s democracy was won. The novel is not a promise to heal all wounds but an invitation to mourn them together.
Her complete oeuvre—much of which is not yet available in English but hopefully will be soon—further bears out her intuitive compassion for the vulnerable, her unyielding awareness of the thin boundary between life and death. In the novel The Wind Is Blowing, Go, a woman tries to understand her friend’s death through the art she made in life. In the short story “Farewell,” another woman inexplicably turns into a snowman; as she melts, she reflects on her life and all the ways that society has already rendered her obsolete. The Swedish Academy noted Han’s “intense poetic prose.” But she also spent years writing actual poems with similar themes, such as two poems where she imagines herself as the reincarnation of Mark Rothko, who died nine months before she was born, or “One Late Evening I . . . ,” a poem about the simple act of sitting down before a bowl of steaming rice and realizing “that something has passed by forever, / that something is passing by forever even now.”*
After winning the Nobel, Han reportedly told her father, the writer Han Seung-won, that he should refrain from hosting a celebratory banquet for her because of the two wars raging in Ukraine and Palestine. In a relentless year of state violence and hostile attempts to silence resistance against it, this is whom the Swedish Academy chose to honor: a writer whose work in both life and literature has been to recover some dignity from the ruins of trauma. As Han writes in Human Acts:
After you died I could not hold a funeral,
And so my life became a funeral.
In the past year, how many people have lost loved ones for whom they could not hold funerals? How many lives will now become funerals? Han Kang’s writing, her triumph, shows that histories of trauma from Gwangju to Gaza do not belong in the shadows. They belong to the world of literature. They belong to world literature.
December 7, 2024
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'Truths will be spoken': Nobel winner Han Kang on the necessity of literature
Published: 07 Dec. 2024, 16:11
Updated: 07 Dec. 2024, 20:57
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LEE JIAN
lee.jian@joongang.co.kr
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Korea JoongAng Daily
'Truths will be spoken': Nobel winner Han Kang on the necessity of literature
5 min
Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI
Korean author Han Kang answers questions from reporters at the Nobel Prize Museum in Sweden on Dec. 6 during her first official press conference since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. [NEWS1]
Korean author Han Kang answers questions from reporters at the Nobel Prize Museum in Sweden on Dec. 6 during her first official press conference since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. [NEWS1]
Literature is “not a surplus but a necessity” during times of turmoil, according to Nobel laureate author Han Kang.
“Books constantly have readers enter another person’s mind and, in that process, deeply explore themselves as well. Repeating this act gives one internal strength — an uncompromising muscle to make clear judgments and think for oneself in a time of unprecedented crisis,” she told the press in Stockholm, Sweden, on Friday, ahead of the official Nobel Prize awards ceremony slated for Tuesday.
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Her comments come in the wake of President Yoon Suk Yeol's emergency martial law declaration on Tuesday, putting one of Asia’s most vibrant democracies under military rule. The decree was lifted six hours later, following a unanimous parliamentary vote as well as nationwide fury and anxiety that rippled around the world.
The author is well-versed in similar historical events. Her book “Human Acts” (2014) directly deals with the last time emergency martial law was declared, in 1979. “I sincerely hope that the country will not go back to the age of control and the suppression of speech," she said.
Korean author Han Kang answers questions from reporters at the Nobel Prize Museum in Sweden on Dec. 6 during her first official press conference since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. [NEWS1]
Korean author Han Kang answers questions from reporters at the Nobel Prize Museum in Sweden on Dec. 6 during her first official press conference since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. [NEWS1]
Han was also optimistic, however, in truth and democracy. “Language has a way of slipping through when attempts are made to grip, control or suppress it. So whatever happens, truths of some form will be spoken. I believe this power of language will remain unchanged in the future."
But even before Korea's short brush with martial law, society had limited Han's voice. Some of her books, namely “The Vegetarian” (2007), were banned in libraries and blacklisted for being “harmful for minors.”
“There are many readers in Korea who painfully sympathize with ‘The Vegetarian,’ but many others misunderstand the book,” she said. “Now, I think that this is just the book’s fate. But it was indeed heartbreaking, as its author, when it was categorized as a ‘harmful book’ and thrown away in libraries.”
She continued, “‘The Vegetarian' is a novel filled with questions and ironies. The title, for starters, refers to the protagonist, but she never declared herself a vegetarian. It also uses the literary device of an unreliable narrator. Yeong-hye herself barely speaks in the first person throughout the book. So each line is ironic, and I think readers will really enjoy the book when they think about this.”
Han Kang is featured on the facade of Stockholm's city hall as the laureate of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature [YONHAP]
Han Kang is featured on the facade of Stockholm's city hall as the laureate of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature [YONHAP]
Han is the first Korean author to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. She is also the first female Asian to win the 123-year-old accolade and the second Korean to receive a Nobel Prize, following President Kim Dae-jung (1924-2009), who won the Peace Prize in 2000.
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She is set to continue celebrating her win in Stockholm throughout next week, giving a lecture and attending the Nobel Prize ceremony on Dec. 10 at the Konserthuset concert hall.
“When I first heard that I had won the Nobel Prize, I was anxious and heavy-hearted with the attention that I was getting. But a month later, I started thinking that this award was being given to literature as a whole and I just happened to receive it this time, and I became more at ease. I am ready to set aside any burden or discomfort and continue writing," she said.
The teacup that Han Kang donated to the Nobel Prize Museum in Stockholm, Sweden, on Friday [NEWS1]
The teacup that Han Kang donated to the Nobel Prize Museum in Stockholm, Sweden, on Friday [NEWS1]
Earlier in the day, Han visited the Nobel Prize Museum for the Swedish award's traditional artifact donations. She submitted a small turquoise teacup.
"I chose the teacup because it was the most intimate object related to writing," she said. "Whenever I tried to return to my desk during the day, I would fill that teacup with black tea and sit down. I drank just that one cup, and that became my routine. It also kept me going back to my desk to write."
The teacup also represented the "hardest-working times" of Han's career.
"This is the 31st winter that I've been working as an author, but it would be a huge lie to say that I always kept my routine during those years," she said. "I was lost a lot of the time and spent many hours pondering what to write about. Sometimes, I couldn't work out the book and would close my notebook and take a walk. These times outnumber the hours I spent actually writing.
"But when I used the teacup, I was working diligently."
Korean author Han Kang answers questions from reporters at the Nobel Prize Museum in Sweden on Dec. 6 during her first official press conference since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. [YONHAP]
Korean author Han Kang answers questions from reporters at the Nobel Prize Museum in Sweden on Dec. 6 during her first official press conference since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. [YONHAP]
Han's final message to her readers was to be inquisitive and let their questions lead the way.
“The most important scene in ‘The Vegetarian’ is when Yeong-hye is force-fed meat by her family. I wrote about it three times in the book because I thought it was so critical. Isn’t it such a weird scenario? What, and who, is normal, and who is crazy? I wanted to throw these questions out there. In Yeong-hye’s universe, she may be a perfectly sane being. She is also a character who, to save herself and reject violence, refuses to be part of human society and goes forward, risking death. She may seem bizarre, but her actions make one think about the possibility that society’s violence is even wackier.
“We live in a world today that compels us to ask many questions. Sometimes, that makes me think about whether or not there is hope. But since a few months ago, or it may have been even further in the past, I began to think that hoping that there is hope left is still, well... Hope.”
BY LEE JIAN [lee.jian@joongang.co.kr]
Han Kang
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Not to be confused with Han River (Korea).
In this Korean name, the family name is Han.
Han Kang
Han Kang in 2017
Han Kang in 2017
Born November 27, 1970 (age 54)
Gwangju, South Korea
Pen name Han Kang-hyun
Occupation Writer
Alma mater Yonsei University
Genre Fiction
Notable works The Vegetarian
Human Acts
Notable awards Yi Sang Literary Award
2005
International Booker Prize
2016
Prix Médicis étranger
2023
Nobel Prize in Literature
2024
Spouse Hong Yong-hee (divorced)
Children 1
Parents Han Seung-won (father)
Signature
Korean name
Hangul 한강
Hanja 韓江
Revised Romanization Han Gang
McCune–Reischauer Han Kang
Website
www.han-kang.net
Han Kang (Korean: 한강; born 27 November 1970) is a South Korean writer. From 2007 to 2018, she taught creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.[1] Han rose to international prominence for her novel The Vegetarian, which became the first Korean language novel to win the International Booker Prize for fiction in 2016. In 2024, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, a first for an Asian woman and for a Korean.
Early life and education
Han Kang, who according to her father is named after the Han River (Korean: 한강; RR: Hangang),[2] was born on 27 November 1970[3] in Gwangju, South Korea. Her family is noted for its literary background. Her father is novelist Han Seung-won. Her older brother, Han Dong-rim, is also a novelist, while her younger brother, Han Kang-in, is a novelist and cartoonist.[4]
At 9, Han moved to Suyu-ri in Seoul, when her father quit his teaching job to become a full-time writer, four months before the Gwangju Uprising, a pro-democracy movement that ended in the military's massacre of students and civilians. She first learned about the massacre when she was 12, after discovering at home a secretly circulated memorial album of photographs taken by a German journalist, Jürgen Hinzpeter.[5] This discovery deeply influenced her view on humanity and her literary works.[3][6]
Han's father struggled to make ends meet with his writing career, which negatively impacted his family. Han later described her childhood as "too much for a little child"; however, being surrounded by books gave her comfort.[7] In 1988, she graduated from Poongmoon Girls' High School, now Poongmoon High School, where she had been a class president.[8][9] In 1993, Han graduated from Yonsei University, where she majored in Korean language and literature.[3] In 1998, she was enrolled at the University of Iowa International Writing Program.[3][10]
Career
After graduating from Yonsei University, Han briefly worked as a reporter for the monthly Saemteo magazine.[9] Han's literary career began the same year when five of her poems, including "Winter in Seoul", were featured in the Winter 1993 issue of the quarterly Literature and Society. She made her fiction debut the next year, under the name Han Kang-hyun, when her short story "The Scarlet Anchor" won the New Year's Literary Contest held by the Seoul Shinmun.[11][12] Her first short story collection, A Love of Yeosu, was published in 1995 and attracted attention for its precise and tightly narrated structure. After the publication, she quit her magazine job to solely focus on writing literature.[13]
In 2007, Han published a book, A Song to Sing Calmly (가만가만 부르는 노래), that was accompanied by a music album. At first she did not intend to sing, but Han Jeong-rim, a musician and music director, insisted that Han Kang record the songs herself.[14] The same year, she started working as a professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts until 2018.
In her college years Han became obsessed with a line of poetry by the Korean modernist poet Yi Sang: "I believe that humans should be plants."[15] She understood Yi's line to imply a defensive stance against the violence of Korea's colonial history under Japanese occupation, and took it as an inspiration to write her most successful work, The Vegetarian. The second part of the three-part novel, Mongolian Mark, won the Yi Sang Literary Award.[16] The rest of the series (The Vegetarian and Fire Tree) was delayed by contractual problems.[15]
The Vegetarian was Han's first novel translated into English, although she had already attracted worldwide attention by the time Deborah Smith translated it.[17] The translated work won the International Booker Prize 2016 for both Han and Smith. Han was the first Korean to be nominated for the award, and, in its English translation, it was the first Korean language novel to win the International Booker Prize for fiction.[18][19][20][21] The Vegetarian was also chosen as one of "The 10 Best Books of 2016" by The New York Times Book Review.[22] The English translation, however, sparked controversy due to Smith's basic errors stemming from her unfamiliarity with the Korean language and culture, as well as her shift in style from Han's original Korean.[23]
Han's novel Human Acts was released in January 2016 by Portobello Books.[24][25] Han received the Premio Malaparte for the Italian translation of Human Acts, Atti Umani, by Adelphi Edizioni, in Italy on 1 October 2017.[26][27] The English translation of the novel was shortlisted for the 2018 International Dublin Literary Award.[28]
Han's third novel, The White Book, was shortlisted for the 2018 International Booker Prize.[29] An autobiographical novel, it centers on the loss of her older sister, a baby who died two hours after her birth.[30]
Han's novel We Do Not Part was published in 2021. It tells the story of a writer researching the 1948–49 Jeju uprising and its impact on her friend's family. The French translation of the novel won the Prix Médicis Étranger in 2023.[31]
In 2023, Han's fourth full-length novel, Greek Lessons, was translated into English by Deborah Smith and E Yaewon.[32] The Atlantic called it a book in which "words are both insufficient and too powerful to tame".[33]
Personal life
Han was married to Hong Yong-hee, a literary critic and professor at Kyung Hee Cyber University.[34][35] In 2024, Han stated that they had been divorced for many years.[36][unreliable source?] Han has a son, with whom she had run a bookstore in Seoul from 2018 to November 2024, when she stepped away from its management.[37][38]
Han has said that she suffers from periodic migraines, and credits them with "keeping her humble".[30]
Awards and recognition
Han won the Yi Sang Literary Award (2005) for Mongolian Mark (the second part of The Vegetarian),[16] the 25th Korean Novel Award[clarification needed] for her novella Baby Buddha in 1999, the 2000 Today's Young Artist Award from the Korean Ministry of Culture, and the 2010 Dongri Literary Award for The Wind is Blowing.[39]
In 2018, Han became the fifth writer chosen to contribute to the Future Library project. Katie Paterson, the project's organizer, said that Han had been chosen because she "expands our view of the world".[40] Han delivered the manuscript, Dear Son, My Beloved, in May 2019. In the handover ceremony, she dragged a white cloth through the forest and wrapped it around the manuscript. She explained this as a reference to Korean culture, in which a white cloth is used both for babies and for mourning gowns, describing the event as "like a wedding of my manuscript with this forest. Or a lullaby for a century-long sleep".[41]
Han was elected a Royal Society of Literature International Writer in 2023.[42][43]
The Vegetarian placed 49th in The New York Times's "100 Best Books of the 21st century" in July 2024.[44]
In 2024, Han was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature by the Swedish Academy for her "intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life".[45][46][47] This made her the first Korean writer[48] and the first female Asian writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.[49]
Awards
1999 – Korean Novel Award for Baby Buddha[39]
2000 – Korean Ministry of Culture Today's Young Artist Award – Literature Section[39]
2005 – Yi Sang Literary Award for Mongolian Mark[16]
2010 – Dongri Literary Award for The Wind is Blowing[39]
2014 – Manhae Literary Award for Human Acts[39]
2015 – Hwang Sun-won Literary Award for While One Snowflake Melts[39]
2016 – International Booker Prize for The Vegetarian[19]
2017 – Malaparte Prize for Human Acts[26][27]
2018 – Kim Yu-jeong Literary Award [ko] for Farewell[39]
2019 – San Clemente Literary Prize for The Vegetarian[39]
2023 – Prix Médicis étranger for We Do Not Part[50]
2024 – Émile Guimet Prize for Asian Literature for We Do Not Part[51]
– Ho-Am Prize in the Arts[52]
– Nobel Prize in Literature[45][46]
– Pony Chung Innovation Award[53]
Bibliography
This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (October 2024)
Novels
—— (1995). 여수의 사랑 [Love in Yeosu] (in Korean). Moonji. ISBN 8932007500.
—— (1998). 검은 사슴 [Black Deer] (in Korean). Munhakdongne. ISBN 8982811338.
—— (2000). 내 여자의 열매 [My Woman's Fruits] (in Korean). Changbi. ISBN 8936436570.
—— (2002). 그대의 차가운 손 [Your Cold Hands] (in Korean). Moonji. ISBN 8932013047.
—— (2007). 채식주의자 [The Vegetarian] (in Korean). Changbi. ISBN 9788936433598.
—— (2010). 바람이 분다, 가라 [The Wind Blows, Go] (in Korean). Moonji. ISBN 9788932020006.
—— (2011). 희랍어 시간 [Greek Lessons] (in Korean). Munhakdongne. ISBN 9788954616515.
—— (2012). 노랑무늬영원 [Fire Salamander] (in Korean). Moonji. ISBN 9788932023533.
—— (2014). 소년이 온다 [A Boy Comes] (in Korean). Changbi. ISBN 9788936434120.
—— (2016). 흰 [White] (in Korean). Nanda. ISBN 9788954640718.
—— (2021). 작별하지 않는다 [We Do Not Part] (in Korean). Munhakdongne. ISBN 9788954682152.
In translation
—— (2015). The Vegetarian. Translated by Deborah Smith. London: Portobello Books. ISBN 9781846275623. UK[54]
—— (2016). The Vegetarian. Translated by Deborah Smith. London/New York: Hogarth. ISBN 9781101906118. UK US
—— (2023). Greek Lessons. Translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won. London/New York: Hogarth. ISBN 9780593595275. UK US[55][56][57][58]
—— (2016). Human Acts. Translated by Deborah Smith. London: Portobello Books. ISBN 9781846275968. UK[59][60][61]
—— (2017). Human Acts. Translated by Deborah Smith. London/New York: Hogarth. ISBN 9781101906743. UK US
—— (2017). The White Book. Translated by Deborah Smith. London: Portobello Books. ISBN 9781846276958. UK
—— (2019). The White Book. Translated by Deborah Smith. London/New York: Hogarth. ISBN 9780525573067. UK US
—— (2025). We Do Not Part. Translated by Emily Yae Won and Paige Aniyah Morris. London/New York: Hogarth. UK US
Short fiction
Collections
내 이름은 태양꽃 ("My name is Sunflower"), Munhakdongne, 2002, ISBN 978-89-8281-479-2.
붉은 꽃 이야기 ("The red flower story"), Yolimwon, 2003, ISBN 978-89-7063-333-6.
천둥 꼬마 선녀 번개 꼬마 선녀 ("Thunder little fairy, lightning little fairy"), Munhakdongne, 2007, ISBN 978-89-546-0279-2.
눈물상자 ("Tear box"), Munhakdongne, 2008, ISBN 978-89-546-0581-6.
Stories
Title Year First published Reprinted/collected Notes
"The Middle Voice" 2023 Han Kang (6 February 2023). "The middle voice". The New Yorker. 98 (48). Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won: 50–58. The story is an excerpt from the novel Greek Lessons.
"Heavy Snow" 2024 Kang, Han (10 November 2024). "Heavy snow". The New Yorker. Translated from the Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. The story is an excerpt from the novel We Do Not Part.
Poetry
서랍에 저녁을 넣어 두었다 ("I put dinner in the drawer"), Moonji, 2013, ISBN 978-89-320-2463-9.
Essays
사랑과, 사랑을 둘러싼 것들 ("Love and things surrounding love"), Yolimwon, 2003, ISBN 978-89-7063-369-5.
가만가만 부르는 노래 ("A song to sing calmly"), Bichae, 2007, ISBN 978-89-92036-27-6.
Adaptations
Baby Buddha and The Vegetarian have been made into films. Lim Woo-Seong wrote and directed Vegetarian, which was released in 2009.[62] It was one of only 14 selections (out of 1,022 submissions) included in the World Narrative Competition of the North American Film Fest, and was noticed at the Busan International Film Festival.[63]
Lim also adapted Baby Buddha into a screenplay, in collaboration with Han, and directed the film version. Titled Scars, it was released in 2011.[63]
The author of The Vegetarian talks about the impact of winning the International Booker Prize, how the novel has been received worldwide – and questioning what it means to be human
This interview was conducted in 2023. Han Kang was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2024 on October 10, 2024.
Publication date and time:Published July 28, 2023
You were the first winner of the International Booker Prize after the rules changed for 2016. How did it feel to win, and what did it mean for you?
I wrote The Vegetarian between 2003 and 2005, and published it as a full-length novel in 2007. I remember thinking that it was rather strange (in a good way) to win the International Booker Prize in 2016, more than a decade later. Since winning the prize, my other works including Human Acts, The White Book, and Greek Lessons, as well as my most recent novel, We Do Not Part, have been or are being translated into several languages. I’m grateful that the International Booker Prize has invaluably helped my works to reach a wider readership in different cultures.
You were also the first Korean to be nominated for – and win – the award. Do you feel there was more recognition for Korean fiction as a result of your win, or was it becoming more visible internationally anyway?
At that time, there were already excellent Korean poets and writers – such as Kim Hyesoon – whose works had been translated into English. Now, more and more works of Korean writers are being translated and published overseas. In recent years, the number of translators working on Korean literature has increased dramatically – a phenomenon that seems to be also closely related to the global success of Korean cinema and pop music.
The novel was based on your 1997 short story ‘The Fruit of My Woman’. What inspired you to develop this into a full-length novel, or a story in three parts?
After writing ‘The Fruit of My Woman’, I hoped to one day write a variation on that story. It was only after writing two full-length novels that I was able to do so in my third novel, The Vegetarian. In particular, Part One of The Vegetarian retains many formal traces of the original short story. For example, the husband takes on the role of an unreliable narrator, and the voice of the female protagonist appears only partially, in dreams or in monologues addressed to her mother. The difference between these two stories about a woman who becomes - or wants to become - a plant lies in the level of darkness, passion and intensity. The Vegetarian is much darker, more intense and painful; nothing supernatural happens as in ‘The Fruit of My Woman’, and the characters plunge to their doom in the midst of brutal reality. Another difference is that the protagonist of the novel has a sister, which creates a strange sense of self-identification.
Han Kang, 2017
Han Kang, 2017 © Jessica Gow/TT/Alamy
It is intriguing to see the subtle differences in interpretation between various cultures and generations, but what strikes me even more is the way the novel has been received in general. For example, it has been more embraced and understood by female readers everywhere
— Han Kang
The Vegetarian has been translated into over 20 languages. Has the reaction to the novel been different in different countries and have any of those reactions surprised you? Has it attracted a different readership (e.g. younger readers) in different places or resonated in different ways?
It is intriguing to see the subtle differences in interpretation between various cultures and generations, but what strikes me even more is the way the novel has been received in general. For example, it has been more embraced and understood by female readers everywhere.
For the English edition, you worked with the book’s translator, Deborah Smith (Smith taught herself Korean and this was the first book she translated). What was this experience like, compared to other language translations? And how did it feel when there was a level of controversy around the translation?
Contrary to the concerns expressed by many, I do not believe that the translator has deliberately undermined the original, nor do I believe that she has created a new work that is completely different from the original. The errors have been corrected and translation is by its very nature an extremely difficult and complex act that involves loss and exploration. Lyricism, rhythms, poetic tension, subtlety, the layered meanings, the deeply inscribed cultural context of the departure language – everything that is possible only in that language – is inevitably lost in the transition to the arrival language. The challenging task for any translator is to navigate through this dark tunnel of loss and find the closest equivalents or analogies to be as faithful as possible to the original text.
I first came across the English version of The Vegetarian when Granta Books sent me the file of the first proof. I was so absorbed in writing Human Acts at the time that, to be honest, I spent about three or four hours reading the manuscript without even looking up words in a dictionary. Along the way, I spotted several errors, and exchanged a few emails with Deborah about them. That was the extent of my involvement in the translation of The Vegetarian. However, in 2015, when Deborah was working on Human Acts, I wasn’t writing anything else, so I had the peace of mind to engage in a deeper dialogue with her. When Deborah translated The White Book in 2017, she and I compared the manuscript with the original text sentence by sentence. Later, when a heated debate erupted over the translation of The Vegetarian, I wished I had spent as much time reviewing the translation as I had with Human Acts. In fact, perhaps I should have commissioned an expert to compare it sentence by sentence with the original.
The debate seems to have been a confusing conflation of two arguments. The first is mistranslation, as mistakes were made. There were mistranslations of Chinese characters and incorrect assumptions about context when subjects were omitted from sentences – as is often the case in Korean. In 2017, Deborah made 67 corrections based on the various points raised. The UK and US editions of The Vegetarian, reprinted in 2018, as well as the language editions translated via English, were then revised based on these corrections. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all those who found errors in the translation and emailed me.
The second point of contention is the extent to which the translation deviates from the original text. The problem here is that mistranslations have been used as evidence for this argument. For example, the Korean word cheohyeong refers to the older sister of one’s wife, but since the first part of the word (cheo) means ‘wife’ and the second part (hyeong) means ‘older brother’, it could be confusing to a beginner, who might take it to mean the older brother of one’s wife. The resulting mistake led to the misconception that the translator had changed the characters. Also, about half a page overall of the original text is missing from the English translation, which I understand was an editorial decision on the part of the publisher. The translator had diligently translated every sentence.
Deborah Smith and Han Kang
Translator Deborah Smith and author Han Kang, winners of the International Booker Prize 2016 for The Vegetarian © Janie Airey/Booker Prize Foundation
When I write fiction, I put a lot of emphasis on the senses. I want to convey vivid senses like hearing and touch, including visual images. I infuse these sensations into my sentences like an electric current
— Han Kang
The Vegetarian combines beauty with horror. It is a story that is at times brutal and disturbing, with scenes of physical and sexual violence, force-feeding, and a foreboding sense of death. What draws you to write about darker subjects, and human actions?
I wanted to deal with the questions I had about the world and humanity in the form of three sections about two sisters crying out in silence: one who wants to stop being part of the human race, refusing to eat meat and believing she has turned into a plant, and the other who wants to hold her sister from death, conflicted and pained herself. When I write novels, I find myself trying to reach the end of the question – not an answer – which initially drew me to write it. To penetrate my questions on the meaning of being human, it was inevitable for me to go through such intense scenes and images.
The story is rich with visual iconography and reoccurring motifs. Did you intend to write these into the story, or did they evolve naturally? How important are these visual elements of the story?
When I write fiction, I put a lot of emphasis on the senses. I want to convey vivid senses like hearing and touch, including visual images. I infuse these sensations into my sentences like an electric current, and then, strangely enough, the reader discerns that current. The experience of that connection is phenomenal for me every time.
You wrote The Vegetarian in 2007, and when translated into English in 2015, many readers and reviewers felt it was a parable, a transgressive commentary on Korean etiquette and society, as well as patriarchal norms. 16 years on, how do you feel this stands up?
I agree that the novel can be read as a parable against patriarchy. However, I do not think that this is unique to Korean society. There may be differences in degree, but wouldn’t it be universal? I did not set out to create a portrait of Korean society in particular.
The Vegetarian challenges conventional narrative structures. Yeong-hye’s story is told through three narrators, yet she is rarely allowed a voice. Why did you choose to write your protagonist in this manner?
Yeong-hye is a radical and strong character. She is determined to become a plant in order to save herself. The irony, of course, is that her efforts bring her closer to death. Instead of having Yeong-hye speak directly, I wanted to show through the narration of other characters how she is observed, hated, misunderstood, pitied and objectified. I imagined the moments the readers piece together her truth as it emerges from these misunderstandings.
As well as winning the International Booker Prize, The Vegetarian won the Yi Sang Literary Prize, receiving critical acclaim and made several ‘best of the year’ lists. How did it feel to write something that has been celebrated around the world? What impact did this have on your career in the following years?
The three years I spent writing The Vegetarian was a difficult time for me, and I never imagined that it would one day find so many readers. At the time, I was not sure if I would be able to finish the novel, or even survive as a writer. I was suffering from severe arthritis in my fingers, so I wrote the first two parts at a leisurely pace, using a felt-tip pen that glided smoothly across the paper, and then typed out the last part holding two ballpoint pens upside down. To this day, I feel awkward when I hear about the novel’s ‘success’, especially since the protagonist, Yeong-hye, doesn’t seem to fit the word ‘success’.
Somehow, I made it through that period of my life and finished the novel. I was then able to move on to the next one. In the final scene of The Vegetarian, Yeong-hye’s sister stares out of the ambulance window ‘As if waiting for an answer. As if protesting against something.’ Indeed, I feel that the whole novel is waiting for an answer and protesting against something. Usually, the questions I’m left with after writing a novel drive me on to the next one, so I wrote my fourth novel starting with the question in the last scene of The Vegetarian: how do we come to terms with human life, which is so beautiful and so violent at the same time? Then the question posed at the end of my fourth novel became the starting point of my new work. That’s how I have written on until now. I have started to write a new novel this summer, waiting to reach what I am going to find at the end.
What three works of translated Korean fiction would you recommend to readers, and why?
I would like to recommend One Hundred Shadows by Hwang Jungeun, translated by Jung Yewon; Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-jin, translated by Jamie Chang; and Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur. All three works never avert their gaze, but look directly at the world and the human interior.
Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung
Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur
The Vegetarian
The Vegetarian
Han Kang WE DO NOT PART Hogarth (Fiction None) $28.00 1, 21 ISBN: 9780593595459
The lyrical latest novel from the new Nobel laureate.
"When someone who hasn't slept soundly in a while, who is stumbling through a period of nightmares blurring with reality, chances across a scene that defies belief, they may well initially doubt themselves," we are told early on by Kyungha, the narrator. Even at the beginning, Kyungha doesn't seem to have a firm grip on what is and what isn't real. She's moved by herself into an apartment near Seoul, where she hasn't unpacked, barely sleeps, eats less, and spends her time writing and rewriting a will that she tears up and writes again every day. Still, when Inseon, an old friend and colleague, texts to say she's in the hospital and then asks Kyungha to hurry from Seoul to Jeju Island, where Inseon's pet bird is caged without food and water, Kyungha complies--in the midst of a snowstorm. Even through the veil of translation, the quiet intricacy of the author's prose glitters throughout, but nowhere is this so evident as in her descriptions of the snow: "As the snow lands on the wet asphalt, each flake seems to falter for a moment. Then, like a trailing sentence at the close of a conversation, like the dying fall of a final cadence, like fingertips cautiously retreating before ever landing on a shoulder, the flakes sink into the slick blackness and are soon gone." This is a mysterious book that resists easy interpretation, but it's clearly addressing the violent legacies of the past. As Kyungha trudges through the snow toward Inseon's house, trying to reach the bird before it runs out of water, the reader also knows that, decades earlier, the neighboring village had been incinerated in its entirety. How to hold all this together?
A mysterious novel about history and friendship offers no easy answers.
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"Han Kang: WE DO NOT PART." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A817945847/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4331146e. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.
Greek Lessons
by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won
Hamish Hamilton, [pounds sterling]16.99, pp. 148
In the wake of the death of her mother, divorce from her husband and the loss of custody of her son, a young writer and poet in Seoul turns her attentions to lessons in ancient Greek. She walks miles across the city to the classroom, dressed in a black jacket, black scarf and black shirt - a 'sombre uniform, which makes it seem as if she's just come from a funeral' - and devotes herself to the unfamiliar alphabet, verbs and nouns. This delight in words - 'the wondrous promise of the phonemes' - has sustained her since childhood, when she first scratched Hangul, the Korean alphabet, into the dirt. There is only one barrier to her love of language. Not for the first time, she has completely lost the power of speech.
The other main character of Han Kang's lyrical new novel is usually found at the front of the classroom. Wearing 'thick-lensed, silver-rimmed spectacles' and pointing at the white chalk marks on the blackboard, the lecturer in Greek, who suffers from rapidly failing eyesight, becomes entranced by the silent woman who sits in his class. A sympathy grows between them: conversations defined by silences, blindness and words written on skin, as Braille is formed by 'boring holes into white paper'.
Kang won the International Man Booker prize in 2016 with The Vegetarian, which told the story of a woman's descent into mental illness after she refuses to eat meat. Greek Lessons, deftly translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won, has a similar ascetic focus: both the woman and the lecturer live almost hermit-like lives. But, unlike The Vegetarian^ overt horror, this novel is replete with moments of tenderness and intimacy. Against a background of extreme distress (the woman conceals a scar on her wrist with a 'dark purple hairband... the solitary point of colour on an otherwise monochrome figure'), a quiet, slow-paced relationship develops between the two until understanding transcends speech.
It is difficult to write a novel about words that 'thrust like skewers' and 'language worn ragged over thousands of years' without drawing attention to the author's own talent for expression. Does Kang have a grip on the 'dulled fragments' and 'saw-toothed cogs' that her characters lack? With chapters so short they seem almost like sonnets, and images so dense they read like haikus, there is no question of Kang's control. Greek Lessons is a masterful interrogation of language, love and the thousand intricacies of communication.
Francesca Peacock
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
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Peacock, Francesca. "Not so dumb." Spectator, vol. 352, no. 10158, 6 May 2023, p. 37. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A748906811/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=278f11e0. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.
Han Kang
Greek Lessons
Hogarth, 2023
Does our spoken language ultimately enable expression or stifle it due to its inherent limitations?
This is the theoretical and practical question Han Kang's protagonist--simply "the woman"--addresses in Greek Lessons. At forty, the woman--a teacher and single mother--has lost her voice for the second time since her teenage years. This time, the cost to her life is much greater: her ex-husband wins a protracted court battle to gain full custody of their eight-year-old son. The woman is voiceless to protest, metaphorically and literally. When her ex-husband makes plans for their son to leave Seoul and live with his sister, the child begs his mother to let him return to stay with her. She can't answer, and she can't console him.
In an attempt to regain her voice, she seeks the comfort and novelty of learning Ancient Greek, a language she's entirely unfamiliar with. She wonders if the complex, alien symbols of the ancient written language--so distant from her own elusive mother tongue--will draw her voice up from where it is buried. In the Ancient Greek classroom, with only a handful of men--old and young--she takes comprehensive notes, watching the blackboard and the teacher intensely.
The woman's story is delivered in chapters alongside her teacher's. He, too, is unnamed and suffering his own sensory loss. Since childhood, his eyesight has been in gradual decline and increasingly, he is incapable of comfort in anywhere other than the highly familiar classroom and the well-traveled routes between home, shops and work. In his mysteriously mute student, he finds an unconfirmed, unspoken recognition of suffering and silence.
The chapters do not indicate which of the characters are narrating, and it is not as simple as single chapters alternately belonging to one character then the next. As readers, this structure entangles us in confusion and incoherence. By pushing through, we can decipher voices in the fog and frustration of trying to piece together which story belongs to which narrator, whose memories belong to whom. This confusion, sometimes irritatingly, mirrors the lack of clarity the protagonists are living with.
We learn that the teacher grew up between Korea and Germany, exposed to everyday racism and his mother's extreme fear of making cultured missteps in their adopted city of Frankfurt. Her determination that the family must assimilate fully and more importantly, be perceived as fully compliant with white German norms of living, instills a deep anxiety in her son. In his university years, he returns to Korea to pursue teaching (he is one of the few East Asian students with a comprehensive mastery of Ancient Greek).
In the early chapters of Greek Lessons, I sought a clear-cut explanation for the woman's muteness. Surely, a traumatic episode from childhood or a neurological condition must be the cause, I thought. This was the inherent question and motivation that drove me to turn the pages. It was touch-and-go, since the language and the unusual, senseless sentences here and there lacked soul and coherence. Was it the inevitable clunkiness of translating Korean to English, I wondered? Or was this intentional--the author toying with her audience, as if saying: Look how oblique I can be! Look at the raw, open seams of my paragraphs, my sentences, and. find the flaws in them. See how flimsy language is?
The woman's psychiatrist suggests that the overwhelming trauma of losing both her mother and custody of her son in the weeks prior to losing her voice are a simple case of traumatic cause-and-effect. The woman picks up a pen and responds to him, "No. It isn't as simple as that."
Those familiar with Gwangju-born, Suyuri-rased Kang's 2016 Man Booker International Prize winning novel The Vegetarian will find many thematic similarities in Greek Lessons. In The Vegetarian (the first work by a Korean author to be nominated for the award), a woman descends into mental illness owing to her family's indifference and neglect. The sense of solitariness and a life lived largely in rumination, recollection, and avoiding repressed memories is a commonality in Kang's characters between her novels and her poetry.
The woman is not Kang, but they share qualities and experiences. Kang, too, suffers a crippling health condition in the form of periodically recurring migraines. "If I was 100% healthy and energetic I couldn't have become a writer," she told the Guardian in 2017, upon the release of her autobiographical novel The White Book (translated by Deborah Smith).
Kang's cleverness is in challenging readers to determine their own motivation for engaging with her novel, her characters, and their complicated, oftentimes confusing combination of dialogue and reflection. Is the problem in Kang's use of language or the translation of her language from Korean to English, or is it the nature of language itself that creates division between what we are absorbing from the page and what we want from it?
In January, Kang told The New Yorker, "Language is like an arrow that always misses its target by a narrow margin, and is also something that delivers emotions and sensations that are capable of inflicting pain."
It would be unfair to reveal to readers whether there is a neatly packaged ending in which the teacher and the woman pare back their memories and traumas to clearly pinpoint the cause of their failing senses. Greek Lessons, originally written in 2011 and newly translated for English readers by Smith and Emily Yae Won, bears a much greater resemblance in theme, nature, and attitude to Kang's poetry. There are some stunning metaphors or descriptions that arrive unheralded and inflict a visceral sting to the heart. Take, for example, the description of our ordinary bodies that are linked, inextricably, to the cosmic world. "She cannot know that, afloat in the air she has breathed in every night since last spring, were infinitesimal luminous bodies, which have inadvertently entered her respiratory system and are still twinkling there ..."
As the teacher comes to a sense of resignation and acceptance of losing his sight, something he has had his childhood and youth to contemplate and learn to live with, the woman exists in a constant battle of both loving and hating the Korean language, at once both familiar and transient in her body. As readers, we want her to regain her voice. That is the driving desire I felt with every turn of the page: an explanation for the woman's muteness and her ability to regain her voice. Is the key to her ability to express herself, and to convey her pain and love for her son within the grammatical labyrinth of Ancient Greek symbols and sounds?
There is some resolution to be found by the final page, but the questions that linger for readers are not so final. That inexorable need to connect is both stymied by a lack of universal language and enabled by the systems of words and grammar we have learned and mastered to differing abilities. Just as the woman is filled with the twinkling, cosmic dust of the universe--embodying the entirety of the cosmos within her impermanent body--we, as readers, are forming an immeasurable and transient relationship with Kang and her characters. This is why we read. Greek Lessons may not leave readers with a greater understanding of the archaic language, but it will, hopefully, imbue us with a greater respect for the many ways we communicate beyond sound and noise, and how complicated and unifying it is to be fallibly human.
Cat Woods is a Melbourne-based freelance writer with bylines in New York Times, Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, Marie Claire, and The Telegraph. She's a lifelong book nerd, music obsessive, and design addict.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 The Brooklyn Rail, Inc.
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Woods, Cat. "Han Kang's Greek Lessons: This novel may not leave readers with a greater understanding of the archaic language, but it will, hopefully, imbue us with a greater respect for the many ways we communicate beyond sound and noise, and how complicated and unifying it is to be fallibly human." The Brooklyn Rail, May 2023, pp. 98+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A750348617/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d0c6c08a. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.
In ''Greek Lessons,'' Han Kang's latest novel to be translated into English, a young Korean mother is suddenly unable to speak.
GREEK LESSONS, by Han Kang. Translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won.
Study of a new language often begins with words presented as opposites: ''heat'' and ''cold,'' or ''quiet'' and ''loud.'' You know you've progressed in your comprehension of that new language when other words disrupt the neatness of these initial pairings, when the word ''quiet'' arrives with some mental noise, echoing against other possible choices, ''inaudible'' or ''unsaid,'' that might be more precise.
In ''Greek Lessons,'' Han Kang's unnamed narrator finds the echo of words like this, in her mind, so overwhelming that she's lost the ability to speak. She decides to take a course in ancient Greek to see what might be possible in a language other than her native Korean, in which she can ''taste bile at the back of her throat'' at the mere thought of ''arranging a word or two.''
A therapist attributes her speech block to the collision of several unbearable events -- her mother has died and she's lost custody of her young son to a vengeful ex-husband. The therapist's insistence that her loss of speech is a direct result of these other losses strikes her as simplistic. She experienced a prolonged inability to speak once before, in childhood, and as with a stutter, she knows the cause can't be narrowed to any one factor or resolved with a behavioral strategy. It's neurological. She's lost ''the passage that led to speech.''
Han, who received the 2016 Man Booker International Prize for ''The Vegetarian'' and was shortlisted for ''The White Book'' in 2018, is an astute chronicler of unusual, insubordinate women. Her protagonists never shout or throw furniture. Their acts of subversion are subtler, and what they're after eludes easy explanation as well. In ''Greek Lessons,'' the woman doesn't expect language lessons to help her regain custody of her son or recover her ability to speak. One of the allures for her of ancient Greek, in fact, is that nobody's spoken it for centuries. She's drawn to its silence, as is the teacher of her course, who narrates alternating sections of the novel, a sensitive man who is going progressively blind.
The juxtaposition of these two characters, with their respective sensory challenges, isn't particularly nuanced. How the woman and her teacher will ultimately find some solace in each other is postponed until the end, allowing Han to devote the majority of the book to separate flashbacks of extreme sensory experiences that have stayed with them. Of her childhood speech block, the woman recalls how ''words would thrust their way into her sleep like skewers, startling her awake.'' Her teacher recalls his father going blind from the same genetic disease and withdrawing from their family.
As counterpoints to the flashbacks, Han injects fascinating insights on Hangul, the alphabet system used for writing the Korean language, and how it differs from the syntax of ancient Greek, and from German, which the teacher learned in childhood. This is a novel, above all, for readers drawn to considering language itself as a source of self-revelation. While I was reading, an essay by Anne Carson came to mind, on her renowned translations of Sappho and about the silence that ''falls between certain words'' and how our attunement to that silence tells us who we are. Han's alternating narrators are highly attuned to meanings that extend beyond spoken language. By the middle of the novel, the woman reaches a silence so deep that breathing in and out begins to ''resemble speech ... to stir the silence as boldly as the voice does.''
''Greek Lessons'' was published in Korean in 2011 but not translated into English until now, following the global acclaim that greeted her other books. Deborah Smith, who worked solo in translating Han before now, has collaborated with Emily Yae Won on this one. To my ear, with no knowledge of Korean, the collaboration did not noticeably alter the cadence of Han's voice in English. Yet something about that voice seems less certain in this book, less trusting of its ability to convey subtext. Some refrains about snow repeat a bit too often. In the closing pages, various mentions of ''hearts and lips'' could have been left out. Except for these occasional excesses, though, this novel achieves the distinctive sharpness of observation and persuasive narrative power that brought such recognition to her more assured, fully realized books.
Ample evidence emerges in this novel of the psychologically messier, more complex books Han is known for in the English-speaking world. In addition to her incisive writing about bodily responses to language, ''Greek Lessons'' contains some exceptionally poignant scenes about a mother's growing estrangement from her child. When the woman hosts her young son for brief stays, he arrives full of questions she can no longer answer -- at least not aloud, as she could before.
In her despair, she reflects on earlier conversations that convey her son's willingness to think about names and language as intensely as she does. At her suggestion that they come up with names of natural things the two of them most resemble, the son claims ''Sparkling Forest'' for himself and ''Thickly Falling Snow's Sorrow'' for his mother. The boy's perceptive answer evokes the distinctive sensibility they share, the intimate moments they will both lose when the father cuts off the woman's joint custody of her son.
This novel is a celebration of the ineffable trust to be found in sharing language, whether between parent and child, teacher and student, or between words spoken aloud and those traced, painstakingly, with a finger on someone else's waiting palm.
Idra Novey is a translator and novelist. Her new book is ''Take What You Need.''
GREEK LESSONS | By Han Kang | Translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won | 175 pp. | Hogarth | $26
Idra Novey's latest novel is ''Take What You Need.''
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Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 The New York Times Company
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Novey, Idra. "Speechless." The New York Times Book Review, 23 Apr. 2023, p. 8(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A746559465/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6a355486. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.
Greek Lessons. By Han Kang. Translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won. Hogarth; 192 pages; $26. Hamish Hamilton; £16.99
Han Kang was already a literary star in South Korea when "The Vegetarian" was published in 2007, but her reputation was burnished when Deborah Smith's English translation won the International Booker prize in 2016. The surreal and sinister novel chronicled the cruelty inflicted on a woman after she stops eating meat; an overseas audience proved hungry for the story of female oppression and resistance, as well as a narrative style that broke free of realist literary norms.
In the next of Ms Han's novels to be translated, "Human Acts", cruelty is inflicted by the state, not family and friends. It was inspired by a massacre of student protesters in 1980 in the author's home city of Gwangju. Then came "The White Book" , an autobiographical account of a Korean novelist in Warsaw. As she reflects on the city's wartime destruction and rebirth, she also muses on the death of her infant sister.
Loss is a theme of "Greek Lessons", too, Ms Han's latest novel to arrive in English. Elliptical and fragmentary, it toggles between two unnamed characters living in Seoul. One half of the novel is narrated by a teacher of ancient Greek . The other half follows one of his students, a divorced young poet who, rendered mute by the death of her mother, hopes to regain her voice by taking his class.
Ms Han's style creates mystery, yet snippets of back story gradually make things clearer. The woman's loss of speech is a recurrence of a problem that first transpired when she was a teenager. (The remedy then was to learn French.) Adding to her grief is the loss of her nine-year-old son in a custody battle. Her teacher, unsure how to help her communicate, has problems of his own: he is losing his sight.
At the heart of the novel lies the difficulty of giving voice to psychological and emotional dislocation; Ms Han uses the characters' problems as a metaphor for the inadequacy of language in general. But in the closing pages, a story of the mind becomes a story of the body, when an accident leaves the teacher in urgent need of help. A breakthrough in communication suddenly becomes vital.
"The shards of memories shift and form patterns. Without particular context, without overall perspective or meaning. They scatter; suddenly, decisively, they come together," writes Ms Han, during a passage in which the woman recalls a conversation with her son. It is an apt description of how this slender, enigmatic novel works.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
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"Han Kang's new novel, 'Greek Lessons', is a reflection on loss." The Economist, 19 Apr. 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A746334234/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fda18f64. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.
A Korean poet living in Seoul has stopped speaking. It's not a protest, a neurological condition, or a conceptual artwork--the woman in question would like to speak but can't. She visits a therapist, who asks about her childhood memories and recent dreams and twines them into an elegant hypothesis to explain her problem. "I understand how much you've suffered," the therapist says. The woman knows, with "a serene certainty," that the therapist is wrong; he doesn't understand her. But who is going to help her now?
The woman who cannot speak is one of the two protagonists of Greek Lessons (Hogarth, Apr.), Han Kang's latest novel, translated from Korean by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won. The other is a teacher of ancient Greek--a man in his late 30s whose family relocated from South Korea to Germany when he was a child. After the man learns he is slowly losing his sight, he returns to Seoul. The woman enrolls in the ancient Greek course he teaches, hoping that the study of a language that's entirely unfamiliar to her and doesn't feel "worn ragged" by years of use will help her regain her speech. They move slowly toward each other in alternating chapters that describe their ascetic presentday lives, childhood recollections, poems, and letters--his story narrated in first person, hers in third.
Ancient Greek came to fascinate Han because of its grammar. In 2002, she had tea with a publisher who'd studied Greek philosophy. She asked him about the language, and he mentioned the concept of the middle voice; in Greek Lessons, the teacher explains that middle voice is used to express "an action that relates to the subject reflexively."
The idea of a grammatical voice indicating that the subject is acting upon herself became the genesis of Greek Lessons. "I started picturing a single word in the moment before the big bang, which contained all of life's meanings and feelings and sensations together," Han says.
In the novel, a character wakes in horror from a dream of "one single vord, bonded with a tremendous density and gravity," she writes. "A language that would, the moment someone opened their mouth and pronounced it, explode and expand as all matter had at the universe's beginning....a supremely self-sufficient language." The prospect is chilling.
Han explains the story of Greek Lessons over Zoom on a winter day. It's morning in Seoul, where she lives. She describes it as a town that smells of "things that had once been alive going bad." That idea of going bad has something to do with her concerns about language; she dislikes it.
"Maybe because I started my writing with poetry, I always feel that language falls short--short of reaching anything," Han says. "It's like an arrow that flies but always fails to reach the target."
Yet if language is a record of failure, as poets often lament, Greek Lessons suggests that its loss is no solution, either. Newly speechless, the woman also loses custody of her beloved son, whose father plans to send him abroad.
"The entire book," Han says, "is a process of retrieving the first-person voice for this woman." Language comes to seem imperfect but necessary; life is suffering--you can leave your country, love unrequitedly, lose a sense you value deeply-but no other kind of existence is possible.
Centered on one woman's attempt to accomplish something existentially important, Greek Lessons is in some ways a thematic complement to Han's other works, which tend to follow characters, often women, compelled to moral acts that people around them find unintelligible and threatening. The resulting conflicts are often violent, and characters not infrequently harm themselves.
Many Anglophone readers came to Han's work through 2015's The Vegetarian, a book about a woman named Yeong-hye who renounces meat, then eating in general, determined to live harmlessly, like a plant. Yeong-hye's desire to exit a brutal system is met with brutality; the book's scenes of hospital wards and forced feeding are frank and harrowing.
In a later novel, Human Acts, published in English in 2016 (both books, plus a third novel titled The White Book, were translated by Deborah Smith), Han describes the South Korean government's repression of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising: the murders of protesters, including children; their decaying corpses; the casual torture of those who were arrested.
"I actually don't like violence," Han says. "But I want to be truthful. I don't like very violent movies, but when I look into the depth of humans, when I look into the world, I cannot just look away. I feel that I should penetrate the raw truth of humans and the world, rather than enjoy or be fascinated by violence."
In contrast to these works, the bloodiest scene of Greek Lessons is one in which the Greek teacher drops and breaks his glasses while trying to help a bird trapped inside a building. The novel describes powerful and painful emotional states, but it's gentle in tone, closer to The White Book, in which a woman in a European city mourns a sister who died before the woman was born and ponders the individual and communal aftermath of tragic events.
"Before I wrote Greek Lessons and Human Acts," Han says, "I read Sebald's Austerlitz, and I was fascinated with his historical trauma and very personal insight." For her, Greek Lessons offered consolation. "I wanted to touch a very tender and soft part of humans. Suddenly, a scene came to me where an index finger writes something on a palm to communicate. And the fingernails are so severely clipped back that the finger is incapable of harming anyone. I wanted to describe the process of coming closer and closer to this moment of infinitely tender touch."
The characters' search for consolation--through philosophy, psychiatry, poetry, linguistics--carries them beyond language, toward touch. Finally alone together, they are "at once joined and eternally sundered"--a description that would have pleased Rilke, who thought of love as two bordering solitudes. Neither one claims to understand the other: according to the structures of Greek Lessons, such a claim would necessarily be false. But like the Greek philosophers, Han is still intent on understanding something fundamental, and perhaps ineffable, about people.
"My next novel to be published in English, We Do Not Part, deals with another massacre in Korea," she says. "And then I'm going to write another one. I'm not sure if it will be a very bright one, but I'm going in this direction, toward looking into something in humans th'at cannot be harmed or destroyed. Maybe in the end, if I live long, I can reach that part."
BY ELINA ALTER
Elina Alter is the translator of Alla Gorbunova i It's the End of the World, My Love: her translation of Oksana Vasyakina's Wound will be published by Catapult in September.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 PWxyz, LLC
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Alter, Elina. "LANGUAGE BARRIERS: In Han Kang's Greek Lessons, words are never enough." Publishers Weekly, vol. 270, no. 11, 13 Mar. 2023, pp. 29+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A743366171/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b8ee70f2. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.
A WOMAN wanders through the snowbound streets of a European city that, in the second world war, suffered such wholesale obliteration that "the white glow of stone ruins" stretched "as far as the eye could see". During this spell of exile, she recalls the sibling she never met: her mother's first child, who died "less than two hours into life". The baby girl had "a face as white as a crescent-moon rice cake".
From these dual dimensions of grief and memory, one personal and one historical, Han Kang, a South Korean writer, has fashioned a winter book made up of beautiful, tantalising fragments. Its snow-crystals of prose settle into an eerily moving sequence of meditations on destruction, bereavement and rebirth. Amid images of ice and ashes, rice and salt, cloud and moon, the "white things" that signify mourning in Korean and other Asian traditions, the woman learns how "to light a candle for all the deaths and spirits she can remember--including her own."
Readers of Ms Han's novels "Human Acts" and "The Vegetarian" (the second of which won the Man Booker International Prize) will know that each of her books creates a unique frame for its theme. With its brief, lyrical sections, its scatter of enigmatic photographs, "The White Book" feels less like a novel than a manual of wisdom, even of prayer. It seeks to fix memories that, like the recollection of "a dish of wrapped sugar cubes", will "remain inviolate to the ravages of time".
The woman not only journeys "further into my own interior". She observes the unnamed city--perhaps Warsaw--that has risen from annihilation while always honouring its dead. Candles and flowers memorialise the fallen. In contrast, her own country is haunted by its "insufficiently mourned" dead. Obliquely, Ms Han alludes to the 1980 Gwangju massacre of protesters in South Korea--the setting of "Human Acts". In the mind, as in the nation, every lost one demands to be remembered, even though "Nothing is eternal." For a community as for a person, "learning to love life again" takes time. Grieving rituals help. Translated, like Ms Han's previous books, by Deborah Smith with exquisite craft and tact, this luminous album of snow, ash and bone shares the salutary quality of coarse salt-crystals: "the power to preserve…and to heal."
The White Book.
By Han Kang. Translated by
Deborah Smith.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
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"Mourning colour; Korean fiction." The Economist, vol. 425, no. 9066, 11 Nov. 2017, p. 74(US). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A513950314/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=66660d42. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.
The White Book
by Han Kang, translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith
Portobello, 10 [pounds sterling], pp. 128
Before the narrator of The White Book is born, her mother has another child; two months premature, the baby dies 'less than two hours into life'. The narrator is born in the dead baby's place. 'This life,' she writes, in a passage directly addressed to her sister, 'needed only one of us to live it. If you had lived beyond those first few hours, I would not be living now.' In small, breath-like fragments, The White Book, written while Han Kang was on a writers' residency in Warsaw, feels its way through and tries to find meaning in both lives, the narrator's and her sister's--or, rather, the single life they have each inhabited, at and for different times.
Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith, The White Book follows Kang's Human Acts, a novel about the 1980 Gwangju massacre, and The Vegetarian, in which a woman rejects meat, for which Kang and Smith won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. The White Book--slim, fragmented, interspersed with black and white photographs of a performance in which Kang hunches and crouches over pieces of white-grey material and foods--is quieter and subtler; it is meditative and slow and deeply personal.
This is both an autobiographical book and a work of fiction. In a foreign city, haunted by ghosts from its own tragic past, Kang imagines her sister, a spirit, 'hovering at [her] forehead', walking through Warsaw in her place, seeing and experiencing the things Kang comes into contact with. (In Warsaw--a city that was destroyed in 1944 and reconstructed--Kang also sees reflected her sister's life, its destruction and its reconstruction into a life for herself.)
Kang shows her sister objects significant to their shared life. Beginning with the swaddling bands that wrapped her sister's still-breathing body, and then became her shroud, Kang moves through a list of white things to find structure in her sister's story. There are short meditations on salt, rice, breast milk, white hair, sugar cubes and--most movingly--the white clothes that the narrator, her brother and her sisterin-law make as an offering to the spirit of her mother. ('As soon as I held my brother's lighter to the sleeve, a thread of bluetinged smoke spiralled up. After white clothes dissolve into the air this way, a spirit will wear them').
Through such meditations, veins of story emerge. These describe what might have been, had the narrator's sister survived -- 'I think of her living to drink that milk ... I think of her being weaned and then raised on rice porridge, growing up, becoming a woman, making it through every crisis'--and, concurrently, outlines of the narrator's life lived so far. A strange feeling of conflict arises from reading this book. While we mourn the potential of one life passed, we are made continuously aware of the fact that, had the sister lived, the narrator would not have been born.
There are two words for white in Korean, hwin and hayan. Kang chooses hwin for the title of this book. 'Hayan indicates white as an ordinary colour,' she explains in an interview with her publisher, 'but in hwin there might be a certain sadness, the colour of fate.' While there is certainly sadness in this book, there is also a sense of gratitude, of acceptance and of peace. In instances of death, we find life, too--Kang's own and, part way through, the birth also of her son, the twinge of his existence felt over a bowl of boiled rice.
This is a breathtakingly beautiful, compassionate, open, moving book. It is immensely special. In its pages are evidence of a true genius.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
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Hazelton, Claire Kohda. "The colour of fate." Spectator, vol. 335, no. 9875, 2 Dec. 2017, pp. 33+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A524738585/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=54631049. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.
The White Book
Han Kang. Translated by Deborah Smith
Portobello Books, 128pp, 10 [pounds sterling]
Admirers of the South Korean novelist Han Kang are already familiar with the savage, poetic images she uses to write about somatic and spiritual violence. In her Man Booker International Prize-winning novel, The Vegetarian, a housewife who renounces both meat and her own body (she wants to be a tree) is force-fed pork by her father and lusted after by her arborphiliac brother-in-law. In Han's next book, Human Acts, she described the violent suppression by the Korean military dictator Chun Doo-hwan of the 1980 student uprising through the eyes of a carousel of narrators: a boy seeking his friend in piles of corpses, a murdered boy's mother making herself a shrine and a dead boy's lost soul sensing "as a physical force, our existence in the mind of another".
This physicality of the soul dominates Han's latest work of fiction, The White Book. Unlike her previous novels, it neither bears witness to the living nor commemorates the dead but, through a series of trance-like vignettes, consecrates the never-lived.
We learn in the first section ("I") that the narrator's mother gave birth to a premature baby. Evidence for the child's existence is scant and anecdotal: she had a face "white as a crescent moon rice cake", she opened her eyes once, heard her mother's plea--"For God's sake don't die"--and was later buried in white swaddling bands on a mountain. The central section ("She") is the narrator's attempt to build on these few details by seeing the world through her sister's eyes, had she survived. The final part ("All whiteness") reflects on the strange symbiotic relationship between the two girls, transubstantiated throughout the book by a beguiling selection of "white things".
Written while Han was on a writers' residency in Warsaw, the novel is set in a cold, unnamed European city, as alien and linguistically inaccessible to the narrator as her dead sister. Conflating place and person, she wonders how best to communicate with a baby who could neither speak nor comprehend language.
It's a riddle that justifies the novel's imagistic quality, as if through descriptions of white objects or phenomena, the narrator might create a universal language to communicate with those we have lost, or never known. "I wanted to show you clean things," she says to her dead sister. "Before brutality, sadness, despair, filth, pain ... "
It is a profound, beautiful and doomed project. Each "white thing" that she "sees" --rime, frost, a lace curtain, a dropped handkerchief, a clenched fist--is sullied. Just as snow merely hides evidence of a city once brutalised by war, just as white paint conceals stains rather than removing them, so the sister, in her parallel narrative, wanders the strange city only to discover that she, too, merely "imitated the steady gait of one who had never been broken".
There is a tender moment when the narrator imagines her older sister, had she lived, helping her with maths homework: "That's really simple, you're just over thinking it," the imaginary sibling says. Time after time, Han's writing grapples with the insoluble, overwrought nature of trauma. If I have one criticism of the book, it is that I'm not sure about the inclusion of seven black-and-white photos of a woman (presumably Han) holding various objects that appear elsewhere in the novel--a white pebble, swaddling bands, a newborn's gown. They hint at a misjudged lack of confidence in the words (which have, once again, been beautifully translated by Deborah Smith).
In a vignette titled "Laughing whitely", the narrator attempts to translate this peculiar phrase for non-native speakers. It means "laughter that is faint, cheerless, its cleanness easily shattered"; to laugh "whitely" is to "force a laugh, quietly enduring some internal struggle". It can also be done by "someone struggling to part from something inside himself".
The White Book is about trying to part with the burden of being alive because someone else has died. Han's non-linear, disembodied prose is the perfect medium wherein the sisters can coexist: "Were it not the case that life stretches out in a straight line," thinks the resurrected sister, "she might at some point become aware of having rounded a bend. Bringing, perhaps, the realisation that nothing of that past could now be glimpsed were she to cast a quick glance over her shoulder. This road might be covered not with snow or frost but with the soft tenacity of pale-green spring grasses."
The tragedy--and consolation--is that we are all as coloured by the greener grass of a life unlived as we are by the one we are living.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
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Walsh, Megan. "Live and let die." New Statesman, vol. 147, no. 5400, 5 Jan. 2018, p. 42. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A524738996/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1767d592. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.
THE WHITE BOOK By Han Kang
''The Vegetarian'' and ''Human Acts'' introduced English-language readers to the explosive fiction of the South Korean writer Han Kang. Although her new novel, ''The White Book,'' occupies a somewhat quieter register, it too is formally daring, emotionally devastating and deeply political. Its relative smallness of scale -- a scant 157 pages, cut to fit in the palm of the hand -- is deceptive, itself the mark of a supremely confident writer.
All three novels have been translated into English by Deborah Smith, whose work has garnered great acclaim: Her translation of ''The Vegetarian'' won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, and ''The White Book'' was a finalist for the prize in 2016. However, the earlier books have not been without controversy, as several critics noted both errors in the translation of ''The Vegetarian'' and liberties taken with its original phrasing.
The parameters of a translator's task are by no means fixed, and can range from word-for-word renderings -- one thinks of Nabokov's famously literal, and famously controversial, translation of ''Eugene Onegin'' -- to something more akin to interpretation. It's fair to say that Smith's previous translations of Han's fiction veer toward the interpretive. In an interview, she has described ''faithfulness'' as ''an outmoded, misleading and unhelpful concept when it comes to translation.'' Numerous articles have been published about this dispute, and some have argued that the amplified register of Smith's work -- the addition of copious adjectives and embellishments -- successfully rendered Han's fiction more palatable to a Western readership. Whether a more conventionally faithful translation would have won Han the international audience she now enjoys is a moot point. But the controversy raises a pertinent question: whether the task of translation is simply to bridge the divide between cultures or to somehow also represent that divide. This question is also germane to ''The White Book,'' which is narrated by a South Korean writer newly arrived in Warsaw.
The narrator travels through a cityscape that bears visible traces of World War II: ''The boundaries that separate old from new, the seams bearing witness to destruction, lie conspicuously exposed. It was on that day, as I walked through the park, that she first came into my mind.'' That ''she'' is the narrator's older sister, who died ''less than two hours into life.'' ''They lay there on the kitchen floor, my mother on her side with the dead baby clutched to her chest, feeling the cold gradually enter into the flesh, sinking through to the bone.'' The confluence of the resurrected city and the lost sister becomes the through-line for a novel told in flashes and fragments, as an act of memory and incantation.
Smith's rendering of ''The White Book'' cannot be accused of prolixity. The novel is composed of short entries centered on a word or phrase having to do with the color white, opening with a list that includes ''salt,'' ''shroud'' and ''blank paper.'' From this, the narrator constructs the novel: ''Now, in this moment, I feel that vertiginous thrill course through me. As I step recklessly into time I have not yet lived, into this book I have not yet written.''
What follows is a text shot through with ''vertiginous thrill.'' The dead sister haunts the narrator: ''For there are moments, lying in the darkened room, when the chill in the air is a palpable presence. Don't die. For God's sake don't die. ... Perhaps I, too, have opened my eyes in the darkness, as she did, and gazed out.''
The novel moves fluidly between the ''I'' and the ''she,'' in shifts between first and third person, but also in the slow collapse of the boundary between the narrator and the sister, the living and the dead. This culminates in the forging of an alternate history of the sister's birth: ''And yet, before dawn, when the first milk finally came from her mother's breasts and she pressed her nipple between the tiny lips, she found that, despite everything, the baby was still breathing. Though she had, by now, slipped from consciousness, the nipple in her mouth encouraged a soft swallowing, gradually growing stronger.''
Resurrection is a theme throughout Han's work, one that is tied up in political and collective memory. In ''Human Acts,'' a writer observes an illegal police raid on a group of activists. In it, she sees the specter of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, a sustained protest against South Korea's military government that resulted in hundreds of civilian deaths: ''I remember being glued to the television ... and surprising myself with the words that sprang from my mouth: But that's Gwangju. ... The radioactive spread is ongoing. Gwangju had been reborn only to be butchered again in an endless cycle. It was razed to the ground, and raised up anew in a bloodied rebirth.''
Among other things, ''The White Book'' is an urgent plea for the ritual power of mourning -- for its significance in terms of both personal and historical restitution. ''She thought of certain incidents in her own country's history,'' Han writes, ''the country she had left in order to come here, of the dead that had been insufficiently mourned. Trying to imagine those souls being thus eulogized, in the very heart of the city streets, she realized that her country had never once done this properly.''
Han explores occupation in multiple forms and contexts, from the Japanese occupation to political demonstrations, always tracing the ''radioactive spread'' of trauma. But she also makes a case for empathy, one that recognizes both its power and its limitations: ''I saw differently when I looked with your eyes. I walked differently when I walked with your body. ... But it didn't come off as I intended. Again and again I peered into your eyes, as though searching for form in a deep, black mirror.'' In this subtle and searching novel, Han, through Smith, proposes a model of genuine empathy, one that insists on the power of shared experience but is not predicated on the erasure of difference.
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THE WHITE BOOK By Han Kang Translated by Deborah Smith 157 pp. Hogarth. $20.
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PHOTO: Han Kang (PHOTOGRAPH BY PARK JAEHONG)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 The New York Times Company
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Source Citation
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Kitamura, Katie. "Mourning Becomes Her." The New York Times Book Review, 3 Mar. 2019, p. 8(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A576639890/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=361b80d2. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.