Han Kang, the South Korean author who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, achieved her first major success in the English-speaking world with The Vegetarian, her first novel translated into English (which was her third written in Korean). The book was released in English in 2015 and became an immediate success, securing a spot on the Evening Standard bestseller list. The following year, it went on to win the Man Booker international prize for Han and her young English translator, Deborah Smith.
In the summer of 2015, Han was the resident author for the Korean-English literary translation workshop at the annual summer school of the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT), spending a week at the University of East Anglia (UEA). She was already an established, prize-winning author in Korea and had recently published the controversial novel that Smith would later translate as Human Acts.
During the July 2015 summer school, Deborah Smith conducted a workshop with Han for six aspiring Korean translators, an event funded by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. Han later commented that the event as a whole was “on a larger scale and more intensive than any other translation program I had previously heard about or experienced”.
It was clear that Han was a significant literary figure, and her quiet but firm presence underscored the power of her writing. Workshop participant Roxanne Edmunds remarked: “The great thing about the workshops was that we were able to work on the translation with the author. It was a little intimidating at first, but Han put us at ease with her enthusiasm.”
Fellow participant (who later became a Korea Times translation prizewinner) Sophie Bowman told me:
I remember that in the workshop we spent an hour or so moving around a comma, adding it to the sentence, taking it out. And spent a long time discussing the colour and feel and look of a cardigan one of the characters wore and how it signified. I was quite amazed at how we could do this in all seriousness – labouring over such details (not even there on the page), when I had been working until then on tight deadlines and weekly translation quotas. But Han’s work stood up to that scrutiny and expansive kind of reading.
Victoria Caudle, another of the workshop participants and now a doctoral candidate at UCLA, added:
Working with Han, I experienced a writer who respected translation as its own process of writing. She was fascinated by how we would agonise over how to express the slightest movement or smallest image in the text. Overall, I remember how generous she was, how softly she spoke and how strong her words were.
After a full week of intense discussion, the translation group produced an excerpt—barely a page long—from Han’s short story Europa. However, the significance of such activities always lies at least as much in the process as in the product.
The workshop concluded with a joint reading of the translated text during the Summer School’s finale, which took place at Dragon Hall in Norwich, the beautiful medieval home of the National Centre for Writing, BCLT’s partner.
Participants Bowman and Caudle later co-founded the SmokingTigers, a Korean-English literary translator collective, along with several other alumni. Bolstered by the success of her Vegetarian translation, Deborah Smith established Tilted Axis Press, which itself went on to win the International Booker prize in 2022 for Tomb of Sand, written by Geetanjali Shree and translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell.
Responding to Han’s Nobel victory, Sooyoung Chon, the president of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, remarked: “Han Kang’s Nobel prize in literature is a pivotal moment that highlights LTI Korea’s efforts to introduce Korean literature to the world.” While BCLT has continued its close partnership with LTI Korea on various subsequent summer school workshops, the initial 2015 session has proven especially consequential.
Source: THE CONVERSATION Academic rigour, journalistic flair
