Behind the walls of the publishing industry, countless decisions are made to bring our favorite novels to our shelves. These decisions grow ever greater when it comes to translations, and particularly translations into languages other than English. In the following essay, Linnea Gradin explores the complex process of bringing Korean literature to Sweden, featuring commentary from Swedish translators and publishers in her analysis of monumental author Han Kang’s latest release in translation: 작별하지 않는다/Jag tar inte farväl/We Do Not Part. Discussing indirect translation, questions of form, and even the choices made in translating a single word, Gradin presents both the burdens and blessings of such a unique language pair.
Han Kang, one of South Korea’s biggest international authors, broke into the English-speaking literary fiction space with a bang in 2016 when she won the International Booker Prize for The Vegetarian (originally published in 2007), a darkly insightful look at Korean society told through the story of a woman who one day decides to stop eating meat in a quiet act of resistance that turns increasingly obsessive. That same year, Human Acts (originally published in 2014)—a novel that delves into painful parts of the country’s past—was also published in English, further cementing Kang as a leading voice of Korean literature worldwide.
Born in the city of Gwangju (where Human Acts is set), Kang is from a family of writers: her father is a teacher and award-winning novelist, and her two brothers are writers too. Kang herself has been widely praised and won many prestigious awards both domestically and internationally, and is known for her ‘poetic’ yet spare and quiet style among Korean readers. In her work, she often comes back to themes of remembrance and Korean history, approaching the subjects in a deeply empathetic though notably neutral way, never telling the readers what to feel or think. After winning the Booker Prize, her work—particularly the English translations of The Vegetarian and Human Acts by Deborah Smith—found itself at the center of discussions about the complexities of translation.
With her latest book, We Do Not Part, scheduled for English-language publication in January 2025 (almost a year after it was published in several European countries), I again find myself reflecting on translation and publication practices—and how different stories are mediated across different parts of the world.
The first time I seriously considered the realities of translation, I was doing something I almost never do: reading a book translated into Swedish, my first language. At some point in my life I had started reading almost exclusively in English, and then made an unspoken rule to only read translated literature in English as well. I was living in England, where English translations are obviously much more prevalent than Swedish ones, and besides, I found Swedish translations of English choppy and stiff—maybe because I’m fluent enough in both to notice. As a result, I would only read a Swedish translation if the source language was another Scandinavian language (which I imagined would be a more natural fit), or on the rare occasion that the text wasn’t yet available in English. This was the case of Han Kang’s We Do Not Part.
All that said: a few years ago, I found myself capitalizing on a “Buy four, get one free” deal at my local bookstore and purchased the Swedish translations of Sun-mi Hwang’s The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly and Han Kang’s Human Acts. I told myself that the Korean originals were so far from both English and Swedish, linguistically speaking, that it wouldn’t matter which language the texts were translated into. And I was mostly right; I noticed no odd phrasing, and I particularly enjoyed Human Acts. But it was only later that I discovered that they were both re-translations of the English versions, and not direct translations of the Korean originals.
Discovering this phenomenon of “translation-hopping” (also known as indirect translation) firmly established my fascination with translated literature, not only as a reader, but also as someone who is fascinated by the politics of publishing. On the one hand, indirect translations can be used to fill a gap in the market, and—for practical or financial reasons—it is sometimes easier, especially for smaller languages like Swedish, to find English-to-Swedish translators than translators that work from another small language, like Korean. According to the Swedish publisher, when Kang’s English translations blew up in the United Kingdom, the Korean-to-Swedish translators would have needed eighteen months to complete the The Vegetarian, and a further few months for Human Acts—which, in the already slow world of publishing, would have set publication back two to three years—whereas an English-to-Swedish translation would ensure that Swedish readers could have access to Kang’s writing while the Booker win was still on everyone’s mind. In this way, re-translations can offer smaller-language markets a chance to keep up with trends, and help to contribute to a more diverse literary landscape.
But as a reader, you’re often not aware of these behind-the-scenes decisions, and when I discovered that the translations I had been reading were in fact not of the originals, it just felt wrong. This sense, almost of betrayal, was rooted in some subconscious hope that the texts I was reading were the same as those that readers of the original language would experience. But if the translator can’t even read the original, this idealized (albeit misconstrued) notion of what translation is drifts even further out of reach.
Of course, on a logical plane, most of us know that no translation will ever be an exact replica of the original, and even word-for-word translations will go through a process of transformation. But indirect translations turn the volume up a bit on these age-old questions: How much creative freedom is a translator allowed, and how can we best safeguard the intentions of the original text? Is it more important to convey the original text “word for word” and leave it to the reader to overcome any potential awkwardness? Or should translators focus more on capturing the essence and feeling of a text through words that are already familiar to their readers, even if it means deviating even further from the original?
Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in between, or there is no answer at all. But when you rely on indirect translation, it is hard to even enter the conversation. Just like each reader brings their own interpretation to the reading experience, so each translator brings theirs. With indirect translations, the original text will always be filtered through the English translator’s interpretation before it is filtered through the Swedish, and there’s no good way of knowing where they have strayed from the original and why. It will thus always echo both the strengths and the weaknesses of the English translation, and any awkwardness will be the result of English-to-Swedish difficulties, rather than Korean-to-Swedish. It could be that these types of “errors” are easier for Swedish readers to subconsciously correct than ones based on a language they are much less familiar with, but it obscures the specific challenges that arise in Korean-Swedish translations, and thus the joy of these two languages meeting.
This discussion is made even more poignant in the case of Han Kang, for whom the English translation of Human Acts by Deborah Smith has been both widely praised and criticized for its rather liberal approach to translation, which Smith has discussed in an essay for Asymptote. When The Vegetarian and Human Acts were then re-translated into Swedish based on the English versions, the creativity of Smith’s translations carried over. According to the Swedish publisher, it has been argued that the Swedish translations of both The Vegetarian and Human Acts are in some ways closer to Smith’s English translations than the Korean originals, in the sense that they, intentionally or not, mimic the uniqueness of Smith’s versions, rather than that of Han Kang’s.
What, then, of Kang’s most recent work in Swedish and English translation, We Do Not Part?
For anyone concerned about indirect translations, there is good news: since the release of Han Kang’s The White Book, Kang has been rendered into Swedish directly from Korean by translator duo Okkyoung Park and Anders Karlsson, which has given Swedish publishers the ability to make their own decisions on when and where to take creative liberties. However, this doesn’t necessarily guarantee “faithful” translation (what does that even mean?)—as with any language pair, translation between small languages offers unique challenges and semantic hurdles of its own.
As mentioned, I first read Han Kang in Swedish when I incidentally encountered the indirect translation of Human Acts. Based on real events, this harrowing story follows a wandering boy in the aftermath of the Gwangju uprising, a student protest in May 1980 that was violently suppressed by South Korea’s military regime. To this day, it is one of my all-time favorite novels for the way it deals with such a heavy topic with sensitivity, engaging with the tragedy without feeling gratuitous.
Years later, reading We Do Not Part first in Swedish and then in English via an early ARC—and now living in South Korea myself—I can’t help but see connections to her earlier work as Kang returns to similar themes. We Do Not Part follows the author Kyungha (Gyeongha in Swedish), who suffers from nightmares and migraines after writing a book about a massacre. In the sweltering Seoul summer, Kyungha experiences a physical and mental collapse, struggling with everyday life as dreams and visions torment her. Wasting away in isolation, she takes cold showers to escape the heat, and occasionally, walks to the restaurant across the street to eat 죽 (juk).
There doesn’t seem to be much keeping Kyungha tethered to this world. But, when she receives a phone call from a friend who’s been in a terrible accident, she agrees to fly to the southern isle of Jeju to care for the friend’s pet bird until she recovers. While on Jeju, Kyungha is reminded of her previous visits to the island: the stories her friend used to tell her about her family, and the island’s tragic but largely unacknowledged past.
In a mixture of dreams, memories, and flashbacks, the imagery shifts from gently falling snow to blizzards as the water washes away all evidence of harm. As both Kyungha and her friend convalesce in their own ways, the story of another bloody massacre gradually comes to light. Throughout it all, Kyungha eats 죽.
It is this word, 죽, that I keep returning to as I consider the peculiarities of translating between two small languages like Korean and Swedish. In the Swedish translation of We Do Not Part by Park and Karlsson, 죽 has been rendered as risgröt, or rice porridge: a translation which is correct, but doesn’t quite capture the nuance of the original word. The Korean 죽 is a light yet nurturing porridge—commonly made with rice, but sometimes made with other grains and legumes—and often eaten when sick. Making 죽 for someone is a sign of care, as years of interacting with Korean culture and people has taught me.
The much richer Swedish risgröt, on the other hand, is a hearty and festive food, boiled in milk and mainly eaten during the Christmas season. As far as I know, it holds no deeper meaning beyond signaling the arrival of the holidays, though the generalized gröt, or porridge, does hold some connotations of health and wellness.
By contrast, the English translators e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris have opted for an italicized transliteration of the original Korean word, ‘juk,’ perhaps partly in recognition of the cultural significance and some untranslatable quality that this small word holds.
Having lived in South Korea for a year and studied the language for many more, I am partial to the way that yaewon and Morris have approached this. It feels more faithful to the context of the story: a woman trying to heal her trauma, and a country trying to heal its collective wounds. Juk becomes emblematic of the process of recuperation that Kang serves the reader.
But I do have to ask myself whether this type of translation would have been possible in Swedish. Translation theory and preferences aside, though a Swedish transliteration system for Korean does exist, it is not as standardized nor as widely used as the English—even though the Swedish vowels ‘å’ and ‘ö’ are phonetically much closer to some Korean vowels than the strange configurations that English has to resort to. Furthermore, in an email, the Swedish translators noted that while words like ‘kimchi’ and ‘soju’ may have become viable in Swedish text, ‘juk’ has not yet reached this level of cultural saturation. They are also of the opinion that there’s no specific cultural significance to the word that the Swedish ‘risgröt’ doesn’t capture, and in either case, the context already makes it clear to readers why Kyungha can stomach eating it. Even so, yaewon and Morris are partial to transliteration here, as am I. Neither choice is more “right” than the other, as even the somewhat awkward ‘risgröt’ manages to provide the reader with a sense of comfort, but it does seem to be a choice informed at least partially by what amount of cultural literacy the translators expect of the reader; depending on the target audience, publishers and translators sometimes prefer to assume that readers are starting from absolute scratch, especially when the source language is considered particularly unfamiliar to the readership, as in the case of Swedish readers of Korean literature.
Instead of juk, Park and Karlsson spent considerably more energy on big picture issues like trying to untangle Kang’s use of tense throughout the novel and the passages that Kang has written in Jeju dialect—distinct enough for some to consider it its own language.
As Kyungha visits the island, the reader is transported back in time through flashbacks and memories to witness the gruesome repression of the Jeju uprising of 1948–49, during which 14,000–30,000 people are estimated to have been killed and some 40,000 displaced to Japan. After decades of censorship, the records of these events are limited; this history’s inaccessibility is reflected in Kang’s use of language, which many Korean readers struggle to understand, and the fragmented structure of the narrative.
Park and Karlsson tell me that they normally avoid translating dialects because it feels a bit inauthentic and contrived, but in this case they felt it played a big role in the narrative and decided to approach these passages through a sense of contrast: trying to capture the distinct and lovable Jeju-accent by giving these sections a more old-fashioned, colloquial, and softer feel, even though Kang uses it to recount atrocities. This produces a potent dissonance between form and content.
I must admit, however, that despite reading the novel both in Swedish and in English, I did not know that parts of the narrative were written in dialect until a friend informed me. That said, these sections landed like a gut-punch, so if we take the goal of a translation as conveying the same experience of a text from one readership to another, it seems to have been successful.
I believe this is because Kang has an astute ability to write about tragic events with respect and care, seen across her oeuvre and particularly in Human Acts and We Do Not Part, which shines through even in translation. Though the two books are loosely connected, We Do Not Part is quite distinct from its predecessor, with an erratic and sometimes hard-to-follow narrative where scenes nestle within scenes and readers are forced to stay alert as Kang switches tenses seemingly at random. Where Human Acts is bold and outraged, We Do Not Part has a much more somber tone that is at times hard to interpret, made all the more complicated by the structure of the text.
With such a fragmented narrative, Kang relies heavily on motifs to tie the threads of We Do Not Part together: snowflakes, birds, tidal waves, tree trunks, and, of course, juk. While the Jeju dialect at first seems to be a more load-bearing element of the novel, one that might affect the reading experience more than a single word, it is juk that feels like the beating heart of the story to me, as the narrative time spent eating juk is another way that Kang urges readers not to forget, word by word and spoon by spoon.
Where to draw the line between what to translate and what to leave “untranslated,” or when to depart from the original text, is a case-by-case judgment that every translator has to grapple with, and translators are in the best position to make an informed choice based on the context of the publishing landscape and their own understanding of both cultures. This small word, then, can tell us a lot about the difficulties of translating between languages, especially when the interaction between those two languages is so limited and translators bear the responsibility of introducing readers, sometimes for the first time, to an entire literary landscape, as is with Swedish and Korean. While I would gladly be momentarily confused by new and unfamiliar words—with the ability to look them up later and learn something new—publishers and translators often have different preferences in their translations, and it is often these details that might differ from one translation to another, rather than bigger structural issues, where the effect produced seems to be the main concern.
Juk besides, the quality of both the English and Swedish translations of We Do Not Part is rather encouraging for readers of Kang in all languages, indicating that no particular Germanic language is “better” than another for translating a language like Korean when the proper resources are put into it, and readers can rest easy knowing that the translators have chosen what they think will work best for their readership. Even so, just as each translator and each reader brings their own experiences to the text, so too does the language in which we read affect our experience.
Being able to read in more languages than my native tongue puts me in a position where I can choose translations that best suit my tastes, compare and contrast, and access texts that have not yet reached one market or another. In an ideal world we would not have to rely on indirect translations, but for readers who read in Swedish or English exclusively, translations are key to increasing access and cultural literacy, and any translation—perhaps even one that is indirect—might be better than none. Still, I can’t help but wonder what the result would have been if We Do Not Part had been translated into Swedish based on the English translation. Probably a completely viable translation, which, in a pinch, would have been better than no translation at all, but also one shaped by the choices of English translators for an English-speaking audience. In such a case, we might not even have the privilege of discussing details like juk or how to capture a dialect, because the choice would have already been made by the first translator. While no translation is ever perfect or complete, in that they can never be exactly what the original was, it is just those “untranslatable” qualities between languages and cultures that make translation exciting. With direct translations, Swedish readers get to fully join the conversation and experience the joy of exploring the unique meeting point between Korean and Swedish, from the larger questions of how to capture a dialect, to a warm bowl of juk.
Linnea Gradin is a freelance writer from Sweden, currently based in South Korea. She holds an MPhil in the Sociology of Marginality and Exclusion from the University of Cambridge and has always been interested in matters of representation, particularly in literature. She has also studied Publishing Studies at Lund University and as a writer and the editor of Reedsy’s freelancer blog, she has worked together with some of the industry’s top professionals to organize insightful webinars, develop resources to make publishing more accessible, and write about everything writing and publishing related, from how to become a proofreader, to avoiding ‘white room syndrome’, and what a novella is. Catch some of her book reviews here and here.
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