Risgröt or juk? On Han Kang’s We Do Not Part and Translating Between Small Languages

August 28, 2024 | in Essays | by Linnea Gradin

[Indirect translation] obscures the specific challenges that arise in Korean-Swedish translations, and thus the joy of these two languages meeting.

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.

Teaching and Learning Narrative Identity

October 8, 2018 | in Essays | by Claire Jacobson

"Though there is no substitute for language immersion in pursuit of fluency, you don’t need to leave home...all you need is a book"

What does it take to truly communicate? In this essay, Claire Jacobson takes us on a journey from language classrooms to the souqs of Morocco, exploring the narrative frameworks that create culture. Read on to discover the differences between learning a language, and the narrative identities that language use is built on.

Humans are inveterate storytellers. We narrativize our memories, use allegory and metaphor to communicate complex ideas, and search for meaning in suffering by placing it in the narrative arc of our lives. “When someone asks you who you are,” writes Richard Kearney, “you tell your story. That is, you recount your present condition in the light of past memories and future anticipations. You interpret where you are now in terms of where you have come from and where you are going to.” Or, as Paul Ricoeur says, “Selfhood is a cloth woven of stories told.”

But it’s not only individuals, Kearney writes. “Communities come to know themselves in the stories they tell about themselves.” When families gather, we always tell stories, sometimes new ones but mostly the old ones over and over—these stories are part of what makes us family. No Christmas celebration in my home is complete without reading about shepherds and wise men and the sociopolitical implications of the term “messiah” in first-century Palestine. These stories are part of what marks us as people of faith and also total nerds. A few weeks ago, my boss told me about the day we went from one bookmobile in town to two, traveling around to neighborhoods without access to the public library—this is one of the many stories that place me firmly in Iowa City, the only city I’ve ever known where you can find inter-bookmobile competition drama.

Zsuzanna Gahse’s Europe: Like Her New Book, It’s a Collection

March 2, 2017 | in Interviews | by Chenxin Jiang

Translations are more or less a doubling of life, or rather, a translation is the doubling of a book’s life.

Zsuzanna Gahse’s strange and eloquent meditation on the question of what, or rather, who “Europe” is has only become more relevant over the course of the past year in politics. Gahse’s Europe is the continent that shares her name with a princess abducted by Zeus. “Europe consists of its disintegration,” she writes. Gahse’s writing is all the more relevant for not being “topical”: these prescient thoughts on Europe’s disintegration date from 2004, the year of the EU’s most ambitious expansion. Her Europe is composed of a collection of accents, languages, and landscapes, “a collection of mountain ridges wrinkling the earth.” It’s an Europe for travellers, migrants, and lovers.

Her first book to be published in English comes out this month with Dalkey Archive in Chenxin Jiang’s translation. The translator and writer spoke shortly before the book’s release.

Chenxin Jiang (CJ): The Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote of you a few days ago: “As a master of short prose, she has become a truly European author.” Is the short prose form central to your being a European author?

Zsuzanna Ghase (ZG): Short compact narratives and even individual sentences can be memorable and indeed arresting. Whether in prose, poetry, or drama, these types of writing have a remarkable role to play in the modern world, and the endless (serious and unserious) ways of playing on them constitute an experimental challenge. As for being a European author, I certainly am one, in that I don’t focus on any one country (or my so-called “own” country) in my books, but am interested in many different countries.

CJ: In what sense are the pieces in Volatile Texts part of what the first piece would call “a collection”?

ZG: The word “collection” only applies to the first piece in the book and the pictures of Europe it presents. Europe can be described as a collection of various customs and histories, different languages, climates, political arrangements and so on; a collection that is both well- and less-than-well-developed. You could spend a long time surveying the cuisines alone. All that taken together is Europe: in other words, a collection.

But the individual pieces in Volatile Texts are carefully composed. As such, they do not constitute an arbitrarily assembled collection—hence the subtext of Europe that runs throughout. The fact that a Hamburger can become a Roman and a woman from France an American in one of the Volatile Texts speaks to the porousness of identity, to the existence of a collection of identities.

CJ: In Volatile Texts, you write that “languages [are] shaped by landscape, by topography.” How has your own attentiveness to language and your writing been shaped by living in Switzerland?

ZG: In the mountains, in order to make yourself understood between the cliffs, you need a different voice from the voice you’d use on the plains. It must be true in the Rockies too, that voices have to prevail against the mountains. Conditions are different on the tranquil plains: for instance, in windswept northern Germany, I’ve observed that people talk with a distinct singsong, so that the wind doesn’t take all their syllables and sounds with it. The striking number of phonological shifts in Swiss German, which might have to do with the topography of the landscape, has always interested me—not to mention the fact that Switzerland has four languages. Because of these linguistic boundaries and the different regions within Switzerland, I began playing with the idea of depicting Switzerland, of all places, as Europe—since, as you know, Switzerland is part of the continent but not part of the EU.