Snow in the throat.
Earth in the eyes.
So writes the woman in Greek in the margins of her notebook, as she waits for her lesson to resume. The first line, “A woman lies on the ground,” is one of the elementary ancient Greek sentences the class has learned during the lesson. Yet the short lines she has scrawled are hardly a mere exercise in composition—they’re a self-portrait.
Acclaimed Gwangju-born author of The Vegetarian (Hogarth, 2016) and Human Acts (Hogarth, 2017), Han Kang first published Greek Lessons in its original Korean in 2011. The story is deceptively simple: an unnamed woman who has lost her ability to speak learns ancient Greek from an unnamed man who has lost his ability to see, their disabilities resulting in painful family fissures but an unlikely understanding of one another. Yet as their bond burgeons, Han’s text reveals an intense, intricate portrayal of romance that bears witness to the fragility and isolation of the self, and the perseverance of intimacy in the face of this.
Such concepts are foregrounded immediately in Greek Lessons, as Han opens the novel with an invocation of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’s epitaph, a quote from a Norse saga: “He took the sword and laid the naked metal between them.” Here, the unnamed man is reflecting on his personal cleaving from his environment, imagining his blindness as “a knife between [him] and the world,” in what feels like a marked reference to Borgesian concerns the signifier versus the signified. Borges’s exploration of the tension between the material (signifier) and ideal (signified), around which many of his works are centered, enters crucially into Greek Lessons, as the man and woman struggle to assign conceptual ideals to the tangible forms of their narrowing internal landscape. As the man’s storyline unfolds, and his blindness gradually worsens, Borges’s oeuvre features prominently as the character’s intellectual interests, as well implicitly informs his private ruminations. In fact, Han appears to pay homage to Borges even in certain areas of the novel’s textuality; one brief chapter in which the man struggles to distinguish the events of a dream from the obscurity of waking life—upon waking from a nightmare, the man is helpless but to “simply confirm that there is no outside world that [he] can once more escape to from this dream”—reads much like a story Borges himself might have written. While the woman’s character is less explicitly enraptured with Borges, these same questions regarding the boundaries of personhood arise through the character of the woman, who strives to retain her proprium when she can no longer conceive of her mother tongue, and thus can no longer stake her identity on verbal communication. Instead of a person, the woman feels to be “some harsh, solid substance that will never commingle with any being, living or otherwise.” As Borges describes the ego death he endured after growing in notoriety as an author in the story “Borges y yo,” the man and the woman must likewise contend with where to place their sense of self having been severed from nearly all humanity.
In an interview with The New Yorker, Han clarifies that communication and its imprecisions lie at the heart of Greek Lessons, noting, “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.” During this interview, Han also explains her emphasis on the ancient Greek middle voice, which is another recurring motif of self-containment throughout the story, recalling, “I would sometimes picture all of life’s meanings, feelings, and sensations condensed into a single word, like the moment before the big bang.” Language’s capacity for compression arises within the woman’s fascination with this construction, which she learns during her language lessons at a local academy. One of the first Greek words we see both the man and woman analyze closely is διεφθάρθαι—“he killed himself.” While the man teaches and the woman takes notes, we learn that in the middle voice, a verb’s action, tense, and most importantly, both actor and object, are compressed within a singular construction. As the woman intently writes διεφθάρθαι, she observes the cruel exactitude of the middle voice in Greek, identifying it as “a supremely self-sufficient language,” one “that can part the lips only after irrevocably determining causality and manner.” Given how Borges’s themes reverberate throughout the novel, the characters’ obsession with the middle voice could very well symbolize a unification of the signifier and the signified at once: the signifier being the semantics of the construction, and the signified being its self-possession and continence. Thus, as the characters’ inability to produce language or observe material objects (signifiers) results in the fragmentation of their perceptions of personhood (signified), the middle voice provides comfort to two figures who have experienced the chasm between these two moods and are grappling physically to overcome it.
The ruthlessness the woman relishes of Greek, however, is notably absent from the woman’s careful analysis of her mother tongue, Korean. She remembers as a young girl playfully tinkering with Hangul phonemes, until she arrives at 숲 (woods), a word that like διεφθάρθαι is perfectly enclosed within itself—διεφθάρθαι semantically, and 숲 phonetically. As the woman, at this point a primary school girl, sounds out 숲 aloud, she discovers the sibilant to be “a word completed through silence . . . pronunciation, meaning, and form were all wrapped around in stillness.” Indeed, the phonetic composition of 숲, s-oo-p, foreshadows the muteness that will befall her, as the oo vowel (necessarily voiced) are walled in by the unvoiced s and p. And indeed, as her capabilities to verbalize fall away in her adult life, and her words and meaning begin to come “from a place deeper than tongue or throat,” the places where language falls unvoiced—that is, silent—become ubiquitous, thus secluding the woman within herself.
It is here, through the two protagonists’ apparent disabilities, that Han proposes a discourse of translation that transcends the well-discussed stumbling blocks of lexical, national, or cultural systems. Anne Carson’s theory of translatability, which she details in her essay “Variations on the Right to Remain Silent,” herein likening the voiceless to the untranslatable and calling the latter “a word that goes silent in transit,” feels useful to probing Han’s thesis, given Carson’s attention to the physicality and phenomenology of silence. While the man may still technically be able to speak, both he and the woman are similarly barred by a non-communicable element of their experience, as they are both confined to their respective inner worlds. As the woman’s language slips away from her, so does her power to make herself understood, as though her entire interiority were untranslatable. Likewise, the man’s failing eyesight and thus compulsory interpretation of his surroundings and reliance on a permanently incomplete visual schema also fits a translational framework of sorts. While there are nods to traditionally translation-oriented arguments placed throughout Greek Lessons—such as the various instances in which the characters must translate between Korean and German, Chinese, and Greek—Han’s line of questioning instead pursues the “translation” required to overcome barriers formed and contained within the body: speaking and seeing.
Indeed, the presence of the body underpins the loss of communication that the man and the woman both suffer—that is, the self-destructive body, the physical excruciation of losing sight and speech, and ultimately, what happens when two such bodies come into contact. This divide is made apparent through the various narrative voices the novel assumes: threaded throughout the neutral third-person omniscient voice that recounts the actions of the man and woman in their present circumstances are the first-person voices of both protagonists from an earlier lifetime, when they both moved more freely through the world. The result is the text’s palpable density of metaphor and literary device, including numerous allusions to literary and philosophical figures—besides Borges, ideas from Plato, Socrates, and others are closely entwined with the novel’s events. Yet while these citations of famous thinkers (such as the Aristotelian concept of potentiality dynamis, which serves to illuminate the male character’s experience and cognizance of his slow journey to blindness) do impressively scaffold the novel’s theoretical discourse, such frequent footnotes may weigh on the story’s otherwise delicate unfolding.
However, the notion of being divorced both from one’s outside environment and within oneself manifests with immense nuance through the practical translation of Han’s text itself. According to Debora Smith, it would also seem that this Borgesian tension of a body divided between the signifier and signified, the bifurcation between the corporeal and the psychological self, is an issue that arises in the confrontation between Han’s Korean text and its English rendering. While Smith (co-translator of Greek Lessons with Emily Yae Won, and translator of several of Han’s other works including The Vegetarian and Human Acts) has faced controversy for her tendency to expand and embellish Han’s spare Korean into a more ornate English lexicon, the life she breathes into her translation is clearly a creative process all her own. In an earlier edition of Asymptote, Smith has explained the need to eliminate the redundancy of the “body” when translating from Korean to English, yet she at times rejects this Anglo-normative need to do justice to “the body as something separate from the self.” In the case of Greek Lessons, Smith’s decision to privilege “the sense that physicality, embodied existence in the world, can be rapturously beautiful as well as violently brutal” is felt keenly as the characters endure both the physical and emotional anguish of dismemberment from their material existences, and the text is richly visceral with imagery of the flesh—the woman suffers words that “thrust their way into her sleep like skewers,” while the man’s eyes burn “as through a thin acid had been poured onto them” when he attempts to look at the sun.
The story comes to a head when an accident obliges the man and woman push back against their limitations and work together without a concrete method of communication, their intimacy unmistakable all the same—where the characters rupture the barriers that have immured them. Han recalls this collision as “a tactile moment in which the softest parts of two people meet.” And as they are tentatively freed from their individual untranslatable torments of darkness and silence, the narrative reaches a fever pitch of tenderness and redemption, in which Han invites us to ponder: what will always tether us to other people, when we are sequestered within ourselves? And who are we, without other people?
