Translation and the Nobel Prize

Han Kang’s The Vegetarian

1.

Last Spring, I wrote a post about Elaine Hsieh Chou’s debut novel Disorientation—and the hilarious situation of the protagonist’s boyfriend Stephen. A Japanese language translator, he was completely self-taught and had never been to Japan. And worse, he could not speak the language.

But he really loves the culture—especially anime and sushi, and does have real success as a translator. His first major work of translation being a memoir of a former mizushobai worker, the author was a woman who had a very rough, but scintillating life. His translation of Pink Salon takes off, and the beautiful young author becomes the next “it” girl —with Stephen being the much-applauded translator.

But since he can’t actually speak Japanese, there are some wonderful scenes where he communicates with his author using an interpreter. Sound crazy, right?

2.

By now, you’ve probably heard that there was some online discussion regarding recent Nobel Prize winning author Han Kang’s English translator and her “creative” translations.

Like Japanese, Korean is one of the hardest languages in the world for English speakers to learn. It’s not really something you “pick up,” but that is apparently what Han’s translator Deborah Smith did. In three years.

If you are interested, this is a detailed and very interesting summary of what is extraordinary (good and bad) about her Korean translations of Han’s work. I was interested in a few things—first that the English translation went beyond the simple swapping of words (like “leg” for “arm”), or even of mistaken pronouns (easy to do this in Japanese too!) but rather the issue involved changing the style and tone of the language…. from the minimalist, fragmentary style of the original to Smith’s use of a high, formal style with lyrical flourishes. As one critic noted, the translation has a “nineteenth-century ring” to it, reminiscent of Chekhov.

Whoa!

2.

翻訳 honyaku= Translation

In the first character hon 翻, you can see the wings 羽 for the fluttering and turning, flipping quality that happens when you translate words from one language into another; while the second character “yaku” 訳 conveys meaning and sense.

This immediately brings to mind something Cicero (or Horace?) wrote about aiming for sense translation, rather than a word for word translation.

non verbum e verbo sed sensum de sensu

This is because languages do not divide the world up the same way. If they did, AI translation would be a done deal already.

I’ve heard a very brilliant translator tell me that he liked to read a paragraph of the original and then not refer to it again and dash out an English version—and then after checking to make sure nothing was list, polish the English to be the best it can be… Of course, there are going to be losses, as I wrote about here. Murakami, for example, will stress the musicality of the sentences over tone or voice. Or even meaning versus sound.

3.

In Japanese, people distinguish between a direct word-for-word translation 直訳 chokuyaku and the more literary “sense” translation of 意訳 iyaku. For example, when I was working on the e-Japan戦略 translation for the government, my English translations were re-translated back to Japanese in order to account for every single word. It was maddening —but it had to be done because the English version became the basis for other translations into languages like German or Swedish and they all had to match up.

This kind of legalistic translation is world’s away from the translation of literature, where for example, a poem from Japanese cannot just be the translation of the words—because you must be rendering a poem from one language into a POEM in another language.

So, in that sense, Han’s translator was doing the right thing by taking a great piece of literature from one language and turning it into great literature in another.

4.

I have only read two books by Han and am not a fan. So, I don’t really have a big opinion about this. Except that Smith’s approach reminded me of the Stephen character in Elaine Hsieh Chou’s novel, in the sense that it takes some real guts to translate literature when you only started learning the language three years before…

If you think about it, none of this matters in terms of the Nobel anyway since presumably the English translations were not all they were going by. I mean, in my eJapan papers, my English translation was used for translations into other languages. Not always as some translations were made using the original Japanese, but there were cases, which is why it had to be a legalistic kind of translation.

But presumably the Nobel committee was reading versions that were not based on Smith’s version at all.

5.

And by the way, I think someone should write a novel about Smith because she sounds pretty out there (in a good way!) …. and of course, translator’s names really do need to be on book covers…. they are collaborators when it literary AND as this article rightly points out, they are also taste makers!

Smith went on to found Tilted Axis Press in 2015, a translation-focused publishing house that has put out works such as “Tokyo Ueno Station” by Yu Miri (translated by Morgan Giles), winner of the 2020 National Book Award, and “Love in the Big City” by Sang Young Park (translated by Anton Hur), an English-language debut that was longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize.

Anton Hur has a debut novel out that I am really looking forward to reading. Smith sounds like a literary talent (genius) in her own right, and I would expect a novel from her one of these days.

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Flowers atop from my second ikebana lesson!!!