I also carefully studied the first section of Han’s original Korean text and compared it to Smith’s translation. And this was just the first section alone. Another 5.7 percent of the original text was omitted. According to a research paper presented last year at a conference at Ewha Womans University, 10.9 percent of the first part of the novel was mistranslated. Still, like the critic Anton Ego in Ratatouille, I’m like to offer some fresh, well-seasoned “perspective” to go with the cold side dishes of criticism.įirst, the translation clearly has its flaws. Even if they did, they’d scarcely be heard under the roar of thunderous applause. It’s doubtful these criticisms will ever reach the West.
Little, however, was written about the controversy outside South Korea. Some newspapers even began to post line-by-line comparisons with the Korean text. A number of articles in the Korean-language media began to report numerous mistranslations in The Vegetarian.
In the West, reviewers lavishly praised the book’s “lyrical and lacerating prose,” referring directly to the translation itself as “masterful” and “exquisite.” Much was also made of the fact that Smith had started learning Korean only six years earlier.Īfter the Man Booker International prize, however, controversy began to emerge in South Korea. When the English translation was released in 2015 as The Vegetarian, it was met with rapturous acclaim.įrom the start, much of the attention focused on the book’s translator, Deborah Smith, a then 28-year-old PhD student at The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. Published in South Korea in 2007, Chaesikjuuija is a dark, disturbing tale about a woman named Yeong-hye who refuses to eat meat, mentally unraveling to the point of believing she is becoming a tree. While I copy edit translations and teach English writing in a translation department, I didn’t know if my Korean was sufficient to do an in-depth analysis of Han Kang’s original novel. And in a nation known for its craving for international recognition, the book had pulled off a stunning coup.īut when I began to hear my students and colleagues complaining about the accuracy of the translation, I wondered: Who would be first to spoil the party? I certainly didn’t want to do it. In terms of prestige, the Man Booker is perhaps second only to the Nobel Prize for Literature. When news hit that novelist Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (Korean: Chaesikjuuija ) had won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize last year, a jolt of excitement surged through the country.
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