As one of her many thousands of readers around the world, I have enjoyed witnessing the ongoing recognition for Han Kang's extraordinary body of work. In January 2016, when Human Acts was published in the UK, one poet and translator wrote to me: “I do think it is a major book, a landmark, a new kind of book about political violence and its effects. It adds to our sense of what it is to be human.” 

    The Vegetarian is still best-known work in the Anglosphere, thanks to being awarded the International Booker Prize back in 2016. The prize was in its first year, which meant that Human Acts also fell within the eligibility window. It surprised me that the judges chose The Vegetarian out of the two—books about historical, national traumas have traditionally been favoured by such prizes. Initially, I found it a shame that Human Acts was overshadowed, especially as this was the more recent work, which showcases Han’s development as a writer and is generally considered her masterpiece (many are now saying this about her latest work, whose English translation by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris—We Do Not Part—will be published in early 2025).  

    I haven’t read those books for many years, I think not even since I translated them. In the wake of the Booker, there was a lot of criticism of me and my translation, claiming that errors were due not only to inexperience but to a lack of respect and care. It was savage and personal and worse behind the scenes. At the other extreme, my translation was over-hyped in order to downplay Han’s own artistry. I was preoccupied with the literary world's violent racial inequality, where whiteness had eased my passage into the industry and contributed to my work being so disproportionately praised and visible, and I didn’t really understand the misogyny at play, or how to speak about both things at once. (To my knowledge, The White Book contains no mistakes, but the fact that it deals with the death of a baby means I haven’t been able to read it since becoming a mother. I read We Do Not Part yesterday and found that Han's narrative voice sounds just as I remember it from my own translations. So perhaps I didn't ‘distort’ her after all.)

    In all this time, I’ve come to a deeper understanding of why I became a translator in the first place. Written language is my mother tongue, the place where I can achieve the clarity of precision that is almost sacred to me, and where patterns of stress and intonation produce an effect which I find pleasurable and meaningful. In an article for Asymptote, I described the process of reading / translating Han Kang (an inextricable binary for me) as one of being “arrested by razor-sharp images which arise from the text without being directly described there.” Like many autistics, I experience a form of synaesthesia, and language itself is vivid, has colour and taste and heft.

    When I think of Human Acts, the images that come to my mind all cluster in the courtyard of the hanok in Gwangju. Water “crackling” into the tin pail. It took me a long time to get that word. Dong-ho feeling “lacerated,” behind the door as he listens to, or imagines, Jeong-dae’s sister crossing the yard. Toothpaste suds dripping from her brush. Images which capture the extraordinary sensory experience of being alive, of being young and in love.   

    From The Vegetarian, the only phrase I can recall directly is “armoured by the strength of her own renunciation.” From a young age, I felt that social conventions—of being made to speak, of being made to eat—are violence. (The editors of this article have pointed out that I misremembered the line from The Vegetarian. In 2013, the word I chose was power, not strength.)

    My favourite thing about the Nobel has been the chance to read interviews with some of Han’s many other translators. I was especially struck by Sunme Yoon describing how she came to translate La Vegetariana (several years before the English translation) in defiance of the South Korean literary scene, which in 2007 was “dominated by old-school men immersed in a very socially conservative society” who ignored or denigrated the book as “extreme and bizarre.” I am one of the many women who have found Yeong-hye’s story to be neither extreme nor bizarre. Like her sister In-hye, I almost envy her magnificent irresponsibility.

    In all its languages, The Vegetarian is a work which invites a particularly personal form of reading, the kind that those ‘old-school men’ would disapprove of, among a particular kind of reader— ‘sick women’ who refuse to be well in a world that violates and debilitates; “impressionable young girls” mocked for their fannishness; anyone who might defiantly reclaim some of the labels given to Yeong-hye—crazy, excessive, hysterical. Looking back, I think this is also how I translated it—with affinity coinciding with respect for alterity, agency, and unknowability, as well as protectiveness for how Yeong-hye would be read, knowing the prevalence of the reductive and frankly racist reading of ‘passive Asian woman struggles against (uniquely Asian) patriarchy.’ I love that a book described as “magnificently death-affirming,” and which is also, as more than one queer Asian has expressed to me, so queer, has such a high profile. 

    And Human Acts is not overshadowed. It was a bestseller when published in South Korea in 2014, and it is the book that BTS superstars were referencing when they tweeted their congratulations to Han and said they had read her book during their military service. This year, translated in twenty-five languages, it is being read in a different, and yet similar light to The Vegetarian. It describes Gwangju as “another name for whatever is forcibly isolated, beaten down, and brutalized, for all that has been mutilated beyond repair.” It has been personally moving for me to encounter so many readers connecting Gwangju to Gaza. I am inspired by their committed, intelligent reading to use my royalties from Human Acts to support Palestinian liberation, and grateful to every reader for making those royalties possible.

Deborah Smith worked at Tilted Axis Press between 2015 and 2022. She has also translated several books from Korean, mainly by Han Kang, Bae Suah, and Kim Hyo-eun. She has been living in North India since early 2020 and is currently writing a critical memoir on translation, whiteness, misogyny, disability, and empire.