The Vegetarian

I haven’t read The Vegetarian in any language, and I hadn’t heard about the controversy surrounding its translation until reading these assigned pieces. I think that Tim Parks’ opinion piece reads as a little harsh— maybe I was just very moved by Deborah Smith’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Translation. (Her statement that “learning a language is not a progression toward ‘mastery,’ and that nothing teaches you to translate like actually doing it” was a good affirmation to start this semester on, and an idea that can be applied to many things.) Of course, there were errors from Smith’s translation presented that were pretty damning: grammatical ones, incorrectly attributed dialogue, arm for foot, and the like. I did appreciate Smith’s specification in her article that she is currently working with Han Kang to fix these mistakes for future printings of the book, though I wonder (and maybe this is a question for Google, or Smith, or my peers studying literary translation that are more versed in the practices of that world than I am) why that collaboration couldn’t have existed from the English translation’s inception? Is it common for someone translating a recent work from a living author to not have a consistent exchange with them from the start of their translation process?

There was so much talk throughout these readings about lyricism/ poeticism in Smith’s translation, versus the lack thereof in Kang’s original text. I found this interesting, and I take issue with the idea that lyricism doesn’t exist in a stripped down, staccato text. It’s not impossible to find music in that style of writing, and though I don’t have the cultural/ lingual knowledge of Korean to say this with certainty, it doesn’t seem ridiculous to me that certain moments within the source text were best rendered into English using a more lyrical sensibility. This particular passage from Parks’ Raw and Cooked made me shake my head— he critiqued this passage from Smith’s translation: “awkward silences … were now peppering the conversation.” He then writes of the passage: “One can imagine a conversation peppered with obscenities perhaps, but aren’t silences just too long to be peppery?” Silences, as they are understood by most, are not just a timed period of quiet, but the reasoning and sensation of that quiet— they are not too long to be peppery. Of all the moments of Smith’s translation to critique, why choose that great one?

 Samantha Long