Part of the narrative that now surrounds Han’s international celebrity is that Smith only started learning Korean three years before taking on The Vegetarian.

Since there is no such thing as a truly literal translation – no two languages’ grammars match, their vocabularies diverge, even punctuation has a different weight – there can be no such thing as a translation that is not ‘creative’.” Korean literature’s historic problem has been “professional translators” who have throttled the literary life out of it Last week, Smith herself responded in the LA Review of Books, arguing that “to say that my English translation of The Vegetarian is a ‘completely different book’ from the Korean original is, of course, in one sense, entirely correct. Most serious of all, Yun wrote – reprising his attack in the LA Times – were the stylistic differences between the English and Korean versions of the novel: “I find it hard to come up with an adequate analogy, but imagine the plain, contemporary style of Raymond Carver being garnished with the elaborate diction of Charles Dickens”. More serious “mistranslations” include the novel’s opening line: Han writes that the protagonist’s husband never really thought of his wife as “anything special” Smith renders this as “completely unremarkable in every way”. Yun conceded that “it’s important to keep in mind that niggling errors occur even in the best of translations, and any scanty, cherry-picked, line-by-line comparisons from a 200-page book will inevitably appear trivial, if not petty, when posted.” The niggles included using “foot” ( bal) for “arm” ( pal) in a door-shutting scene that he conceded may even have been improved by the substitution.

Translate korean to english