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10 · The Vegetarian

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10 · The Vegetarian

On 2 July 2017, Charse Yun, a professor at Ewha Womans University, published a critique of the translation that had won the Man Booker International Prize the year before. His charge was not that it had been mistranslated. It was that it had been over-translated.

The book had a life before it crossed. Han Kang wrote The Vegetarian (Chaesikjuuija) in three parts between 2003 and 2005; it appeared as a novel in Korea in 2007, and its central section won the Yi Sang Literary Award in 2005. Deborah Smith began learning Korean in 2009, founded the press Tilted Axis in 2015, and translated this book as her first book-length translation. The English edition came out in January 2015 from Portobello Books. The following year the two of them shared the Man Booker International Prize, in the first year the prize credited author and translator equally.

Yun's criticism came in two layers. In the first he rated the translation a high achievement. In the second he argued that it had drifted from Han Kang's spare, restrained manner by adding intensifiers, superlatives and emphatic word choices — not once or twice, but on close to every other page. One senior translator he consulted took the view that Smith's work was better called an adaptation than a translation. The first piece ran in Korea Exposé on 2 July 2017 under the title "You Say Melon, I Say Lemon: Deborah Smith's Flawed Yet Remarkable Translation of 'The Vegetarian'"; he then extended the argument in the Los Angeles Times on 22 September 2017.

The two sets of evidence in this entry do not carry equal weight. Yun's wording reached this book through secondhand citation, not through the Los Angeles Times text itself, so his argument is reported here in summary rather than quoted. The words of Smith and Han Kang below were checked against their sources one word at a time.

Smith answered for herself in the Los Angeles Review of Books on 11 January 2018. Her position sits in a single sentence: "there is no such thing as a truly literal translation... there can be no such thing as a translation that is not 'creative.'" She separated the charges into two piles. The first was outright mistranslation, and for that she took responsibility. The second was stylistic divergence, which she defended as one legitimate reading of Han Kang's prose.

Han Kang addressed it herself in an interview the Booker Prize Foundation published on 28 July 2023: "I do not believe that the translator has deliberately undermined the original, nor do I believe that she has created a new work that is completely different from the original." She pointed out that the dispute had mixed two things together. The first was genuine mistranslation: Smith made 67 corrections in 2017, and they went into the 2018 UK and US reprints. The second was the argument about style — and the first was being used as evidence for the second.

The example she gave herself is the word cheohyeong, which means a wife's older sister, though its two syllables read literally as wife plus older brother — a trap for anyone who did not grow up in the language. Some critics read that slip as evidence that Smith had changed a character's sex, when it was purely linguistic. She also disclosed that around half a page of the Korean text is missing from the English edition. That was an editorial cut, not a failure of translation, because the translator had translated every sentence. The two went on working together; the manuscript of The White Book (2017) was compared sentence by sentence.

The dispute is not an argument about who did the better job. It is an argument about what a translation owes first. The same question had ended a friendship once already, fifty years earlier.

In 1964 Vladimir Nabokov published his translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin with the Bollingen Foundation: four volumes of unrhymed, near-literal iambic prose, plus more than 930 pages of commentary. He had declared the position long before, in "The Art of Translation" in The New Republic on 4 August 1941. That essay opens: "Three grades of evil can be discerned in the queer world of verbal transmigration." The worst grade is prettifying a text to suit the taste of the audience it is being carried to.

Edmund Wilson reviewed the translation in The New York Review of Books on 15 July 1965, under the title "The Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov". The two had been friends since 1940, when Wilson was The New Republic's critic and helped bring Nabokov into American literary life. His verdict on the translation: "It has produced a bald and awkward language which has nothing in common with Pushkin or with the usual writing of Nabokov."

The heavier charge was about interpretation. Wilson read Onegin's killing of Lensky in the duel as malice consistent with the character, where Nabokov read it as out of character. Wilson wrote: "There are no out-of-character actions in Evgeni Onegin. Nabokov has simply not seen the point." He still closed the review with praise, calling Nabokov a live wire strung between the reader and the Russian past.

Nabokov replied in a letter in the issue of 26 August 1965. He opened by affirming the friendship, then itemised seven errors in Wilson's Russian grammar and usage, from confusing two senses of the colloquial netu to getting the sound of the letter "ё" wrong. He closed: "Its mixture of pompous aplomb and peevish ignorance is certainly not conducive to a sensible discussion of Pushkin's language and mine." Wilson answered in the same issue, conceding two of the seven: "I must acknowledge two errors... I felt that it sounded more damaging than I had meant it to be, and this has given him a chance to score." The rest he contested point by point.

The exchange ran on for months in the NYRB letters pages, with other Slavists joining, David Magarshack and Ernest J. Simmons among them, and Nabokov returning with a piece titled "Translation" on 20 January 1966. A twenty-five-year friendship did not come back. Alex Beam, in The Feud (2016), treats this as the rupture point.

Under the insults there was a real disagreement about method. Wilson wanted a verse translation that read fluently as English, to the point of offering a competing stanza of his own in the review. Nabokov held that any deviation from literal sense for rhyme or euphony betrayed the poem. He had said so in 1941 and said it again in the prefatory poem "On Translating Eugene Onegin" (1955): a faithful crib is more honest than a beautiful lie.

The frame used for a conflict of this kind comes from Lawrence Venuti, in The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation (Routledge, 1995; revised edition 2008). A translation fluent and idiomatic enough in the target language that readers believe they are reading an original, he calls domestication. A translation that deliberately keeps the friction, the unfamiliar syntax and the traces of the source language, he calls foreignization. His proposal does not stop at description. The fluency Anglophone publishing has always rewarded is not a neutral taste; it is an ideology, and it forces the translator to disappear. In his view foreignization is therefore the more ethical choice, because the reader stays aware throughout of reading something that has crossed.

The frame drew hard pushback, chiefly from Anthony Pym, whose argument is reported here in summary because his exact wording was not checked in this research pass. It has three layers. First, foreignization has no workable method. Second, Venuti does not show that the democratic cultural exchange he claims actually follows from it. Third, the domestication and foreignization axis is too crude to describe what translators do; real work sits on a spectrum of partial adaptation. Maria Tymoczko's work on postcolonial translation ethics is cited as extending the argument past that binary. Venuti's own answer is that fluency is not the enemy, that translations should be readable, and that what he attacks is the squeezing of readable down to one register of standard English, whatever register the source was written in.

Put the two cases on this frame and the picture sharpens. Smith chose the domestication side: the book must work as literature in English first. Nabokov chose the foreignization side to its limit: the reader should see through the English back to the Russian sense, and the English may be deformed to allow it. Each side's loss was predictable from that choice alone. One loses the register and restraint of the original; the other loses the poetry. Both sides had even been named in advance. Wilson called the second side's result "bald and awkward" in 1965; Nabokov had called the first side's method the highest grade of evil in 1941, before either book existed.

One part of the dispute can be settled, and it is far smaller than what the two sides argued over. The 67 mistranslations in The Vegetarian were wrong under either standard: whatever obligation a translator holds, cheohyeong still means a wife's older sister. The seven errors of Russian are the same kind of thing. Wilson conceded two of them himself; the rest are still argued. What cannot be settled is the much larger part, the question of what a translation owes first.

This book can support exactly one verdict. These two translators worked to different obligations, and each one's loss was predictable from the obligation chosen, before a first word was translated. The verdict this book cannot support is that either of them was wrong, because no measurement adjudicates between two obligations. There is only the check of whether a translator did what they said they were doing, and whether an error is an error under both standards. So this book says plainly that it cannot rule, rather than pretending that it has.

What could not cross: Korean kinship terms oblige a speaker to specify side and seniority in a single word: cheohyeong says both that the relative is on the wife's side and that she is the elder. English obliges neither, and cannot put them back without adding words. The other thing that could not cross is the verdict itself — no measure weighs an obligation to the reader on the far side against an obligation to the text on the near one.

Overturned if: Someone builds a checkable criterion that ranks domestication against foreignization without first assuming what a translation is for; or if someone reads Charse Yun's text in the Los Angeles Times of 22 September 2017 directly and finds his charge differs from what is reported here.

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What Cannot Cross

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101 · What Grammar Makes You Say202 · That Young Woman303 · Two Texts, One Country404 · Five Kinds That Do Not Translate505 · The Snow That Never Was606 · The Two Blues of Russian707 · How Do You Know808 · The Dust Beneath the Royal Feet909 · Human Parity1010 · The Vegetarian1111 · The Facing Page
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