created 2025-03-17, & modified, =this.modified
tags:y2025translation
rel: Translator’s note (Deborah Smith) Milena, Milena, Ecstatic by Bae Suah
Deborah Smith, whose rendition of Han Kang’s “The Vegetarian” won the Man Booker International Prize, reflects on the controversies of translation.
There are two anxieties at play
- the cultural politics of prize-giving
- the nature and status of translation
The increased attention and appreciation afforded both translation and the translator undermines the myth of unmediated access to an original, a fantasy in which both readers of the translation and of the original have a stake.
People believe they’ve read War and Peace and not The Translation of War and Peace and that the thing they love — be it an individual book or a culture — is really the thing being acclaimed.
All of these anxieties are compounded by the fact that translation is a profoundly strange and often counterintuitive art. It’s also perhaps the only art that can be not just bad, but wrong, and will never not be flawed.
To say her translation is a complete different book, is in one sense correct. 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.
And while most of us translators think of ourselves as “faithful,” definitions of faithfulness can differ. Because languages function differently, much of translation is about achieving a similar effect by different means; not only are difference, change, and interpretation completely normal, but they are in fact an integral part of faithfulness.
Each translation of the text: “resulted, just as my English version did, from a translator falling in love with the book sufficiently to want to dedicate their time to it.”
Literary style is not simply a mark of identity like a fingerprint, it also has a function and a significance.
Translating from Korean into English involves moving from a language more accommodating of ambiguity, repetition, and plain prose, to one that favors precision, concision, and lyricism. This is simultaneously a gross generalization and an observable phenomenon.
Literary translation can both resist and perpetuate cultural imperialism; as translators, we need to stay aware of our own biases, and of the plurality of approaches advocated by those whose biases and aims are other than ours. Winning a prize doesn’t make my approach to translation the best or only way.
learning a language is not a progression toward “mastery,” and that nothing teaches you to translate like actually doing it.