The first sentence of Han Kang's The Vegetarian belongs to a husband, and in Korean it is little more than a shrug. Before his wife stopped eating meat, he says, he had never thought of her as anyone special. In Deborah Smith's English the same man remembers her as "completely unremarkable in every way", which is a harder thing to say about the person you chose to marry. I have read the two openings side by side more often than I would care to admit, and the gap between them has occupied me for years. It is not a large gap. It is the width of an adverb or two. Yet the novel is about nothing so much as the distance between what a woman is and what the people around her say she is, and on the very first page the English edition has already widened it by a notch.
That English edition has had an extraordinary life. It shared the Man Booker International Prize with its author in 2016, the first year the award went to a single book and was divided equally between writer and translator. Han's Nobel Prize in 2024 sent a fresh wave of readers towards it, and this spring, when the Booker Prize Foundation asked readers to choose their favourite winner from the prize's first decade, almost ten thousand people voted and close to a third of them chose The Vegetarian. By any measure it is the translated novel the English-reading public has taken most warmly to heart. In Korea, meanwhile, the same translation provoked a long and at times bitter argument about whether those readers had read Han Kang at all. I have no wish to settle that argument, and I doubt it can be settled. What interests me is how closely the quarrel resembles the book it concerns. The Vegetarian is a novel in which a woman is interpreted, corrected and spoken for by everyone who claims to love her, and its career abroad has followed the same script almost scene for scene.
The book grew from an image Han had carried for years. In a short story from the late 1990s, "The Fruit of My Woman", a wife in a city flat slowly turns into a plant on the balcony, and her husband, at a loss for anything better to do, runs to the kitchen sink, fills a plastic basin and pours the water over her. She revives under it like a leaf in rain. Han has said that The Vegetarian began there. She wrote the new work between 2003 and 2005 as three linked novellas, each able to stand on its own, and the middle one, "Mongolian Mark", won the Yi Sang Literary Prize by itself in 2005, two years before the three were gathered into a single volume. What had been a fable about one marriage became, in the longer book, something closer to the case notes of an entire family.
Consider how the finished book is built. The first part belongs to the husband, Mr Cheong, who tells it in the first person with the grievance of a man whose dinners have been interfered with. The second, "Mongolian Mark", follows Yeong-hye's brother-in-law, a video artist who becomes fixated on a birthmark she has carried since infancy and persuades himself that his desire is a form of art. The third, "Flaming Trees", is given to her elder sister, In-hye, who is left to shoulder her care once everyone else has walked away. Yeong-hye herself is never granted a section. Her voice reaches us only in short italicised passages about her dreams, dropped into the husband's account without introduction, and no one inside the novel ever hears them. We are allowed to overhear what her family never does, and even then only in fragments.
Each of these witnesses renders her into a language of their own. The husband translates her into inconvenience: a wife who embarrasses him at a dinner with his superiors and can no longer be relied upon to cook. The brother-in-law translates her into an image, a body he can paint flowers on and film. He tells himself that he alone sees her as she truly is, which may be the most dangerous delusion in the book. In-hye, the most patient of the three, translates her first into duty and then, more painfully, into a mirror, because watching her sister refuse the life expected of her forces In-hye to admit how much of her own life she has merely endured. None of these readings is entirely false. None of them is Yeong-hye. The novel's great cruelty, and its great honesty, is that it gives us nothing else to go on.
It matters, too, that so much of the violence happens at a table. The Korean word for family, sikgu, is written with the characters for eating and mouth: the people who share your food. Friends in Seoul still greet one another by asking whether the other has eaten, and many a Korean mother's first question to a returning child concerns food. To refuse the family meal in such a household is not a dietary preference but something close to resigning one's membership, and Han stages the crisis accordingly. At a gathering hosted by In-hye, Yeong-hye's mother presses on her the dishes she loved as a child. When she will not eat them, her father has her husband and brother hold her arms while he forces a piece of sweet and sour pork into her mouth, and he strikes her when she refuses it. The meal ends in a hospital. What makes the scene so hard to read is not its brutality, which Han handles with great restraint, but the fact that every person at that table believes they are acting out of care. They are feeding her. They are bringing her back to them.
Which brings me to the translation, and to the charges laid against it. The case in English was made most fully by Charse Yun, an American-born translator who teaches in Seoul, first in Korea Exposé and then in the Los Angeles Times in 2017. Yun did not dismiss Smith's achievement, and he called her work remarkable in the same breath as he called it flawed. His complaint was that she had taken Han's spare, level prose and dressed it up, adding adverbs, superlatives and emotional emphasis that the original does not contain, so that a writer as sparing as Raymond Carver came out sounding more like Dickens. He cited one Korean count which found that roughly a tenth of the first section had been mistranslated and a further six per cent or so left out, and he listed individual slips, among them a foot where the Korean has an arm. Other critics in Seoul, the scholar and translator Kim Wook-dong among them, pressed the case more sharply still, and some observed that because Korean sentences often leave out their subjects, the English had in places handed an action to the wrong person.
Smith's reply, published in the Los Angeles Review of Books in January 2018, is one of the more candid documents a translator has produced. She acknowledged that the translation contained mistakes and made no attempt to hide them. She also argued that no translation is a sheet of clear glass, that readers like to believe they have read the original when they have in fact read somebody's reading of it, and that much of what reviewers had praised in the book, its structure and its images among them, was Han's doing and not hers. It is not the defence of someone who believes she did nothing wrong. It is the defence of someone who knows exactly what translation costs, and has paid it in public. Han Kang has stood by the English text, and the two women went on to work together on later books. Whatever one concludes about particular sentences, this was a collaboration, not a hijacking.
Having read both texts, slowly and with a dictionary nearer to hand than my old supervisors would approve of, I find that I agree with the critics about the sentences and with Smith about the book. Where the English errs, it tends to err loudly: a feeling is named where Han only let it hover, and a gesture is made emphatic where she left it plain. Yet the point about missing subjects is the one that has stayed with me longest, because it says something about Yeong-hye that neither side quite intended. Korean can leave the doer of an action unstated for a whole paragraph, and Han uses that freedom to let her heroine drift half outside her own sentences. English cannot do this. It insists on a subject; somebody must eat, and somebody must refuse. To carry the book into English is to fill in, again and again, a blank that the original left open, and to fill it with a pronoun the translator has chosen. That is not a scandal. It is simply what the novel's family does at the dinner table, performed at the level of grammar.
A Scot is perhaps better placed than most to feel the force of that. Many of us of a certain age were taught, gently or otherwise, to leave part of our vocabulary at the school gate, and to put "I ken" and "a wee while" into the English that examiners and employers would recognise. Nothing essential was lost in the exchange, we were assured, and in terms of information nothing was. What went missing was temperature. The corrected sentence meant exactly the same thing and sounded like somebody else. Reading Smith beside Han gives me that old sensation in reverse. The facts are all present and correct, the warmth has been turned up a degree or two, and the woman at the centre sounds a little more certain of herself than she is.
None of this, to my mind, is a reason to avoid the English edition, which remains a vivid and serious book and the only door most readers will ever have into it. It is a reason to open that door knowing how many hands have been on the handle. The anglophone reader meets Yeong-hye through four witnesses, not three: a husband, a brother-in-law, a sister, and a gifted young Englishwoman in London who had begun learning Korean only a few years before she took the book on. That fourth witness was more sympathetic than the other three put together. She was still a witness. Without her, it should be said, most of those who voted for the book this spring would never have met Yeong-hye at all. For a novel so exact about what happens when well-meaning people describe someone they do not understand, The Vegetarian could hardly have predicted its own life in translation more accurately.
I keep returning, in the end, to the husband in that earlier story, standing on the balcony with a basin of water because he cannot think what else to do for a wife who is turning into something he has no word for. Smith translated that story too, for Granta, in the year of the prize, so that even the watering can has passed through her hands. It seems to me the right emblem for everyone who has handled Yeong-hye since: the translator, her critics, and one Scottish reader with two editions and a dictionary. Each of us pours over her whatever we happen to be carrying, and she revives under it, and she is not ours. The most any of us can honestly claim is to know which part of the water came from our own basin.
Recommended Resources
☞ Purchase the Original (Korean Edition): Chaesikjuuija (채식주의자), Han Kang, Aladin Bookstore
The English translation by Deborah Smith is published as The Vegetarian by Portobello Books.
'Ex Oriente, Lux.'
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh
※ Published under the author's editorial persona. See the About page for how this comes to be.
Sources
- Charse Yun, "You Say Melon, I Say Lemon: Deborah Smith's Flawed Yet Remarkable Translation of The Vegetarian", Korea Exposé, 2017.
- Deborah Smith, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Translation", Los Angeles Review of Books, 11 January 2018.
- Helen Babbs, "What winning the International Booker Prize means, according to previous winners", The Booker Prizes, 2026.
- "What Han Kang wanted to say in her fiction", Weekly Kyunghyang, 21 October 2024 (in Korean).