What a joy that the Stockholm Academy has finally decided to look beyond the Western horizon again. This year, Han Kang, a South Korean writer, will receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, who is rightly praised “for her intense poetic prose that deals with historical trauma and reveals the fragility of human life.”
Han Kang, the most important Korean voice of her generation, would probably never have come into the spotlight if she had not won the International Man Booker Prize in 2016 with the English translation of her novel “The Vegetarian”.
It formed the entrance to an international book market, beyond which the academy has not yet found any candidates. They are all and were names that were passed around from scout to scout and from agency to agency and were usually published in several European languages.
In the case of Han Kang, whose works are deceptively accessible, they also became bestsellers in this country, which in many ways are stranger than they seem. In her writing, Han has, unsurprisingly, repeatedly claimed to want to find out what it means to be human.
The living and the inanimate
Unlike in Western culture, this is less about a moral standpoint or philosophical humanism than about exploring the position of humans between nature and culture as well as the living and the inanimate. Never has she done this more obviously than in The Vegetarian.
A young woman, Yong-Hye, decides from one day to the next not to eat meat anymore. This is the starting point and actually a provocation for Korea. The escalation to anorexia is told in jumps in time and space, first from the perspective of the indifferent husband, then from that of the brother-in-law, who directs his artistic and sexual desires on the sister-in-law’s thin body, and finally from the perspective of the older sister In- Hye, who has to watch as the younger one does everything she can to turn into a plant.
In the end, Yong-Hye is upside down, with tangled hair that is supposed to sink into the earth as roots and a desire to make do with nothing but sunshine. Not a saint who practices asceticism, not a hunger artist, but a pile of skin and bones on the way to force feeding.
Living Korean mythology
Yong-Hye’s desire for a metamorphosis can be embedded in a tradition from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” to Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”, which hardly any discussion at the time could do without mentioning. But it’s not just that Han Kang, who teaches creative writing in Seoul, wrote for a long time without any in-depth knowledge of Western writers.
Their imaginations fit naturally into the legends and fairy tales of Korean mythology and a culture that is still influenced by animism today. And the sophisticated simplicity of her style obeys the economy of a Korean sentence structure, which looks far too much like a forced constriction compared to the possibilities of German syntax.
The silent violence that dominates “The Vegetarian” turns “Human Work” to the outside world. Using the example of the boy Dong-Ho and other survivors, Han tells of events in her hometown of Gwangju, which became the scene of a massacre in 1980, ten years after she was born there. Although she didn’t experience it herself, she clearly recognized that it played a similar role in South Korea’s history, especially in official secrecy, as the Tiananmen massacre did for China.
© AFP/JUNG YEON-JE
After the assassination of long-time dictator Park Chung-Hee in 1979, a general de facto took over the leadership of the country in the shadow of the then prime minister. He declared martial law at the end of May 1980 and had all demonstrators who campaigned for more democratic conditions swept off the streets. The result was hundreds of deaths, thousands of wounded and arrested.
A voice, a breath
Han Kang has a strangely gentle, breathy speaking voice. She is also a singer who has recorded an album of her own ballads. Neither should lead one to confuse her actual voice with the one that speaks in her stories and poems. But it cannot be denied that they too are often located on the edge of a great silence – even thematically.
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This is particularly true for the protagonist of your novel “Greek Lessons,” which was last published in German in February. While she, the mute young woman, cannot make a sound while reading in a Seoul classroom, her Greek teacher’s eyesight is failing: two traumatized people in different ways who, as they gradually get to know each other’s stories, move towards each other.
“White” is directly autobiographical, albeit fictionalized and set in an alienated Warsaw, where she spent several winter months in 2014. In short sequences, Han fades her mother’s experiences of loss, who lost two children, including Han Kang’s eldest sister, into reflections on the color white – in Korea the epitome of death and grief. It is one of the few books in which an unusual sentiment that some people perceive as cheesy creeps into her prose.
The horrors of the physical
Han Kang is not the only Korean woman who has made a name for herself internationally. In addition to the two great old men of Korean literature, the storyteller Hwang Sok-Yong and the poet Ko Un, others have long since distinguished themselves: the storyteller Kim Young-Ha and the great poet Kim Hyesoon, who was awarded the Canadian Griffin Prize, among others . With Han Kang she shares an obsession with the horrors of the physical.
The Germans have the privilege of being able to gain such a vivid impression of Han Kang’s literature because most of the titles were written by Ki-Hyang Lee, who lives in Munich. Without the popular rough translations from state-sponsored Korean sources that have been common practice in recent decades, she has given this prose a sound that has contributed decisively to its success here.
This year, Lee received the Leipzig Book Fair Prize for her translation of Bora Chung’s stories “The Curse of the Rabbit”. Only “Your Cold Hands,” a novel whose narrator traces the missing sculptor Jang Unhyong and his loneliness, owes much to Kyong-Hae Flugel.
They have ensured that, far beyond the initial success of the “vegetarian”, a small community has emerged across the generations in this country that deserves additional members. It is also an opportunity to take a closer look at South Korea, which is too quick to believe that it is enough to draw attention to itself with K-pop and an internationally renowned film production.