The Translation Politics of Han Kang's The Vegetarian; or, The Task of the Reader of the Work in (English) Translation

Abstract

Abstract This essay argues that the translation controversy surrounding the South Korean novelist Han Kang's Man Booker Prize–winning novel, The Vegetarian , offers a useful model for thinking about both the politics of translating into English and what the stakes of these politics are for scholars of world literature invested in questions of globalization and empire. Positing a model of “reading like a translator” as a way of engaging meaningfully with a text from a source language that one does not have a foundation in—and applying this practice to a reading of The Vegetarian that turns on an understanding of a Korean untranslatable, han —this essay argues that the task of the reader of The Vegetarian in English is to take seriously the “textured moments” that populate the text, in order to reflect on the larger histories of encounter and violence that color South Korea's geopolitical entanglements and shape the literature of its diaspora.