It wasn’t that surprising. It has been a long time – since 2012, with Mo Yan – since the Nobel Prize for Literature recognized an Asian author in an Asian language – Kazuo Ishiguro, 2017 Nobel Prize winner, has lived in England since his childhood and writes in English. Names like the Japanese Haruki Murakami, the Chinese Yan Lianke or the Korean Ko Un had been in the pools for years, even if the recent trend, since 2018, of alternating men and women has tipped the scales in favor of compatriots like the seasoned Chinese storyteller Can. Xue, the Japanese Yoko Ogawa and the one who ultimately won the prize, the South Korean Han Kang.
Born in Gwangju on November 27, 1970, she is, at fifty-three years old, one of the youngest winners – the youngest is still Rudyard Kipling, author of The Jungle Bookwhich he received in 1907, at the age of forty-one – although since he won the International Booker Prize in 2016 for The vegetarian The clamor was already spreading, at least in the publishing circuit, that he would “make it” to the Nobel Prize. This prestigious prize, which rewards works translated into English and which that year launched a new format – rewarding a book and not a career, in addition to sharing the prize with the translator – was a turning point in his career, the making it known to the whole world. and sparked interest in his land, which at the time had not very well understood or appreciated the title. This impact was not surprising: in the Booker he beat writers like Elena Ferrante and even those already recognized with the Nobel Prize Orhan Pamuk and Kenzaburō Ōe.
Everything about this price exuded freshness: the general ignorance of the author – in Spain it had not yet been translated, even if the defunct label :Rata_, directed by Iolanda Batallé, had already contracted the rights and published The vegetarian the following year– ; the almost non-existent presence of your country among editorial news; and even the fact that its English translator, the British Deborah Smith (1987), made her debut with this work. But the most original, without a doubt, was the narrative proposition itself: a sort of dark allegory on uprooting and the violence that human beings are capable of inflicting on their fellow human beings, individually and collectively, when they do not fit the mold. what others and society expect of him.
First life lessons
Han Kang grew up in a modest family, which moved often because they could not afford a house. When he was eleven, they moved to Seoul, where he still lives. They lacked resources, but her father, the writer Han Seung-Won (Jangheung County, South Korea, 1939) also ensured that neither she nor her brother Han Dong Rim lacked books. The difficulty of maintaining lasting friendships due to this wandering life pushed the young girl to take refuge in reading; Later, as a teenager, the difficult experiences of this stage strengthened his interest in books, he began to read carefully and ask questions.
Questions: this is the key to his work. He intends neither to comfort, nor to testify, nor to teach anything, but rather to share his questions with the reader through a narrative construction that is uncomfortable and disconcerting both in its form, of an experimental nature (it is not for nothing that she is often described as “Kafkaesque”). “) and, and above all, because of the background, which always and again touches on violence, violence. Perhaps because of paternal influence – his father wrote about defeated characters, sometimes alone – his literature is oriented towards the most vulnerable, unlike him, the author of a very localist work, Han Kang extends this field to other levels, which has allowed him to cross borders and have his stories read in very different ways depending on cultures. .
Several events that marked his childhood resonate in his work: human acts (2014) is inspired by the week-long massacre that the South Korean army carried out in his hometown in 1970, when the population dared to rebel against the dictator Chun Doo-hwam; Unofficial sources (it is believed that the government has hidden the real figure) speak of thousands of deaths. White (2017), more autobiographical, investigates his own family: the loss of an older sister, who died a few hours after his birth. Intimate or social, violence is always at the heart, which he explores from different angles, in different scenarios, with multiple levels of reading. This ability to renew itself, to remain faithful to its primary concerns and at the same time to innovate in form, constitutes another of its merits.
Creative narrator
After studying Korean philology at Yonsei University, he combined writing with journalistic collaborations and teaching until, after his international consolidation, he could devote himself entirely to his work. Although he began with five poems published in a magazine in 1993, his career has focused more on prose, novels, and short stories, with some forays into essays. He also has a musical background and an interest in the visual arts; a multidisciplinary approach which manifests itself in the creativity of his story and which has given rise to curious projects, such as the essay Songs sung softly (2007), accompanied by an album of ten songs composed and performed by herself.
Han Kang has eyes trained to capture the dysfunctions and traumas of the mechanisms that support contemporary civilization and writes them without avoiding crudeness.
In the West, there is still much to discover. In Spain, only four novels have been translated, available from Random House: The vegetarian (2007), human acts (2014), White (2017) and the last one to appear, Greek lessons (2011), published in Spanish last year. From the beginning, its translator has been Korean Sunme Yoon, who arrived with her family in Argentina at the age of five. Han Kang was in fact a personal discovery: although it had not yet been translated into any language, he managed to convince the Argentinian publisher Bajo la luna to publish The vegetarian in 2012, a version that he then revised for its edition in Spain. When it comes to translating a writer from such a different culture, the translator’s job becomes even more important.
Shy and discreet, Han Kang does not make public appearances or declarations, even if she does not hide either. The international success surprised her, because The vegetarian It was only translated into English in 2015, almost ten years after it was published in Korean. Last year he went to Spain, on the occasion of the promotion of Greek lessons. She is also not one of those who lavish herself on events and public declarations (living far from Western cultural centers doesn’t make things easier either). Shy and discreet, she defends the cultural and identity value of languages: the novel features a woman who tries to regain her speech by learning a dead language, ancient Greek, alongside a professor who grew up between two cultures, two languages. , with underlying internal conflicts.
Human violence
While studying, he came across a verse by his compatriot Yi Sang (1910-1937): “I believe that people should be plants.” In 1997, she wrote the story of a woman transformed into a plant. Ten years later, that seed gave birth to his most famous work, which is not an exposition of animal ideology or a defense of veganism, but a brilliant metaphor for what happens to the ordinary individual when he decides to row against the tide. A woman, neither young nor beautiful, decides to stop eating meat after having a nightmare. In three successive stories, her husband, her brother-in-law and her sister recount her journey from contrasting points of view; a Kafkaesque exploration of the incomprehension, marginalization, loneliness and decay with which family and society condemn those who dare to be different.
His stories generally take place in Korea, a society more homogeneous and more rigid than the West, which partly explains this initial rejection of a work as disruptive as his. Han Kang is not afraid to highlight his country’s bloody footprint: human actswith a polyphonic structure, follows the adventures of a young student volunteer in the improvised morgue, a descent into hell of piled-up corpses, disfigurements, moods, decomposition and chaos, a lot of chaos. As in The vegetarianthe body is once again the center of violence, in the literal and symbolic sense, the object of the ultimate destruction of the human being at the hands of the human being who holds the power (political, social, patriarchal, racial, identity ).
It is almost a commonplace to say that writers write on the margins, like beings foreign to society who find a naked truth in poverty, gray areas, victims. Han Kang, like so many others, has eyes trained to capture the dysfunctions and traumas of the mechanisms that support contemporary civilization; but he writes them as only he knows how, with a particular sensitivity which does not avoid crudeness but exposes it without shame, does not camouflage the pain but shows it without containing the tear, does not avoid the conflict but the projects in his heart. , does not console the reader but disarms him, shakes him, disorients him, because such is the human reaction to pain, illness, death, violence.
In a society that has experienced and is experiencing barbarity due to the express action of its individuals, a Nobel Prize for Han Kang makes sense. She continued to break records: first Korean-language author to win the Booker, first Asian woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature, second Korean, all categories combined, to win a Nobel – after the politician and activist Kim Dae-jung, awarded the Peace Prize in 2000. The election also draws attention to the need to broaden horizons, as is already the case in other cultural spheres, with landmark events such as the award-winning film Parasites (2019). Distant, but connected societies in this wounded and violent global world, in which the voice of Han Kang emerges as a poetic cry to avenge those who have fallen and incite us to reflection, even if we have already lost all hope.
