Tag: literature nobel

Han Kang’s Nobel Is a Testament to The Power of Translators

The work of Deborah Smith, Han’s translator, was initially the subject of great controversy in Korea. ‘But now everyone translates like her – except for the ones that are not successful,’ says translator Anton Hur.

I came upon the Korean author Han Kang through a friend who came upon her through the music act BTS. We came upon both Han Kang and BTS thanks to translators. Korean culture is a well liked zeitgeist now, so the time is ripe to consider the vehicle on which it rides into our lives – translations and the people who do it.

Han Kang has won the literature Nobel, her books have sold out anew in Seoul and the world has entered a phase of engagement with this novelist that can only be described as frenzied. Many have discovered her now, but to many she was already a favourite author.

The Vegetarian, Han Kang, Random House, 2016.

This is largely thanks to the fact that Han won the International Booker Prize in 2016. The book she won it for – a book without adequate adjectives to do it justice – was one she wrote between 2003 and 2005. 채식주의자 was published in Korean in 2007. In the intervening decade, Han’s work was visited by the British translator Deborah Smith, who taught herself Korean, read it in the original and decided to not let it go untranslated. The result was The Vegetarian, published in the UK in 2015.

Han’s work is spartan and she is well known and well liked for sticking to an austere economy of expression that somehow does the job better than busy sentences do. As her father, the novelist Han Seungwon, has said, there is nothing to discard in Han Kang’s novels. Smith has, through her multiple translations of Han’s novels, short stories, publicity material and more, treated this style in a way that has robbed the reader of the niggling awareness that they are reading a work in translation.

But her impact has been a lot more than the already gargantuan propelling of a very gifted author to the global stage. One of the most well known Korean translators active today, Anton Hur, told The Wire this August that Smith’s work had few fans in Korea at the beginning. This was, according to Hur, largely because Smith struck at Korean conservatism.

“In Korea, while I was coming up, the approach was that translation had to be very literal. That was [part of] a very conservative approach to Korean cultural products. I believe that is why Korean books just did not really sell well,” Hur had said. In 2022, two books that Hur translated from Korean were shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.

Hur says that there were exceptions to the literal-or-nothing rule for translation and cites Please Look After Mom, translated by Chiyoung Kim and written by Kyung Sookshin. This book was the first and only Korean New York Times bestseller until Hur and two others translated BTS’s memoir, Beyond the Story.

But, Hur said, it was only when The Vegetarian won the International Booker Prize that the shift began. “It was really Deborah Smith’s translation that changed the face of Korean literature in translation, and allowed translators to be more daring, more literary and to consider the target language culture as much as the source language culture – which was not a position that Korea espoused at that time,” he said.

But before she set the standard for Korean to English translators who would come after her, there were trials. Errors were pointed out. Heated debates were executed. There was deep unease. In an interview with the Booker Prize, Han was asked how it felt when there was a level of controversy around the translation. The authoritativeness in her reply is telling. She said:

“Contrary to the concerns expressed by many, I do not believe that the translator has deliberately undermined the original, nor do I believe that she has created a new work that is completely different from the original. The errors have been corrected and translation is by its very nature an extremely difficult and complex act that involves loss and exploration. Lyricism, rhythms, poetic tension, subtlety, the layered meanings, the deeply inscribed cultural context of the departure language – everything that is possible only in that language – is inevitably lost in the transition to the arrival language. The challenging task for any translator is to navigate through this dark tunnel of loss and find the closest equivalents or analogies to be as faithful as possible to the original text.”

Human Acts, Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith, Granta Books, 2016.

Korean depends more on the translator’s discretion than many other languages. As any learner will tell you, this is because of the dastardly omission of subjects in it, especially in the written form. “Eating.” “Sleeping.” “Feeling blue because the skies are grey.” Who is? Korean doesn’t deign to tell you. You arrive at the answer by paying close attention to the situation and nuance. To add to this, any translator would also have the imperative to not pander to an English expectation of Korean culture, and to strike a cultural balance.

Smith and Han laboured on, with corrections, revisions, and a wholehearted refusal to let literary traditions dictate style. It is curious that in Han’s novels, society which is so deep in Korea is peeled off layer by layer to facilitate an excruciating immediacy of feeling, and it is Han’s novel which was subjected to societal expectations of what goes in literature.

“Indeed, Deborah was attacked a lot in Korea because her translation was so innovative. But now everyone translates like her – except for the ones that are not successful,” Hur said.

The literature Nobel is a strange prize – for long it has been considered an expression of global politics. For a while, your popularity as a writer ruled you out. It served to draw the author out from their corner and make a global concept out of them. Giving the prize to a person – not an author, but a person – like Han goes some way in restoring faith in the prize. The New Republic called the decision a “kind of defense of literature in an era when it is constantly sullied and devalued.”

Han speaks almost entirely through her books – she is no recluse but her public presence is not big. At events, she speaks in the gentlest of tones, one that matches her authorial voice to a frightening degree. As the writer Jen Calleja wrote on The Quietus:

“[When Han began speaking at an event], everyone shuffled around, worried that they wouldn’t be able to hear. But then we adjusted. The room shifted from silence, to an absolute void where Kang’s voice was the only sound, as if whispered to each person individually. It’s a voice that commands your attention because you must listen carefully.”

Indeed, you must listen carefully when Han refuses to organise a press conference in celebration of her award because two wars – in West Asia and Ukraine – are intensifying.

You must listen carefully to the core of Han’s novels, to their obstinate refusal to give in to any kind of normalisation of oppression.

You must listen to the clarity of Han’s voice, despite the men complaining in Korea’s (and the world’s) consistently misogynistic landscape that a woman’s Nobel win is a reflection of deep distress for them.

And while you listen, you must know that the words come to you via a translator or two. Almost all of Asia’s literature Nobels are thanks to the work of translators – which in one case, dear to India, was the author himself. As a literary tool in a fractious world, there is perhaps nothing as valuable as a translation is.

Literature Nobel Prize Winner Annie Ernaux’s Work Has Been Closely Informed by Her Experiences

Her body of work includes discussions on the act and art of writing, texts incorporating personal photographs, intimate and public diaries, and life-writing that refuses to be contained by categories.

The French author Annie Ernaux has won the 2022 Nobel prize in literature at the age of 82. Of the 119 awarded, Ernaux is only the 18th woman Nobel laureate in literature and the first French woman to have won the prize.

The academy praised her “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”.

From her first book Cleaned Out in 1973, Ernaux’s work has been closely informed by her own life experiences. She has continued to surprise and inspire readers with coverage of daring topics and her innovative approach to genres. Her body of work includes discussions on the act and art of writing, texts incorporating personal photographs, intimate and public diaries, and life-writing that refuses to be contained by categories.

Class conflict

Born in 1940, Ernaux was brought up in Yvetôt in Normandy. She is the only daughter of working-class parents who ran a cafe-cum-grocers, and her childhood was underpinned by class tensions within the family home and outside it. Ernaux attended a private Catholic girls’ school for her secondary education, which fuelled social divisions between her and her parents – in particular her father, which she explores in her fourth publication A Man’s Place.

Growing up in a socially divided environment meant Ernaux felt ashamed of the supposedly distasteful aspects of her upbringing, such as the working-class environment of her father’s cafe or her mother’s shirking of the norms of middle-class housewifery and femininity, which she writes about in A Frozen Woman.

Her childhood was immersed in working-class culture, popular songs and the romantic novels her mother consumed. But from an early age, she was also an avid reader of “classic” French texts. She then studied literature at Rouen university and went on to teach it at secondary school before becoming a full-time writer in the 1970s. This experience gave Ernaux knowledge of French theories and practices of writing, which is evident in her references to authors such as Honore de Balzac, Marcel Proust and Simone de Beauvoir and her self-reflexive comments on the act of writing.

As a writer, she realised that her daily life was not represented in either the French literature she read at home or in the classrooms she learnt and later taught in. It was at school that she became aware of a “familiarity, a subtle complicity” as her teachers avidly listened to the stories of her middle-class schoolmates but silenced her attempts to speak about her home life. These experiences permeate her work, which repeatedly touches on the conflict between what she calls “the dominant class” and “the dominated class”, referencing the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.

Her first three novels, Cleaned Out, Do What They Say or Else and A Frozen Woman, form a trilogy of autobiographical novels. These works broadly detail the socialisation of a working-class girl who has a middle-class education and then marriage. Her protagonist is a woman who, like so many of Ernaux’s readers, identifies as a “class defector”.

In subsequent works, Ernaux considered fictionalised accounts of her origins a form of betrayal because they ran the risk of exoticising her family and class origins.

Ernaux’s acute awareness of the formative influence of class underpins her entire body of work and in the wake of her win, many in France praised her work for its ongoing focus on the French working-class experience.

Flat writing

Following this trilogy, Ernaux adopted the writing style for which she has since become well-known, typically referred to as “l’écriture plate” (literally “flat writing”). This pared-down, understated style is coupled with a fluid approach to genre that incorporates elements of ethnography, autobiography and sociology. As she comments in A Man’s Place:

“This neutral way of writing comes to me naturally, it is the very same style I used when I wrote home telling my parents the latest news.”

The chairman of the Nobel Literature committee, Anders Olssen, described Ernaux’s work as “uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean”.

This approach to writing is underpinned by a mission. Ernaux believes that writing about the self inevitably involves writing about a socio-political context, and thereby extends the representativeness of her own experience. By writing simply about her own experiences, she also wants to write into literature the experience of French working-class.

That desire to give voice to marginalised experiences is further illustrated in two of her “external diaries”, Exteriors and Things Seen, which record the everyday exchanges of people in outside spaces such as the supermarket or when commuting on the Paris metro.

She has also published more intimate diaries composed during significant stages of her life. I Remain in Darkness was written during her mother’s decline from Alzheimer’s. Getting Lost is a diary she kept during a passionate affair with a married man – a love affair she also described in her novel Simple Passion. The honesty with which she details her obsession with this man struck a chord with many of her female readers.

Her literary approach typically incorporates self-reflexive remarks where she comments on the challenges she faces in turning lived experiences into literary form.

It is that openness and sense of writer-reader intimacy that partly explains her popularity. Her courage in exploring and exploding generic expectations is also reflected in the content of her work. She writes about a range of taboo subjects including her backstreet abortion (Cleaned Out and Happening, which was recently made into a film), sexual intimacy and issues of consent, breast cancer and her dead sister (L’Autre Fille).

Her most famous work, The Years, is considered to be her magnum opus. It can be read as a further example of a “public diary” in that it covers the socio-cultural history of France, mixing her own story (relayed through the representative “she”) with the collective story of her generation. Nominated for the International Booker Prize in 2019, The Years made English-speaking audiences aware of her – and that attention has now happily been extended by the jury of the Nobel prize in literature.

Like many of the women prizewinners who have preceded her, including Toni Morrison and Alice Munro, Ernaux has spent her writing life giving voice to the experiences of those who remain under- or unrepresented in literature. This award will allow these voices to ring out all the more clearly.The Conversation

Siobhán McIlvanney, Professor in French and Francophone Women’s Writing; Head of Department of French, King’s College London.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Tanzanian Novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah Wins 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature

Gurnah, whose novels include Paradise and Desertion, writes in English and lives in Britain.

Stockholm: Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, the award-giving body said on Thursday.

Gurnah, whose novels include Paradise and Desertion, writes in English and lives in Britain.

The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.14 million).

The prizes, for achievements in science, literature and peace, were created through a bequest in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and wealthy businessman Alfred Nobel. They have been awarded since 1901, with the final prize in the line-up – economics – a later addition.

Past winners have primarily been novelists such as Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Toni Morrison, poets such as Pablo Neruda, Joseph Brodsky and Rabindranath Tagore, or playwrights such as Harold Pinter and Eugene O’Neill.

But writers have also won for bodies of work that include short fiction, history, essays, biography or journalism. Winston Churchill won for his memoirs, Bertrand Russell for his philosophy and Bob Dylan for his lyrics. Last year’s award was won by American poet Louise Gluck.

Beyond the prize money and prestige, the Nobel literature award generates a vast amount of attention for the winning author, often spurring book sales and introducing less well-known winners to a broader international public.

American Poet, Essayist Louise Glück Wins 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature

Glück is a Pulitzer Prize winning poet who is also a professor of English Literature at Yale University.

New Delhi: The Nobel Prize in literature was awarded to US poet Louise Glück in Stockholm on Thursday. Glück is a Pulitzer Prize winning poet who is also a professor of English Literature at Yale University.

“Glück made her debut in 1968 with ‘Firstborn’ and was soon acclaimed as one of the most prominent poets in American contemporary literature. She has published twelve collections of poetry and some volumes of essays on poetry,” the committee has said. Her works are “are characterised by a striving for clarity. Childhood and family life, the close relationship with parents and siblings, is a thematic that has remained central with her”.

In addition to her poetry collections, Glück is also a renowned essay writer and literary critic. Her first published work appeared in 1968.

Glück lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The prize has been awarded almost every year since 1901 and is seen as one of the most reputable literary awards in the world.

Like much of public life around the world, this year’s awards have taken place under the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic, which led to the cancellation of the splashy Nobel prize-giving ceremony held each December in Stockholm.

Instead, a televised event will be held with winners receiving their honours in their home countries.

Tumult and controversy

This year’s prize comes after years of tumult and controversy. The 2018 the award was postponed after sex abuse allegations rocked the Swedish Academy, the secretive body that chooses the winners, and sparked a mass exodus of members.

After the academy revamped itself in a bid to regain the trust of the Nobel Foundation, two laureates were named last year, with the 2018 prize going to Poland’s Olga Tokarczuk and the 2019 award to Austria’s Peter Handke.

Handke’s prize caused a storm of protest: a strong supporter of the Serbs during the 1990s Balkan wars, he has been called an apologist for Serbian war crimes. Several countries including Albania, Bosnia and Turkey boycotted the Nobel awards ceremony in protest, and a member of the committee that nominates candidates for the literature prize resigned.

The prize comes with a gold medal and a 10 million krona (more than $1.1 million) prize.

Earlier in the week, the awards for medicine, physics and chemistry were already handed out. Friday sees the announcement of the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize, while the prize for economics will be awarded next week.

(With inputs from Reuters and DW)

PEN America Decries Peter Handke’s Nobel Literature Prize Win

“We are dumbfounded by the selection of a writer who has used his public voice to undercut historical truth and offer public succor to perpetrators of genocide,” a statement by PEN America said.

New Delhi: PEN America, a nonprofit organisation, has expressed dismay over the Swedish Academy’s decision to award the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature to Peter Handke over his support for the Serbs during the 1990s Yugoslav war.

On Thursday, the Swedish Academy announced that the delayed 2018 Nobel Prize for literature would be awarded to Polish novelist and activist Olga Tokarczuk and the 2019 prize to Austrian writer Peter Handke.

In a statement issued from PEN America President Jennifer Egan, the organisation expressed regret over the Nobel Committee on Literature’s choice and said, “We are dumbfounded by the selection of a writer who has used his public voice to undercut historical truth and offer public succor to perpetrators of genocide, like former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic”.

PEN America – whose name is an acronym that stands for Poets, Essayists, Novelists – identifies itself as an organisation that “stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression” and boasts of a community of over 7,200 novelists, journalists, writers, editors, poets, essayists, playwrights, publishers, translators, agents, and other writing professionals across the US.

Pointing out that the organisation “does not generally comment on other institutions’ literary awards” and was cognisant of the fact that decisions were subjective, PEN America observed that the decision to award Peter Handke the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature was an “exception”.

Also read: What the Nobel Prizes Are Not

The statement asserted that its 1948 PEN Charter was committed to “fighting against mendacious publication, deliberate falsehood, and distortion of facts” and dedicated to working to “dispel all hatreds and to champion the ideal of one humanity living in peace and equality.”

The statement further maintained that at a time of “rising nationalism, autocratic leadership, and widespread disinformation”, the decision to felicitate “a writer who has persistently called into question thoroughly documented war crimes” should not be celebrated for his “linguistic ingenuity”

Handke, whose best-known works include The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, and Slow Homecoming. has been widely condemned and criticised for being an apologist for the former president of Serbia and alleged war criminal Slobodan Milosevic, who was charged with genocide in connection with the war in Bosnia in 1992-95. Handke has previously denied that a genocide took place in Srebrenica and also made an appearance at Milosevic’s funeral.

Handke’s win has elicited criticism from several members of the literary community including British author Hari Kunzru, Slovenian author Miha Mazzini and British novelist Salman Rushdie.

The Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama referred to the Nobel academy’s decision as a “disgraceful choice” while Kosovo President Hashim Thaci tweeted that the academy’s decision had “brought immense pain to countless victims”.

“Have we become so numb to racism, so emotionally desensitised to violence, so comfortable with appeasement that we can overlook one’s subscription and service to the twisted agenda of a genocidal maniac?” tweeted Kosovo’s ambassador to the US,  Vlora Citaku.

The acting foreign minister of Albania Gent Cakaj also tweeted that he was appalled by the decision to award the Nobel Prize in Literature to a “genocide denier” and called it an “ignoble and shameful act”.

In 2014, Handke had also called for the Nobel Prize to be “abolished” and claimed that he did not admire its choices. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek said that Handke’s Nobel Prize win this year “proves that he was right”.

Olga Tokarczuk, Peter Handke Named Literature Nobel Winners for 2018, 2019

Both writers are prominent and popular choices, from Poland and Austria respectively.

The Swedish Academy announced on Thursday (at around 4:30 pm, IST) that the 2018 Nobel Prize for literature would be awarded to Polish novelist and activist Olga Tokarczuk and the 2019 one to Austrian writer and translator Peter Handke. Both writers will win 9 million krona each.

No Nobel Prize for Literature was given in 2018 because of a scandal over sexual misconduct allegations that has seen a string of board members resign from the board of the Swedish Academy.

“Work on the selection of a laureate is at an advanced stage and will continue as usual in the months ahead but the Academy needs time to regain its full complement, engage a larger number of active members and regain confidence in its work, before the next Literature Prize winner is declared,” it had said in May last year.

Also read: Swedish Academy Postpones 2018 Nobel Literature Prize Over Sex Scandal

Olga Tokarczuk. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Tokarczuk, whom the Academy described as the writer of works “full of wit and cunning”, is understood to have been the yearlong choice for 2018. She was, said the Academy, awarded the honour “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopaedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.”

Reports in the aftermath of the announcement describe Tokarczuk as the ultimate foil to the conservative upheaval in Europe. She is a noted feminist and an avowed liberal in her political outlook.

In 2018, she won the Man Booker International Prize for her novel Flights. She is the first Polish writer to have done so. Her novels are usually translated by Jennifer Croft or Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

Tokarczuk is the 15th woman to have won the literature Nobel.

Peter Handke. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Peter Handke, this year’s awardee, presents “an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.”

The decision to pick Handke comes in the aftermath of the Academy’s avowed promise to move away from the “Eurocentric and male-dominated” choices of earlier years. Handke is also infamous for his appearance at former Serbian and Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milošević’s funeral. Milošević is a noted war criminal.

Handke’s opinions on the Yugoslav wars are at best controversial. He is best known for The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, and Slow Homecoming.

Both laureates will attend the award ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death.