Han Kang and Deborah Smith: ‘It is fascinating to ponder the possibili­ties of language’

The winning Man Booker International author and translator explain their writing relationship – and the difficulty of working across time zones

Deborah Smith
As The Vegetarian was my first translation I had no idea how any aspect of the process worked, let alone what I would do day by day. Having spent most of my life reading, and making no distinction between work in translation and in English, I decided after graduating that I would learn a language and become a literary translator. I chose Korean partly for pragmatic reasons, because I knew the country had a lively literary scene, but in fact I had read nothing from there before, because there were no translations. Rather optimistically, I put on my Twitter bio that I was a translator, and eventually I suggested The Vegetarian to a publisher, who asked me to translate it. When I began I didn’t know what the usual author-translator relationship was, whether you were supposed to get in touch, or even if Kang spoke English. So I just went ahead and translated the whole book, sent it in with a list of questions, and waited.

Related: The Vegetarian by Han Kang review – an extraordinary story of family fallout

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