Awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life,” the South Korean writer Han Kangaccording to the jury in its award document, manifests in each of her works “a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, life and death, and with her experimental and poetic style, she has become an innovator of contemporary prose.
Han Kang (Gwangju, South Korea, 1970) began his career as a novelist by winning the Seoul Shinmun spring literary competition in 1994. The Vegetarian, his first novel translated into English, won the Booker Prize in 2016 and his next novel, Acts humans, earned him the Manhae Prize for Literature in Korea and the Malaparte Prize in Italy in 2017. Other of his novels, some of them translated into thirty languages, are The black deer (1998), your cold hands (2002), Breath fight (2009), Greek class (2011) and The boy is coming (2014). She is the author of story books Love in Yeosu (1995), The fruit of my wife (2000), tear boxyes (2010) and The yellow design of eternity (2012), and the essays About love and its surroundings (2003) and Songs sung softly (2007). The Spanish translation of Say goodbyea novel for which he won the Medici Prize when it appeared in French, will be released this winter.
Han Kang was translated for the first time into a Western language—Spanish—in 2012 by the Korean-Argentine Sun-me Yoon. That year the Bajo la Luna publishing house, from Buenos Aires, published The vegetarianwhich four years later would be translated into English and catapulted its author to an international level.
Say goodbyeexplains to Maze Albert Puigduetaits Spanish-language editor and head of the Random House Literature imprint, “is the story of a woman who has a friend who, due to a series of circumstances, is sick in a hospital and asks her to go to her house, on an island, to Take care of your little bird so that it doesn’t die. This story of the present is connected with a traumatic episode: the Jeju massacre in 1948, which serves to talk about the victims somewhat along the lines of another of his novels, Human Acts, in which he also does this type of work. .
Puigdueta says that very few authors like Han Kang have managed to reflect current human fragility and violence, in addition to showing in an original way the historical traumas suffered by their characters. “He does it with a poetic voice of extraordinary beauty and at the same time disturbing and disturbing.” Regarding language, Puigdueta maintains that “his prose is simple and it is clear that Han Kang began writing poetry, since he has an almost minimalist style.”
For its part, Joan Riambaueditor of Kang’s works in Catalan under the La Magrana label, emphasizes that the Nobel Prize winner “is one of the great contemporary authors not only for her powerful narrative, capable of giving life to very solid characters in very complicated life situations, but also because She is one of those rare authors who knows how to delve deeply into the human condition. That is where the success of his novels lies, which move, excite and, above all, invite us to reflect on what we are as human beings and what our place in the world is.”
The vegetarianobserves the Catalan editor, “is the story of a woman who decides to become a vegetarian and encounters the incomprehension of her family environment. Greek class It is a great novel that explains a lot about the world we live in. A woman who is losing her speech and who signs up for an ancient Greek course because she knows that the study of languages has motivated and propelled her in her life, meets a teacher who is losing her sight. With these characters, who are becoming isolated from the world, Kang creates a situation of extraordinary beauty and a faint optimism, because in the end we human beings manage to find a thread that unites us with others.”
In an interview conducted in January of this year for the Infobae agency, Han Kang recalled that in his youth he enjoyed reading works by Latin American writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, César Vallejo, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez and Manuel Puig. He said that in Greek class He showed how language is an arrow that never reaches the target, something that confines and causes wounds to his character, and that the blind character was a reflection of all of us, because in some way “we gradually move towards darkness and disappearance, just like him.”
Greek class It was his fifth novel, and before starting to write it he suffered a blockage for almost a year. It was a period, Kang confessed, in which he had no desire to write or read. He didn’t even watch fiction films, but rather documentaries, and spent most of his time reading astrophysics books, except for the stories of Borges, who, like his character, progressively lost his sight. That condition, Buddhist philosophy and the effort of her other character to overcome the loss of speech and find language, are masterfully woven in that novel because, as Kang herself explained, “when harmony with the world and life become difficult, a conflict with language also arises.” So in The Greek Class the protagonist fights with all her might to rediscover the language. Finally, he recovers the first person, the “I”, to “persist in silence and move towards his own voice, seeking to recover the world, language and love.”
“When writing this novel,” the author said in that talk, “I focused on the senses: seeing, hearing, smelling, touching. As we enter the final part, the speed gradually decreases and some moments swell as if they were eternal. In this leisurely rhythm, the intensity of the senses is magnified. However, this does not mean that the novel is silent. Beneath the calm surface, there is a tension. When the two characters reveal their softer sides and emerge together from the magnifying glass of their shared moments, we realize how violent the world around them is. So when writing this novel I reflected on what aspect of humanity I should explore. I wanted to delve into the softer parts, remembering that we are human beings. I wish not to forget, especially in a world as violent as this.”
As to The vegetarianin the words of its author, is “the story of peaceful resistance using one’s own body.” Kang pointed out that his protagonist, Yeong-hye, is described as the object of the observations, desires, hatreds, misunderstandings and empathy of other narrators, with the exception of her dream monologues, and stated that it was intentional not to have given this character a own voice to show how others fail to understand it and grasp its truth. Yeong-hye decides to practice vegetarianism as an attempt to become an entity that does not commit violence, believing that by transforming into a plant she could achieve perfection. So he refrains from eating anything but water until, ironically, in his quest to redeem himself, he comes closer and closer to death.
Han Kang’s voice ultimately reflects a society of hybrid nature, with values that collide and coexist, something very similar to what happens in Mexico. “In South Korean society,” Kang said, “there are brave and progressive women, movements that seek diversity, just as patriarchy and gender discrimination coexist.”
The work of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature reminds us that, although some cultures are perceived differently by others, the parts that are universally accepted are fascinating and intriguing, because, as Han Kang maintains, “we are more common beings than what we think, able to connect without barriers.”
By Han Kang
The steely edge*
Borges asked María Kodama to engrave on her tombstone the phrase “He took his sword, and placed the bare metal between the two.” Kodama, the beautiful young woman of Japanese descent who was his secretary, married Borges when he was eighty-seven years old and shared the last three months of the writer’s life.** She was the one who accompanied him in his final journey, which took place in Geneva, the city where the writer spent his childhood and where he wanted to be buried. A critic wrote in his book that that short phrase engraved on his tombstone represented “the steely edge.” He maintained that this image was the key that allowed access to Borges’ work, that this sword separated the previous realist literature from Borges’ writing. To me, on the other hand, it sounded more like a personal and quiet confession. The short phrase is a quote from an ancient Norse epic poem. The first and also the last time that a man and a woman spent the night together, a sword placed on the bed separated them both until dawn. What else could that “steel edge” be, if not the blindness that afflicted Borges in his last years and isolated him from the world? Although I have been to Switzerland at times, I have never been to Geneva, because I did not feel like visiting the tomb. of Borges to see it with my own eyes. Instead, I toured the library of the Abbey of St. Gallen, which would surely have provoked endless fascination in the Argentine writer if he had known it. I even seem to feel at this moment the roughness of the felt slippers they made us wear. to protect the thousand-year-old wooden floor. Then I took a boat from the Lucerne pier, which sailed on the lake until sunset along the coast of the snow-covered alpine valleys. I didn’t take photos anywhere. The landscapes were imprinted on my retinas. The camera cannot record sounds, smells and textures, but these were recorded in all their details in my ears, nose, face and hands. At that time, the sword did not yet separate me from the world, so that was enough for me.
*Title of the Editorial. This fragment belongs to The Greek Class, a novel published by Random House (2023).
** Borges died on June 14, 1986. On April 26, 1986, he married María Kodama, whom he met in 1953.
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