The first time a Han Kang novel (Gwangju, South Korea, 1970), Nobel Prize in Literature 2024came out to the West, it was a Spanish translation of The vegetarian which was published in 2012 on the Bajo La Luna label, a independent publishing house in Argentina translated by Sunme Yoon.
Han Kang began her career as a novelist by winning the Seoul Shinmun spring literary contest in 1994. It took four years for the powerful American industry to discover her, and when it did, the English version of The vegetarian won in 2016 the International Booker Prize.
Today, Han Kang’s name has already gone around the world after winning the Nobel Prize at the age of 54 and being the first Asian woman to achieve it.
“For his intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life. She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in her poetic and experimental style she has become an innovator of the contemporary prose”reported the Swedish Academy.
A key woman
Behind the Nobel Prize winner there is an important name, Sunme Yoon, who believed in her when she was in Korea. The vegetarian It was not a success. Even the translator opted for Kang and made known to the Western world the story of a woman who decides to break with the strict customs of a patriarchal and ultracapitalist society.
For this reason, Sunme Yoon’s story is also worth telling, because without her, perhaps the future of the Nobel Prize would have been different.
Sunme Yoon left South Korea at a very young age and stayed in Argentina for many years and studied a degree in Literature at the University of Buenos Aires until she returned to Korea as an adult and has dedicated herself to making people known. korean authors with books like Why do you insist on suffering like this? Pioneers of Korean feminisman anthology of short stories by Korea’s first professional writers, and she is currently a translator and friend of her country’s first Nobel Prize winner.
global surprise
“I am surprised and honored. I had just had dinner with my son. I will have tea to celebrate on this quiet night,” said Han Kang, who, like many, was taken by surprise by the Nobel Prize because it involved big names such as Margaret Atwood, Mircea Cărtărescu, Salman Rushdie and, of course, Haruki Murakami.
Even to its publisher in Mexico, Random House, which immediately announced that it will reprint The vegetarian and Greek class.
“Evidently this took us by surprise. As always, the Nobel jurors like to go off on tangents and not reward those who are supposed to be awarded, those who are in the run run and we are reprinting,” he told MILLENNIUM Andrés Ramírez, editorial director of the literary and paperback division of Penguin Random House México.
But the editor assured that “you will find a very powerful literature that talks about very current issues and that will also open a way for us to get to know a culture that is far away from us, but that is also, in some way, quite present, because there is many korean series and all this, and so I think it will complement that whole trend very well.”
Han Kang is a feminist writer and The vegetarianhis most celebrated work, has all that background “and I think it will be very well appreciated. It is a discovery of the Nobel Prize to give such recognition to a woman with that type of literature. In fact, the novel begins narrated by her partner, by the man, and then he is appreciating how this woman begins to have behaviors that seem strange to him and the counterpoint of what the character is doing with how she sees him is very interesting. he”.
Andrés Ramírez announced that they will launch Han Kang’s new novel called Han Kang before the end of the year. Saying goodbye is impossible, which revolves around the 1948 Jeju uprising and a massacre.
—Does winning the Nobel Prize truly catapult an author’s sales?
Yes, although it always depends on the award or what type of author the winner is. There are certain authors who are sometimes less experimental or less harsh and have much more impact on the sale of the books. In the case of Han Kang, I think it will be a success because it also had an excellent reception in almost all markets.”
Han Kang, the poet
The writer and editor Roberto Amézquita, from Círculo de Poesía, shared that in addition to being a novelist, the Nobel Prize winner has written poetry.
“Kang essentially writes novels, short stories and essays, but he has also written some poems. In the poems by Han Kang Pain bleeds language and silence, bleeds being. In a time apparently devoid of soul, he leads us with his poems to remember (that is, to bring back to the heart) the fire that animates us and also to feel what reality overwhelms us with. A voice of human desolation and a mirror before our vulnerable being so that we can watch ourselves burn and when we look at ourselves, we wake up in our pain,” said Amézquita, who translated “Winter Poetry Through the Looking Glass” from the English version by Sophie Bowman.
Stare into the pupil of a flame.
Eye
bluish
heart shaped
the hottest, the most
lit
inner flame, orange.
The most flickering
that surrounds her again
almost transparent outer flame
Tomorrow at dawn, it will be tomorrow that I leave
towards that distant city, but today
the blue eye of a flame,
look beyond my eyes.
PCL
