South Korean author Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024. Since then, her most famous novel, The Vegetarian, has been all over American bookstores. But when I read The Vegetarian, something seemed off. Upon reaching the end of this slim book, I realized that it is indeed a masterpiece. But I wondered how the English translation compares to the original Korean. This blog post highlights the mastery of The Vegetarian by Han Kang, along with an analysis of its English translation, to the best of my ability as a non-Korean speaker.

Note that this novel was originally published in 2007. This blog features great books published in the last 10 years, but I’m including The Vegetarian in this category since the English translation was published in 2016.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang Book Review: What’s Not Lost in Translation

I gifted this book to my mother for Christmas, despite a friend’s warning that it wasn’t an appropriate gift. I didn’t even read it beforehand, I just gifted it. It was written by a Nobel Prize-winning author, after all. How inappropriate could it be?

Sorry, Mom!

I texted her to inquire how she liked it. She replied: “It was … well … uh … not translated correctly.”

This was a joke. She was not making a comment about the translation. She was, jokingly, blaming the translator for the content of the book. This content, no matter which translation you read, most definitely comes from Han herself. (Han is her last name, aka family name, since in Korea family names are listed first.)

The Vegetarian is about a woman undergoing a mental breakdown that seems to get progressively worse as time passes. The novel is in three sections, told from three perspectives: those of the woman’s husband, brother-in-law, and sister. The husband is a total asshole. The brother-in-law is a sexual predator masquerading as an artist. The sister is the only person who understands. She understands because she grew up alongside her sister, and the two of them, as girls and then as women, experienced traumatic subjugation by cruel men.

The end of the novel is particularly powerful and insightful. It dramatizes what can happen when women aren’t allowed to stand up for themselves—and what can happen when they try.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang: Analysis of Why It’s Emotionally Hard to Read

My friend didn’t think The Vegetarian was an appropriate Christmas gift for my mother because it’s emotionally hard to read. First of all, it’s extremely blunt in its frequent mention of taboo topics like nakedness, sex, abuse, medical interventions, and so on. Secondly, it’s hard to inhabit the perspectives of the asshole husband and predatory brother-in-law, which take up the first two-thirds of the novel.

For example, here are a few lines told from the perspective of the husband. His wife is clearly unwell. She’s behaving unusually. But instead of responding with compassion, or even a hint of comprehension, he yells at her for not doing her routine wifely tasks:

“I flipped my phone shut and dashed into the bathroom, where I shaved so hurriedly that I cut myself in two places.
‘Haven’t you even ironed my white shirt?’
There was no answer.”

His entire thought process is to blame her for everything. The text does not say he blames her for cutting himself while shaving, but you know he does. It’s like—Why are you having a mental breakdown while I’m trying to get ready for work? How inconsiderate of you!

The Vegetarian by Han Kang: Analysis of the English Translation

As I said, something about The Vegetarian seemed off to me. Not the content of the novel, but the writing at the sentence level. I had the intangible feeling that the English words on the page weren’t expressing thoughts with the clarity and precision one expects from a Nobel Prize winner.

Curious about the quality of the translation, I googled and discovered several relevant articles:

• The Guardian, Lost in (mis)translation? English take on Korean novel has critics up in arms
• The New Yorker, Han Kang and the Complexity of Translation
• Los Angeles Times, How the bestseller ‘The Vegetarian,’ translated from Han Kang’s original, caused an uproar in South Korea

All three of these articles focus on a controversy in the literary world over the English translation of The Vegetarian. Critics disagree on whether the translation represents good or bad prose, but they all agree that the translation is not faithful to Han’s original text.

The LA Times article is particularly revealing because it is written by a Korean-American who speaks both Korean and English and teaches translation in Seoul. He writes in this article:

“There are indeed quite a few errors, which is not surprising for a relatively new learner of the language. [The translator] confuses ‘arm’ (pal) for ‘foot’ (bal) [and] mistakes the Korean term for ‘a good appetite’ as being ‘a more than competent cook.’ . . . [The translator] occasionally confuses the subjects of sentences. . . . [The translator] ‘poeticized’ the novel. In terms of tone and voice, ‘The Vegetarian’ is strikingly different from the original. . . . [The translator] amplifies Han’s spare, quiet style and embellishes it with adverbs, superlatives and other emphatic word choices that are nowhere in the original. This doesn’t just happen once or twice, but on virtually every other page. Taken together, it’s clear that [the translator] took significant liberties with the text.”

I don’t point this out to bash on the translator. This person has done something I certainly could not do. However, it is something English readers should be aware of. English readers of The Vegetarian—including you, me, and perhaps some of the judges of the Nobel Prize—are interfacing with a version of the novel that doesn’t match Han’s vision and artistry.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang: Analysis of the English and Spanish Translations

Trying to translate Korean characters myself is a hopeless task, due to my complete ignorance about the language. But what I can do is compare the English translation to the Spanish translation; two different translators created these two translations. While I’m not fluent in Spanish, I have a working knowledge of Spanish grammar and can generally figure out what’s happening in a Spanish sentence in print.

(Speaking is another matter; I generally won’t understand any Spanish spoken to me unless it’s a simple hello or an inquiry about where the bathroom is.)

I chose two passages at random from the opening pages of The Vegetarian and compared the two translations. I did this by translating the Spanish translation of Han’s sentences into English and comparing this to the English translation of Han’s sentences. Note that I used Google Translate for assistance. If any of you speak better Spanish than I do, feel free to offer a better translation in the comments. If you speak Korean, even better—please do weigh in.

Example Passage #1:

English translation: “Have you lost your mind? Why on earth are you throwing all this stuff out?”
Spanish translation: “Te has vuelto loca? Por qué estás tirando todo esto?”
Spanish translation translated into English: “Have you gone crazy? Why are you throwing all this away?”

The Spanish translation contains much more straightforward language. It’s spare and precise and contains no unnecessary words.

As regards the first sentence, “gone crazy” and “lost your mind” are very similar expressions, but “gone crazy” is an exact statement, while “lost your mind” is metaphorical and colloquial.

The second sentence is even more telling. The English translator has included “on earth,” an English colloquial expression that means nothing other than to add a cheesy sort of emphasis. The English translator has also included the word “stuff,” an annoyingly vague and colloquial word.

Example Passage #2:

English translation: “Her expression as she looked at me was perfectly composed.”
Spanish translation: “Me lo dijo mirándome a los ojos sin que se le alterara en lo más mínimo la expreción.”
Spanish translation translated into English: “She said this to me, looking me in the eye without changing her expression in the slightest.”

The Spanish translation contains clarifying information that does not appear in the English translation.

First, there is no “said” or “told” in the English translation, which should be present if there was such a verb in the original Korean.

Ditto for the word “eye” or “eyes.” What a beautiful, concrete noun. In the Spanish translation, I can envision her eyes, but such imagery does not occur in the English translation.

The last part of this sentence is the most egregious because the meaning is not the same. “Without changing her expression in the slightest” is very different from an “expression . . . perfectly composed.” The word “composed” implies that she is calm, but that’s not what is going on here. She is in internal turmoil and acting bizarrely, but she’s sort of expressionless, like a zombie. This is conveyed very well in the Spanish translation, but not in the English translation.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang: Book Review Summary

All this being said, I do recommend the novel The Vegetarian by Han Kang. The content of the novel is so good and profound that it really should not be missed. My opinion of the English translation is that it reads a little like mush. I would love to read a crisper translation. But until a more faithful translation appears, we English-only speakers are stuck with this version.

Have you ever had frightening dreams, become a vegetarian, and hoped to become a tree?

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