The Vegetarian and the Prize That Pays Two Writers — Epoche B1
Han Kang, The Vegetarian , translated by Deborah Smith When this novel won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016, the most interesting sentence was in the rulebook. That year the prize changed shape: it was awarded, for the first time, to a single translated book rather than to a career — and the £50,000 was divided equally between author and translator. Han Kang and Deborah Smith stood on the stage together, and the cheque did not rank them. The book had been published in Korea in 2007 as three linked novellas. Yeong-hye, an outwardly unremarkable Seoul wife, stops eating meat after a dream, and her calm refusal slowly detonates her family. She almost never narrates. We watch her through her husband, then her brother-in-law, then her sister — each of whom needs her to be something she has declined to be. The translation itself became an argument. Korean scholars later went through Smith's English line by line and counted real mistakes — subjects attached to the wrong person, colour added where the Korean is bare. Defenders answered that without that English the book would never have travelled at all. Both things can be true, and the prize had already taken its position: a translated novel has two writers, and the rules now pay them accordingly. I read the English first and the Korean much later, slowly, and they are honestly different animals — the Korean flatter and colder, the English more feverish. What is worth keeping from the whole episode is not a verdict on Smith. It is the rule change: every winner since has been two names on one line, and the money splits down the middle. References Kim Soo-hyun (2016). I Decided to Live as Me. Maumsup.