To Translate Trauma and Violence: An Interview with Janet Hong, Translator from Korean

It is especially heartbreaking to see the bias that everyone carries and the injustice of who suffers, or who suffers most.

Janet Hong is a Vancouver-based writer and literary translator who has brought acclaimed Korean authors such as Han Yujoo and Ha Seong-nan to an Anglophone audience. Her newest translation, the novel Lemon by Kwon Yeo-Sun, is a masterfully crafted novel of grief’s maddening proportions.

During the chaos of the 2002 FIFA World Cup in Korea, high schooler Hae-on is murdered and her killer is never charged. Over the next seventeen years, Hae-on’s sister, Da-on, works by any means possible to piece together the truth of what happened that summer. Taut and propulsive, Lemon expertly weaves the past and present in a page-turning thriller, riding on suspense but sensitive and precise in touching upon the societal contexts of a violent crime—that of class, of gender, of feminine beauty. In the interview below, Hong discusses how she captures the specificities of Korean literary references in English, as well as the intricacies and opportunities in translating dark stories.

Rose Bialer (RB): Kwon Yeo-sun is an award-winning author and Lemon is her first book to appear in English. Can you tell me a bit about how you came to this project and what attracted you to the novel?

Janet Hong (JH): A contact I know at Changbi, the Korean publisher of Lemon, flagged the book for me when it first came out. I read it and loved it, so I mentioned I was interested in translating the book. Shortly after, the book came to be handled by a literary agency, and Changbi let them know about my interest in the project. Luckily, the agents responsible and I knew each other, so everything progressed smoothly from that point.

I was attracted to the polyphonic nature of the book and wanted to take on the challenge of trying to render the different voices and points of view in English. I’m usually more interested in literary fiction, but I like that this work transcends the crime novel genre and plumbs the depths of grief, death, guilt, revenge, and injustice.

RB: Let’s discuss the polyphonic style you mentioned, which I also found very compelling. Lemon follows Da-on and two of Hae-on’s classmates over the seventeen years following Hae-on’s murder. All of these women have very distinct tones and styles of speaking—though I may add that none of them are particularly reliable narrators. What was it like channeling the perspectives of different characters? Did you find one of the women’s voices to be more difficult to translate than the others?

JH: It was quite a challenge to capture their voices. Not only are the three women very different from one another, but they each have distinct styles of speaking, as you mentioned. I wanted it to be very clear for the reader who is speaking, not only by the content of what they say, but by their diction and syntax. I struggled particularly with Yun Taerim’s sections, since they’re monologues in a sense—if there was a way to make her speech sound natural and quirky, as if we were actually overhearing a one-sided phone conversation, yet also make sure that the whole thing also can be understood as a work of art. I’m not sure I succeeded. For that reason, I don’t like to re-read my work once it’s published.

RB: This book meditates on injustice, not only that of death, but also the injustices for those who suffer—psychologically and physically—in its aftermath. We see this in the lasting ramifications the murder has on its two prime suspects: one from a very wealthy background and the other who works to support his family. How do you think the novel worked with the structure of this crime to explore themes of privilege?

JH: I think setting the novel against the backdrop of a crime allowed it to explore class and privilege in a deeper, more pointed way. Since the two suspects come from practically opposite backgrounds, we’re able to see the very different treatments they receive from the police, their school, their friends, and society at large. It is especially heartbreaking to see the bias that everyone carries and the injustice of who suffers, or who suffers most. The world that the book paints seems brutal and tragic, but sadly, this happens all the time in the real world.

RB: I was very moved by the ways the different characters approach grief. Da-on becomes obsessed with plastic surgery, trying to recreate her sister’s ethereal beauty in her own body. Hae-on’s mother, who is convinced that her late-daughter’s birth name was cursed, is intent on legally changing it to Hye-eun after her death. No one in the novel escapes unscathed from Hae-on’s death, and almost two decades later, they are all still processing this loss. I imagine that evoking the pain of the characters in your translation was not an easy task. How do you manage the emotional aspect of translation?

JH: I tend to translate work that’s quite dark, so in some ways, I’m used to managing the emotional aspects of translating pain, trauma, and violence. As many translators have expressed before, I believe that the literary translator is the closest reader of a text. For this reason, it seems impossible to translate something well without connecting with the text and entering fully into the narrative. One way I have of coping is to enter gradually. When I produce a first draft, my goal is to simply translate the text. I don’t think about the deeper significance of the words, and I don’t try to feel what the character is feeling. In a way, I’m translating at the surface level, approaching the text from a distance. It’s with each revision that I allow myself to get closer and connect with the text by using all my senses. At the end, my goal is to be so completely in the author’s head that I can fully identify with the characters, feeling what they feel and knowing exactly what they mean. But I do this in bursts—I get in and get out. Once it’s done, I try not to dwell on the dark, heavy sections. If I did, I wouldn’t be able to work. A few years ago, I translated Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s Grass, a graphic memoir of a Korean woman who was forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese Imperial Army during WWII. That was really hard. Not to get too personal, but one of my defense mechanisms is to compartmentalize experiences; it isn’t healthy in my personal life, but when I’m dealing with painful narratives, it helps.

RB: The air of mystery and suspense in Lemon is also enhanced by the fact that it’s written in short sections that jump back and forth in time; we are never being given the whole story at once. At the same time, it is a very dialogue-heavy book. Scenes often begin in the middle of an interaction between characters—a police interrogation or a phone call to a crisis hot-line where the reader is only privy to one side of the conversation. I found the reading experience to be quite gripping, as there was always so much to piece together. How was the experience of translating this non-conventional narration style?

JH: As I mentioned, I struggled with conveying Yun Taerim’s voice in the one-sided conversations. I also found the police interrogation difficult. The dialogue between the suspect and detective needed to sound natural, snappy, while also allowing for important details to slip in little by little.

Though the narrative of Sanghui, Hae-on’s classmate, was more straightforward, it also contained its own challenges. Da-on mentions a poem Sanghui once wrote, inspired by Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This is important, because the title of the poem she wrote is “Betty Byrne, Maker of Lemon Platt” (my emphasis). I needed to highlight this literary reference, but also make sure that it’s dropped in naturally, in conversation between Da-on and Sanghui. Somehow, in Korean, literary references don’t seem so out of place in everyday speech—is it because South Korea has one of the highest literacy rates in the world?

I faced another particular challenge in the opening pages when the nickname of one of the suspects, Han Manu, is discussed. In order to understand this nickname, you need to have knowledge of a very famous Korean folk song called “Han-o-baeg-nyeon,” which begins with words that sound like Han Manu’s name. The reference to this song is important, because this song captures a crucial theme of the novel—that life is full of misery. Koreans would not only know this song, but also would be able to immediately recall its opening lyrics. So there would be no need to explain this to the Korean reader, but I needed to do some “stealth glossing” for the Anglophone reader, as well as add a footnote—which I don’t like to do, but will as a last resort.

RB: You have translated quite a range of writing, from graphic novels to short stories to novels. There is even a surprising moment in Lemon where you translate a small poem that one of the characters has written. I was wondering if you had a preference in terms of the writing you like to translate? Is there anything you are curious to try but haven’t yet?

JH: In terms of genre, I like translating fiction with a literary bent. It doesn’t matter if it’s a graphic novel, short story, or novel, but I have to love it. Life is too short and I don’t have enough time to translate all the things I actually want to translate, so I would hate to invest my time in work I don’t care for. I wish I’d started doing this earlier.

The kind of work I’m drawn to is quite dark. This is a huge generalization, but I think it’s because these types of stories often feature imperfect people or the neglected and marginalized, and I want to help give voice to these types of characters, rather than those with privilege and power.

RB: Finally, is there anything new that you have been working on or reading lately?

JH: I’ve been working on a dark, surreal, truly singular collection of eco-fiction by Kang Young-sook called At Night He Lifts Weights. You can read a more recent piece by Kang on Granta.

I’ve also been translating Son Bo-mi, whose stories are mysterious and utterly captivating. She’s fond of parallel worlds and alternate histories, and I don’t know how she does it, but she has a real gift for conveying entire histories of characters in just a few paragraphs. She inspires me a great deal.

Janet Hong is a writer and translator based in Vancouver, Canada. She received the TA First Translation Prize and the LTI Korea Translation Award for her translation of Han Yujoo’s The Impossible Fairy Tale, which was also a finalist for both the 2018 PEN Translation Prize and the National Translation Award. Her recent translations include Ha Seong-nan’s Bluebeard’s First Wife, Ancco’s Nineteen, and Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s Grass.

Rose Bialer lives in Madrid, Spain. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in venues such as The Kenyon Review Online, Full Stop and Rain Taxi.

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