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thelinguist.uberflip.com AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2016 The Linguist 17 FICTION IN TRANSLATION Smith took an MA in Korean Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), part of the University of London, followed by a PhD, which she completed in 2015. "Because I had this goal of translation, I focused on the grammar exercises and memorising lists of vocabulary," she says. She spent a week in Korea before starting her MA, and returned to the country for three months of each year of her PhD. While her spoken Korean improved with every visit, this has never been Smith's priority. "My writing skills are much higher than my spoken skills and probably always will be." In terms of Smith's career, the stars aligned in 2012. Thousands of miles away from the now London-based Smith, literary agent Barbara Zitwer, sent the Korean author Han Kang's novel, The Vegetarian, to a British publisher. In the borderless world of social media, that publisher's search for a translator led to Smith – who had optimistically included literary translation among the skills on her online profile. They made contact and "I was too embarrassed to explain that I had never actually translated a book from Korean, so I hacked through this awful sample where I had to look up almost every other word in the dictionary," Smith recalls with horror. Unsurprisingly, the publisher didn't take the book. But a year later, Smith was at the London Book Fair, with Korea in line to be the event's next annual focus. "The organisers were looking for somebody based in the UK who translated from Korean. I was the only person they could find." Smith reworked her sample of The Vegetarian and pitched it to a publisher. A hard-fought legacy To date, Smith has seen two of her translations of Han Kang novels published – The Vegetarian and Human Acts – and translated two novels by another female Korean author, Bae Suah, both of which are soon to be published. "I'm lucky to be based in the UK because there's a strong community of literary translators here," Smith says, acknowledging the valuable support and advice she received from the Emerging Translators Network. "The generation before me fought really hard for literary translation to be recognised as a creative act, and I've really benefitted from that. Our work isn't about substituting words from one language into another. I often have to quite radically rework the source language to make it 'live' in English. It can't 'say the same thing' in both languages because the words, syntax and grammar are different." Crucially, Smith says, she is a die-hard fan of both Han and Bae. "I feel sickeningly lucky and incredibly grateful for the opportunities I've been given. For me, these two are the greatest contemporary Korean writers, so being able to translate their work is my dream. You spend a huge amount of time with a book you're translating, from 7 in the morning until 11 at night, for months at a time – and it's not spectacularly well paid. We do it because we love the book. It sounds trite, but that is a win in itself." A win for literary translation Commercially and in terms of her reputation, Smith's greatest success has been The Vegetarian. In Korean, the book was originally published as three separate novellas, each told from a different character's perspective. "It was different to anything I'd read before – particularly the form," Smith explains. Awarding the Man Booker International Prize in May, judges described Smith's translation as "concise, unsettling and beautifully composed". It wasn't without its challenges, however. While Smith enjoyed finding the voice for each of the three principle characters, "The middle section includes some explicit scenes – and English is a terrible language for writing about sex," she frowns. "It can become trashy erotic or, if you go too far the other way, cold and clinical. In Korean it was neither of these things. It was just quite strange; sexual but not erotic or enticing. I had to be careful with that." As well as being a huge personal achievement, Smith describes the Booker as "a win for literary translation in itself". For the first time this year, the prize was awarded to a single book, rather than a body of work, and the £50,000 prize was divided equally between the novelist and the translator. Smith wonders whether this recognition will have the impact hoped for by the translating community. "Will there be an uptake in the number of translations being published? Will there be more translations from under-represented languages? One of the most exciting things about the prize this year was that the longlist was quite diverse." Among the 155 books were novels from Korea, China, Japan, Indonesia and the Congo. "It wasn't just the same few languages, the same few faces. I think that shows publishers that are willing to take a risk on the relative unknown that it can really pay off. Diversity is not a box-ticking exercise, it's about discovering literatures throughout the world that we don't know so much about." Smith's quest to discover new lands and cultures through fiction continues, both through her translations and her publishing company, Tilted Axis, which she founded in 2015. Coincidentally, we speak on the publication day of its first book, yet the ambitious Smith is reluctant to acknowledge this as a success. "When you start something, you have a grand vision of what you want to achieve. You then slowly realise how difficult that will be and accept that it will take a long time." Give it ten years, she says. "Then maybe I'll look back and feel proud." MEETING OF MINDS Deborah Smith (r) and Han Kang pose with the winning book, The Vegetarian, at the Man Booker International Prize event IMAGES: © JANIE AIRLEY