Found in translation | In conversation with Man Booker International Prize winner Deborah Smith

There’s something fairytale-ish about Deborah Smith’s career thus far as a translator. She won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize along with South Korean novelist Han King for the latter’s The Vegetarian, her first book as a translator. It was also the first time that the £50,000 prize, the world’s highest for literary works in translation, was being awarded to the translator along with the author.

Smith, who was at the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival last month, had begun the translation of King’s novel three years after she began learning Korean in 2010, the first bits done with the help of a dictionary app on her phone! Prior to this, Smith, who grew up in north England, had never even “met a Korean person, nor eaten Korean food”. 

“It’s crazy,” agrees Smith, “to think that the biggest prize that you could get as a translator would come for the first book you’ve done.” In all modesty, Smith says the judges recognised the original work for its quality. “A wonderful book can be ruined by a bad translation. So I think they were trying to give equal weight to both.” 

She’s happy, she says, that her translation has evoked responses very similar to the original. “The test of whether your translation has been successful is when the response to the translation is similar to that of the original. So many reviewers have praised Han King’s psychological insight, her imagery and her emotional restraint when talking about extreme topics like violence and sexuality. And those are very similar to the things people say about the original.”

Since finishing The Vegetarian, Smith has translated one other novel by Han King, Human Acts, and two novels by another South Korean novelist called Bae Suah. “The useful thing about The Vegetarian and a lot of contemporary Korean novels is that though they are set in South Korea, the setting is lightly done and very contemporary. I’ve been lucky that I’ve become friends with the authors that I translate, and can talk to them. But you can never entirely learn a language or culture — it’s a life-long process,” says Smith.

While translating continues to be as lowly paid as ever, the market for translations has greatly improved in recent years, she says. “In the past few years, so many authors who have gone on to be wildly successful — Elena Ferrante, Han King, Eka Kuraniawan from Indonesia — are in translation. People can’t say that translation doesn’t sell any longer,” she says, attributing the phenomenon to the rise of a breed of independent publishers.

Smith can number herself among this breed of publishers. In 2015, she started Tilted Axis, described on its website as a “not-for-profit press on a mission to shake up contemporary international literature. We publish fiction in translation from all over Asia. We have published three books — one each in Bengali (Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay’s Panty translated by Arunava Sinha), Korean and Indonesian — and I have commissioned about eight altogether,” says Smith.

The 29-year-old is familiar with Indian literature. She’s read UR Ananthamurthy, Mahasweta Devi and some contemporary poetry from Tamil and Urdu as well as the Ramayana. “I became a translator because what I mainly read was in translation,” Smith smiles.