Korean critics have lamented the supposed overreach of Han’s English translator. Photograph by Park Sung Jin for The New Yorker

How literal must a literary translation be? Nabokov, who was fluent in three languages and wrote in two of them, believed that “the clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.” Borges, on the other hand, maintained that a translator should seek not to copy a text but to transform and enrich it. “Translation is a more advanced stage of civilization,” Borges insisted—or, depending on the translation you come across, “a more advanced stage of writing.” (He wrote the line in French, one of several languages he knew.)

In 2016, “The Vegetarian” became the first Korean-language novel to win the Man Booker International Prize, which was awarded to both its author, Han Kang, and its translator, Deborah Smith. In the English-speaking world, Smith, at the time a twenty-eight-year-old Ph.D. student who had begun learning Korean just six years earlier, was praised widely for her work. In the Korean media, however, the sense of national pride that attended Han’s win—not to mention the twentyfold spike in printed copies of the book, which was a fairly modest success upon its initial publication, in 2007—was soon overshadowed by charges of mistranslation. Though Han had read and approved the translation, Huffington Post Korea asserted that it was completely “off the mark.” Smith defended herself at the Seoul International Book Fair, saying, “I would only permit myself an infidelity for the sake of a greater fidelity.”

The controversy reached many American readers in September of last year, when the Los Angeles Times published a piece by Charse Yun, a Korean-American who has taught courses in translation in Seoul. (The article extended an argument that Yun had first made, in July, in the online magazine Korea Exposé.) “Smith amplifies Han’s spare, quiet style and embellishes it with adverbs, superlatives and other emphatic word choices that are nowhere in the original,” Yun writes. “This doesn’t just happen once or twice, but on virtually every other page.” It’s as though Raymond Carver had been made to sound like Charles Dickens, he adds. This isn’t, in Yun’s view, a matter merely of accuracy but also of cultural legibility. Korea has a rich and varied literary tradition—and a recent history that is intimately entangled with that of the West, particularly the U.S. But few works of Korean literature have had any success in the English-speaking world, and the country, despite its frequent presence in American headlines, does not register in the popular imagination the way that its larger neighbors China and Japan do. Han Kang seemed to fill that void—or begin to, at least. But if her success depended on mistranslation, how much had really got through?

“The Vegetarian” (Hogarth) is fable-like in structure. It centers on the vivid self-destruction of a single human body. That body belongs to a housewife named Yeong-hye, who is described by her husband, Mr. Cheong, as “completely unremarkable in every way.” For Mr. Cheong, who has “always inclined to the middle course in life,” this is part of her appeal. “The passive personality of this woman in whom I could detect neither freshness nor charm, or anything especially refined, suited me down to the ground,” he says. But there is one thing Mr. Cheong does find remarkable about her: she hates wearing bras—she says they squeeze her breasts. She refuses to wear them, even in public, even in front of her husband’s friends, even though, he says, she doesn’t have the sort of “shapely breasts which might suit the ‘no-bra look.’ ” He considers this shameful.

One morning, Mr. Cheong finds his wife discarding the meat in their refrigerator. She has become a vegetarian, she tells him, because she “had a dream.” Before, he could think of his wife “as a stranger . . . someone who puts food on the table and keeps the house in good order.” Now he feels embarrassed and betrayed. Eventually, he is aroused by her insolence, and he begins to force himself on her. Overpowered, Yeong-hye goes limp. Her muted non-reaction evokes, for him, images from Korea’s past as an occupied nation: it is “as though she were a ‘comfort woman’ dragged in against her will, and I was the Japanese soldier demanding her services.”

Yeong-hye’s decision not to eat meat is received as an appalling rebuke by her entire family, especially her father, a Vietnam War veteran whose violent tendencies suggest the traumas of the battlefield. (More than three hundred thousand Koreans served alongside American soldiers in that conflict.) During a family meal, orchestrated as an intervention of sorts, he attempts to shove a piece of sweet-and-sour pork down his daughter’s throat. In response, Yeong-hye slits her wrist as the entire family watches in horror. Finally, she is institutionalized.

Near the end of the book, Yeong-hye’s more conventional-seeming sister, In-hye, visits her in the hospital. Three years have passed since the family dinner, and In-hye has begun to realize that her role as the “hard-working, self-sacrificing eldest daughter had been a sign not of maturity but of cowardice. It had been a survival tactic.” At the hospital, Yeong-hye has withered to sixty-six pounds. Refusing to speak or to accept food in any form, she has spent much of her time attempting to imitate a tree: doing handstands and basking in the sun. Han Kang has said that the character of Yeong-hye was inspired by a line from Yi Sang, a modernist poet of the early twentieth century who was heavily censored under Japanese rule, and whose work evokes the violence and agitation of imperialism. Yi described catatonic withdrawal as a symptom of oppression. “I believe that humans should be plants,” he wrote.

If Yi was consumed with the collective trauma of colonialism, Han focusses on suffering of a more intimate and personal nature. But her writing, too, is rooted in Korea’s history. This, according to Charse Yun, is what risks getting lost in translation. One of the reasons that “many Western readers find so much contemporary Korean fiction to be unpalatable,” he writes, is the passivity of its narrators. Smith, however, emphasizes “conflict and tension,” making Han’s work more engaging for Western readers than a faithful rendition would be. When Yeong-hye ignores a question from her husband, for instance, he says that it is “as if she hadn’t heard me,” in Yun’s literal translation of the passage. In Smith’s version, her husband asserts that she is “perfectly oblivious to my repeated interrogation.”

Yet what makes Yeong-hye an affecting character isn’t a matter of any heightened aggression or more overt struggle. “The Vegetarian” reads as a parable about quiet resistance and its consequences; it’s also a ruminative probing of Korean culture, in which questions of agency and conformity have particular resonance. These are the questions at the heart of Han’s work.

Han Kang was born in 1970 in Kwangju, a provincial city near the tip of the Korean Peninsula with a population, at the time, of around six hundred thousand. Her father, Han Seung-won, is a noted novelist and the recipient of numerous literary awards. (In the past decade, Han has won many of the same prizes.) Both of Han’s brothers are writers, too. Her father was a teacher as well as a writer, and the family moved frequently for his work. As a child, Han attended five different elementary schools, and she sought constancy in books.