Deborah Smith

When Deborah Smith first encountered Han Kang's work, she was working as a freelance literary translator in London with no particular specialization—a generalist picking up assignments where they appeared. What began as a single commission for a short story became an obsession that would reshape her entire career. That initial spark ignited a partnership so seamless, so attuned to Han Kang's distinctive frequencies, that readers in English-speaking countries would come to know one of contemporary Korean literature's most important voices almost entirely through Smith's mediation. In many ways, Smith and Han Kang became inseparable in English, their collaboration a masterclass in what translation can achieve when a translator truly inhabits an author's sensibility.

The publication of The Vegetarian in 2015 announced Smith's arrival as a major translator. Han Kang's dissociative, visceral novel about a woman's radical refusal demanded absolute precision—a translator had to move seamlessly between the banal and the grotesque, between domestic argument and nightmare surrealism. Smith's rendering is crystalline and unsettling; she captures Han Kang's ability to make the reader feel trapped inside consciousness fractured by violence and desire. When the novel won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016, it vindicated Smith's work as essential interpretation. Her subsequent translations—Human Acts, The White Book, and Greek Lessons—only deepened the achievement, each one revealing new dimensions of Han Kang's language while maintaining an unmistakable English idiom that never flattens or domesticates the original.

What distinguishes Smith's approach is her refusal to smooth over difficulty. She preserves Han Kang's deliberate repetitions, her unusual syntax, even her silences. In Greek Lessons, Han Kang's exploration of language, teaching, and mortality, Smith's translation honors the philosophical weight without sacrificing fluency. She handles Kang's Korean wordplay with particular ingenuity, finding English equivalents that work both semantically and musically. Her translation of Untold Night and Day by Bae Suah demonstrates her range beyond Han Kang, though Han Kang remains her primary commitment.

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to Han Kang—with Greek Lessons circulating in Smith's translation—stands as a watershed moment for both author and translator. Rarely does a translator's work become so inseparable from an author's international recognition. As Smith moves forward with forthcoming volumes including We Do Not Part and Light and Thread, she remains the essential English voice for Han Kang's expanding body of work, proving that the translator's task is not to disappear but to become irreplaceable.