Deborah Smith (currently translating Han Kang’s “Vegetarian”) on That Other Word Podcast

Debora SmithAn old buddy of the podcast, Deborah Smith, a London based translator, is featured in  a discussion about Korean literature and authors on That Other Word Podcast. You have to hop ahead to 15:24 in the podcast to skip to Deborah, and I’d do it, as if you are primarily interested in Korean fiction, the early bits are superfluous. Smith talks about Jung Young-moon (actually one of my least-favorite modern Korean writers – to me he tries waaaay to hard to be post-modern and his better stories tend to be his least “modern” ones) whose  A Most Ambiguous Sunday, was recently published as part of Dalkey Archive Press’ Library of Korean Literature, and which I found a chore to read. But Deborah soon enough moves to the very interesting Han Kang, whose novel The Vegetarian (forthcoming in Smith’s translation) is a brutal, politically sensitive triptych revolving around one woman’s decision to give up eating meat.

You can also follow Deborah on twitter (well worth doing) here https://twitter.com/londonkoreanist if only for gem posts like:

Just came *this close* to emailing “I would like to offer my services as a prostitute” in place of “I would like to apply”. In Korean: 수청/신청