Translator Deborah Smith, left, and author Han Kang, winners of the 2016 International Booker Prize for Smith's translation of Han's "The Vegetarian" / Courtesy of Booker Prize Foundation

“In all its languages, (Han Kang's) ‘The Vegetarian' is a work which invites a particularly personal form of reading … among a particular kind of reader — ‘sick women' who refuse to be well in a world that violates and debilitates; ‘impressionable young girls' mocked for their fannishness; anyone who might defiantly reclaim some of the labels given to Yeong-hye — crazy, excessive, hysterical,” muses translator Deborah Smith in her short essay, “Reflecting on Han Kang.”

Smith's reflection, penned for the upcoming issue of “Korean Literature Now,” a quarterly publication by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea), comes in the wake of Han's historic Nobel Prize in literature win this year.

In 2015, she introduced Han's unflinchingly visceral novel about a middle-aged housewife whose decision to quit eating meat upends her life and those around her to the anglophone world through her translation. The following year, the two shared the International Booker Prize for the work.

When “The Vegetarian” was first published in Korea in 2007, it occupied the fringes of mainstream recognition, largely dismissed by the male-dominated literary establishment as too “extreme and bizarre.”

“I am one of the many women who have found Yeong-hye's story to be neither extreme nor bizarre. Like her sister In-hye, I almost envy her magnificent irresponsibility,” Smith writes.

One key concern in her translation process was how Yeong-hye's defiant rejection of food and her body, rooted in the context of Korea, would be understood in the anglosphere. She sought to shield the narrative from “the reductive and frankly racist reading of ‘passive Asian woman struggles against (uniquely Asian) patriarchy,'” a prevalent trope she was acutely aware of while working on the text.

After “The Vegetarian,” Smith went on to render more of Han's profoundly affecting works into English, including “Human Acts,” “The White Book” and “Greek Lessons.”

For her, the process of reading and translating the Nobel laureate's writing was akin to “finding myself arrested by razor-sharp images which arise from the text without being directly described there.” And these moments, she reflects, are what deepened her understanding of “why I became a translator in the first place.”

“Human Acts,” a harrowing exploration of the military junta's brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in 1980 Gwangju and its enduring ripple effects, brims with such incisive, sensory images.

And decades after the portrayed event, its narrative still remains profoundly resonant, as Gwangju has become “another name for whatever is forcibly isolated, beaten down and brutalized, for all that has been mutilated beyond repair.”

“It has been personally moving for me to encounter so many readers connecting Gwangju to Gaza,” Smith shares. “I am inspired by their committed, intelligent reading to use my royalties from ‘Human Acts' to support Palestinian liberation.”

“Reflecting on Han Kang” will appear in the winter issue of “Korean Literature Now,” set for release on Dec. 1.

The issue will also feature interviews with other translators who have brought Han's works to readers worldwide, including Paige Aniyah Morris, Mariko Saito, Park Ok-kyoung, Choi Kyung-ran and Yoon Sun-me.

Read the full text of “Reflecting on Han Kang” here.