Han Kang Wins Man Booker International Prize for Fiction With ‘The Vegetarian’
By ALEXANDRA ALTER

The South Korean novelist Han Kang won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction on Tuesday for her surreal, unsettling novel, “The Vegetarian,” about a woman who believes she is turning into a tree.

Widely praised by critics in the United States and Britain, “The Vegetarian” is Ms. Han’s first work to be translated into English. It was selected by a panel of five judges, who considered 155 novels in translation, and chosen over novels by more established writers, including Elena Ferrante’s “The Story of the Lost Child” and the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk’s “A Strangeness in My Mind.”

The prize, which is awarded jointly by Booker Prize Foundation and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, honors a single work that has been translated into English. The writer and translator share a cash prize of 50,000 British pounds, or about $72,000.

Ms. Han, a celebrated writer who has been publishing fiction and poetry for more than two decades, was almost entirely unknown to English-speakers when “The Vegetarian” was published by Portobello Books in 2015. (It was released in the United States earlier this year, by Hogarth.) The novel had an unusual path to publication. Deborah Smith, a 28-year-old British translator, read a Korean edition of “The Vegetarian” about four years ago when she was studying for her Ph.D., and decided to send a sample translation to a British publisher, who was won over by the first 10 pages.

The novel, which unfolds in three parts, centers on a depressed South Korean housewife named Yeong-hye, whose violent nightmares lead her to stop eating meat. Her husband and father view her vegetarianism as a subversive act, while her brother-in-law becomes sexually fixated with her plant-shaped birthmark. Yeong-hye begins starving herself, believing that she can photosynthesize light and transform herself into a tree.

In an interview with The New York Times earlier this year, Ms. Han said the novel grew partly out of her fascination with the Gwangju uprising in 1980, when pro-democracy demonstrations turned bloody after government troops attacked protesters. Though she was just 9 at the time, the event profoundly shaped her understanding of the human capacity for violence but also for self-sacrifice and compassion, she said. With “The Vegetarian,” she aimed to explore what it would mean for a person to live a completely nonviolent life, by eschewing food. The novel, which grew out of a short story she wrote around 1998, was inspired in part by a line from the Korean poet Yi Sang, who wrote, “I believe that humans should be plants.”

Ms. Han said, “I was thinking about the spectrum of human behavior, from sublimity to horror, and wondered, is it really possible for humans to live a perfectly innocent life in this violent world, and what would happen if someone tried to achieve that?”

南韓女作家韓江作品「素食者」 奪布克國際獎

南韓女作家韓江十六日榮獲文學大獎「布克國際獎」（Man Booker International Prize），將和翻譯者黛博拉．史密斯（Deborah Smith）分享五萬英鎊（約台幣兩百四十萬元）獎金。韓江是首位獲獎的南韓作家，也是南韓近十年來努力把韓國文學翻譯成外文，推廣到國際市場的一大成就。

四十五歲的韓江為創意寫作教師，這次以單一作品、她第一部翻譯成英文的小說「素食者」（The Vegetarian）獲獎，這部暗黑的超現實小說，描述一名盡職的家庭主婦在一再做同樣的噩夢後，不再吃肉，而且想變成一棵樹，是一個平凡婦人從三個不同層面反傳統的故事。

韓江告訴法新社：「我感到很榮幸。這部作品描述主人翁想要成為植物，還希望離開人類，讓自己不要沾染人性的黑暗面。透過這種極端的描述，我覺得我可以提出『當人』這個困難的問題。」

韓江打敗幾位勁敵，包括土耳其的諾貝爾文學獎得主帕慕克（Orhan Pamuk）和大陸作家閻連科。

評審團主席湯金表示，評審一致選擇韓江。湯金說：「這部緊湊、細致、令人不安的小說，將長期縈繞在讀者心中，甚至夢裡。」

過去韓國文學的國際知名度不高，韓國人羨慕日本有村上春樹這樣的國際知名作家。但隨著「韓流」在國際文化舞台崛起，韓國文化的國際能見度大增，經營韓國文學翻譯網站的蒙哥馬利說：「文學也許是最後一塊。」

韓江能獲獎，除了本身的文學成就外，韓國文學翻譯院努力翻譯新作品、愈來愈多更具有國際觀的新世代作家和才華洋溢的新世代翻譯家，都是造就韓江成功的因素。

其中居功至偉的是一九九六年成立的韓國文學翻譯院，這十到十五年戮力革新，每年有一千萬美元預算，雇用八十人，看重新作家，而且允許翻譯者自己選作品，並邀請國外的出版社和編輯到南韓來認識韓國文學。

第一個突破是女作家申京淑二○一二年以「請照顧我媽媽」獲得英仕曼亞洲文學獎。

雄心壯志的翻譯院院長金聖坤二○一二年受訪時說，南韓作家獲諾貝爾文學獎的「時候到了」。

「布克國際獎」今年起頒給在英國出版，並翻譯成英文的單一作品，「布克獎」則頒給在英國出版，並以英文寫作的作品。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/18/books/han-kang-wins-man-booker-international-prize-for-fiction-with-the-vegetarian.html

2016-05-18．聯合報．A13．國際．編譯田思怡