The book's prose holds up in English, but it also passes a much harder test: Smith says that people who speak both fluent Korean and English cannot tell that a non-native speaker did the translation. “Nobody has really commented on that from having read it,” she says. “People certainly talk about it from hearing my story from other channels. But the strength of the translation and the skill of a literary translation is how well you know the target language, not really how well you know the source language.”
The key, according to Smith, was really knowing English and how to use it to recreate the Korean novel's style and voice. For that skill, she is overqualified. She reads about 200 books a year. “And I have so for as long as I remember,” she says. “So on that end, I was pretty confident.”
“The Vegetarian” was unlike any other book Smith had read, and she was the one who approached a publisher back in 2013 about doing a translation. “I think it's one of those books where you can really see what is exciting about contemporary Korean literature. It is quite distinctive from a lot of other countries’ [literature],” she says.
And that's the big reason she chose to tackle a project in a language she spoke imperfectly. “I think that is kind of the point of translation, to make something available in a language or a culture that is new and that wasn't there before.”
Check out an excerpt of “The Vegetarian” here: