δύσβατός γέ τις ὁ τόπος

φαίνεται καὶ ἐπίσκιος.

ἔστι γοῦν σκοτεινὸς καὶ

δυσδιερεύνητος.

This place is a place

where it is difficult to take a step in any given direction.

All around has grown dark,

It is a place where it is difficult to find anything.

It’s pouring rain outside. My friends and I just managed to get to the bookstore in time to avoid getting absolutely soaked. Together we browse the variety of books in London’s Foyles, surrounded by conversations in a multitude of languages. Inspired by this collage of cultures, I find the table with Fiction in Translation and am immediately drawn to a small novel with a white cover and Korean writing on the side:

The contrast between the familiar English phrases on the cover and the unfamiliar characters on the side inspire me to pick it up. It’s Han Kang’s newly translated Greek Lessons. Briefly scanning the contents of the novel, it becomes apparent to me that language, communication and connection are at its heart. As a literature student, this pulls me in, but I’m already planning on buying four other books, which I’m holding in my other hand.

Perceiving my doubts, my friend nods encouragingly at me from across the table, encompassing exactly the type of non-verbal support that I expect from her.

It’s a Han Kang novel,                             it seems intriguing,    

it’s a signed copy,                            you should buy it.

Greek Lessons is a relatively short novel that revolves around two nameless characters, a woman and a man, who both have a charged relationship with language and slowly form a connection to each other by employing other means of communication.

The woman has lost the ability to speak, in that she has been gradually exorcising language from her body. As a response to trauma – losing custody of her eight-year-old son and the recent loss of her mother – she reverts to silence. A distance is established between her and language, which is reflected in Han’s visceral writing style and the third-person perspective that she employs for the woman’s narrative: “she … seems to have become a shadow … an outside observer of a life contained in an enormous water tank. She can hear and read every single word, but her lips won’t crack open to emit sound.”

This passage underscores the woman’s desperate need to regain language in order to be readmitted to society, where the primary media for ‘true’ communication seem to be speech and writing. Indeed, language pervades every aspect of her life since she is a literature teacher at university, who has previously worked as an editor and has published three volumes of her own poetry. The woman’s anxiety regarding language eerily permeates the novel and makes its readers question the importance of language in their own life.  

In the character of the woman, Han poignantly explores the tension between the woman’s need to regain language and her inability to reclaim it since she cannot reconcile with the world as she is experiencing it. This leads to feelings of alienation and isolation. She attempts to regain language by learning Ancient Greek, which appeals to her since it is completely unlike her native Korean. It is of the past, and it is a supremely “self-sufficient language” with “a complicated grammatical system that [feels] like a safe, quiet room.”

Intricately interwoven with her narrative is that of her Greek teacher. His strenuous relationship with language stems from the pain he experiences as a result of being torn between two languages and cultures (i.e., German and (South) Korean). Similarly to the woman, he has found comfort in Ancient Greek, as its grammatical structure of the middle voice enables a single word in this language to contain a multitude of meanings. His access to a multiplicity of languages and sensitivity towards communication are cleverly presented as a counterpart to the woman’s limitations.

This opposition recurs in the first-person perspective Han uses for the man’s narrative, which also reflects the claustrophobic feelings that the man experiences in his increasingly darkening world.

The man is gradually losing his sight throughout the novel, which means that he is slowly moving inwards, focusing solely on his own thoughts and imagination. This complicates his ability to communicate, and it consequently creates similar feelings of alienation and isolation as the woman experiences. At the beginning of the novel, the man offers a violent description of this increasing darkness as a “knife” that is drawn between himself and the world. Both the man and the woman have to find new forms of communication to navigate contemporary society and to find connection to other people.

As Han emphasizes in an interview for the Pen World Voices Literary Festival, with Greek Lessons she wanted to explore the complexity of language. Especially, since language can be rather constrictive, it is “slippery … and you always fail if you want to be really accurate … your arrows are always failing the target.” In Greek Lessons, she masterfully represents a multitude of languages and non-verbal communication in her poetic writing style. She employs language as a tool in itself to explore its seemingly infinite abilities as well as its limitations. Throughout the narrative, she juxtaposes the man’s language with the woman’s silence through white spaces. Additionally, she creates shorter sentences, sometimes consisting of only one word, to mimic speech, and she evokes poetic rhyme, metaphors and symbolism. The eventual connection that is established between the characters is expressed in tactile communication, where the woman writes short messages on the palm of the man’s hand in Korean. This is cleverly visualized in italics that are shaped in the form of a hand.

Breathing in, she uses the tip of her trembling index finger to write distinctly on his palm.

First

          to the

          hospital

The opposition she creates between the third-person narrative for the woman and the first-person perspective for the man reflects their connection to language, where the woman is distanced from language and where only language will remain for the man when the darkness ultimately consumes him. When their narratives connect in the final chapters, Han symbolizes the darkness they find themselves in, in order to craft a visual representation of their connection: “We were lying side by side in the woods under the sea then. / In a place that had neither light nor sound.” The poetic atmosphere that Han invokes with this vivid description beautifully portrays the lyrical English translation of the Korean text on the side of the novel.

The opposition she creates between the third-person narrative for the woman and the first-person perspective for the man reflects their connection to language, where the woman is distanced from language and where only language will remain for the man when the darkness ultimately consumes him. When their narratives connect in the final chapters, Han symbolizes the darkness they find themselves in, in order to craft a visual representation of their connection: We were lying side by side in the woods under the sea then. / In a place that had neither light nor sound. The poetic atmosphere that Han invokes with this vivid description beautifully portrays the lyrical English translation of the Korean text on the side of the novel.

Finally, the woman utters sound and regains a first-person perspective in the final chapter. In an interview with The New Yorker, Han expresses that language is something that can deliver emotions but is simultaneously capable of inflicting pain. In her creation of the linguistically intricate form and narrative of Greek Lessons, Han further interrogates this paradox.

In Greek Lessons, Han devotes attention to similar themes as in her International Booker Prize-winning The Vegetarian. Greek Lessons was published first in South Korea, yet its translation was published seven years after The Vegetarian. Even though Greek Lessons is advertised as the ‘follow-up’ to The Vegetarian, it ultimately anticipates the shocking character development of The Vegetarian’s protagonist. With Greek Lessons’ experimental form, Han examines the depiction of a shift in the female character’s consciousness and her willingness to remain a functioning member of contemporary society. This is further developed in Yeong-hye’s character in The Vegetarian, where she truly obscures the boundaries of what it means to be alive.

It is intriguing to see that Greek Lessons, a text that centers around language, is the only novel by Han Kang that has been translated by two translators: Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won. In 2016, the translation of The Vegetarian generated some controversy after the Korean American translation professor Charse Yun claimed that the translation heavily embellished the original Korean text. Han was more involved in the translation process of Greek Lessons, but she remained acutely aware of the difficulties, even impossibilities, that arise in a literary translation. In a report on a Korean-English literary translation workshop organized by the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT) Han attended in 2015, she concludes that a translation should be considered in the context of its source text yet should be understood on its own terms.

For Greek Lessons, the translation adds an extra dimension to the central questions of the novel: What are the limitations of language? And how can humans transcend society’s reliance on the spoken and written word? Smith and Won chose to maintain certain Korean elements in the novel, hereby beautifully reflecting the layering of languages that is offered in the original text with the characters’ native Korean at the heart of the narrative. The symbolism that connects the man and the woman, where they find themselves surrounded by darkness in the woods and under the sea respectively, are reflected in hangul (the Korean alphabet). This is cleverly maintained in one of the first passages that discusses the woman’s silence:

After starting primary school, she began jotting down vocabulary in the back of her diary. With neither purpose nor context, merely a list of words that had made a deep impression on her; among them, the one she valued the most was 숲. On the page, this single-syllable word resembled an old pagoda: ㅍ, the foundation, ㅜ, the main body, ㅅ, the upper section. She liked the feeling when she pronounced it: ㅅ – ㅜ – ㅍ, s-u-p, the sensation of first pursing her lips, and then slowly, carefully releasing the air. And then of the lips closing. A word completed through silence. Entranced by this word in which pronunciation, meaning and form were all wrapped around in stillness, she wrote: 숲. 숲. Woods.

The traumatic darkness symbolized by natural elements (whether in the woods or under the sea) experienced by both characters is tightly woven into the story and ultimately entangled in its lyrical ending. At the beginning of the novel, the woman asserts that her dislike of “taking up space” is reflected in her inability to utter words. Han inverts this narrative and purposefully uses language to shine a light on the woman’s narrative. And now, considering the abundance of language that can be found all around us, the novel makes the reader reconsider communication and its inevitable and inherent imperfections.