I Put the Evening in the Drawer – Han Kang

[Munhakgwa Jiseongsa; 2013]

In 2024, the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to the South Korean writer Han Kang “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” Han, who debuted as a poet in 1993, has since primarily written prose and is recognized internationally as a prose writer. Yet, the poetic origins of Han’s work remain largely unknown to Anglophone audiences, as her only book of poetry, I Put the Evening in the Drawer (서랍에 저녁을 넣어 두었다, 2013), has not been translated into English.

Han’s global success came with the translation of her novel The Vegetarian (채식주의자, 2007) by British translator Deborah Smith, which won both Han and Smith the Man Booker International Prize in 2016. The Vegetarian tells the story of Yeong-hye, a housewife who decides not to eat meat after a series of nightmares about human cruelty. As she implements this change, she develops a grotesque desire to abstain from all consumption and become a plant. Her deviation from social norms provokes violent patriarchal responses from family members. As with most translations, Smith’s work was met with both acclaim and criticism regarding its faithfulness. But this translation caused a particular uproar in Koreophone literary circles—perhaps the unprecedented global success of a Korean novel that received relatively less attention at home led many to seek the source of this discrepancy in the translation. In any case, these debates circled around the conclusion that Smith had altered, even ornamented Han’s modest and plainspoken Korean-language prose. In a Los Angeles Times review, Charse Yun argues that Smith’s translation “amplifies Han’s spare, quiet style and embellishes it with adverbs, superlatives and other emphatic word choices that are nowhere in the original.” The result, writes Yun, “create[s] more suspense and interest for the English reader, but for those who can read the original, it can be quite jarring.”

But to a reader who has encountered Han as a poet, even her prose feels eloquent. If the central question of the translation debate is how Han writes, her poetry poses a deeper one: can she write at all? Her poetry falters at the very moment of articulation, grappling with the possibility of language despite the failings of the human body. More than just a private experiment, Han’s poetic exploration forms the cornerstone of her resistance to violence. For her, writing about historical trauma becomes possible only after a painful and thorough encounter with the fragility of both body and language. And the relative fluency of her prose is a product of this exploration. I Put the Evening in the Drawer documents this deep history of Han’s literary language that remains out of view in her prose and its translation.

I Put the Evening in the Drawer opens with the speaker’s reticent but sober awareness of the physicality of existence. “On One Late Evening, I” (“어느 늦은 저녁 나는”) begins with a steady gaze on the steam rising from a white bowl of rice, which leads to the realization “that something has gone by eternally” (“무엇인가 영원히 지나가버렸다고”). The language in this poem is plain but the intense attention to something so unremarkable penetrates the fabric of the everyday and carves out a moment of extraordinarily vivid perception: the physical world, we sense, is transient. The speaker’s response to this realization is just as plain as the language of the poem: she eats. The last two stanzas can be read either as “I should eat//I ate” (“밥을 먹어야지//나는 밥을 먹었다”), understanding the verb “밥을 먹다” as the everyday act of having meals, or more literally as “I should eat the rice//I ate the rice.” The latter foregrounds the physical object of consumption, which is always a violent act in Han’s world. The awareness of one’s physical body, which perpetually consumes and decays, is unsettling. Still, one must go on.

The unbearableness of physical existence permeates Han’s entire oeuvre. Her poetry, in particular, grapples with the physicality of articulation—the very act that makes language possible. “An Object Called Heart” (“심장이라는 사물”) begins with another intent gaze, this time on an erased word. The faint traces of the erased lines and the gaps that were empty before erasure—these are the spaces the lyric subject longs to inhabit, grotesquely folding her body to fit them: “I want to go into places like that/Rolling my shoulders in/folding my waist/bending my knees and pulling in my ankles with all my strength” (“그런 곳에 나는 들어가고 싶어진다/어깨를 안으로 말고/허리를 접고/무릎을 구부리고 힘껏 발목을 오므려서”). Yet the body cannot inhabit vagueness like the erased words; it has to be either here or there: “The wish to fade/however does not fade anything” (“희미해지려는 마음은/그러나 무엇도 희미하게 만들지 않고”). The same applies to language—whether spoken or written, it must take on physical form, incisively demarcating phonemes, graphemes, and morphemes: “The knife, not fully erased,/cuts my lips longways” (“덜 지워진 칼은/길게 내 입술을 가르고”). To escape the violence of definiteness, the tongue retreats to a darker place, withdrawing so far that it can no longer make any sound and its contours blur into indistinction: “In search of a darker place/my tongue, making a round retreat” (“더 캄캄한 데를 찾아/동그랗게 뒷걸음치는 나의 혀는”). And here, the poem ends mid-sentence. The unspoken speech may enjoy indeterminacy and infinite possibilities, but at the expense of having any physical existence.

A more direct expression of Han’s uneasy relationship with language is found in Part Two, “Anatomy Theater” (“해부극장”). “Anatomy Theater 2” opens starkly with the statement: “I have/a tongue and lips.//Sometimes it’s hard to bear.//Can’t bear, me” (“나에게/혀와 입술이 있다.//그걸 견디기 어려울 때가 있다.//견딜 수 없다, 내가”). Han at once expresses frustration and emanates life force in a refrain that drives the poem forward: “I have/a heart,/I have cold hair and nails/that do not know pain.//Sometimes it’s hard to bear” (“나에게/심장이 있다,/통증을 모르는/차가운 머리카락과 손톱들이 있다.//그걸 견디기 어려울 때가 있다”). However, if the first refrain is followed by fragmented speech burdened with uncertainty, regret, and distrust, then the second time around, the lyric subject makes an effort to bear it: “I have a red thing,/I say, bearing” (“나에게 붉은 것이 있다,라고/견디며 말한다”). This is perhaps what Han’s writing is all about—making an attempt to speak despite the unbearability of existence.

As the lyric subject struggles with her moving tongue and pumping heart, the more permanent parts of her body feel kinder. In a radiographic image, her bones and joints are eternally still and immune to decay, outside of history, knowing neither pain nor warmth. Once wrapped in flesh, however, the bones and joints become historical: their permanence can carry years of injuries and traces of violence that resurface in the present as loving pain. “My ankle, sprained years ago/would develop new infections/and burn quietly with every step//…My wrist, crushed even longer ago/the finger joints/lovingly/speak words full of pain.” (“수년 전 접질렸던 발목에/새로 염증이 생겨/걸음마다 조용히 불탈 때가 있다//…그보다 더 오래전 으스러졌던 손목이/손가락 관절들이/다정하게/고통에 찬 말을 걸어온다”). Trapped between the peace of bones and the pain of flesh, the lyric subject dreams of a state near death:

몸속에 맑게 고였던 것들이

뙤약볕에 마르는 날이 간다

끈적끈적한 것

비통한 것까지

함께 바싹 말라 가벼워지는 날

…

다만 해가 있는 쪽을 향해 눈을 잠그고

주황색 허공에

생명, 생명이라고 써야 하는 날

혀가 없는 말이어서

지워지지도 않을 그 말을

Goes the day when the clear things welled up in my body

dry in the scorching sun

Sticky thing

woeful thing too

all dry up and become light on this day

…

Only I must shut my eyes towards the sun and

in the orange void

write life, life on this day

A word without tongue

a word thus will not be erased

Han’s calm and gentle language stands in contrast to the startlingly grotesque imagination it conveys. The language is sparse yet warm, and at the same time fearless in facing the pain and the absurdity of human life. Just as the meek and plain Yeong-hye in The Vegetarian ventures furthest among the novel’s characters in transcending the needs and constraints of the body, Han’s simple language pushes to the edges of physical existence, unbothered even by death. A translation that dramatizes this exploration with suspense and flourish risks missing the mark entirely.

Eventually, abstract desires map onto time and space in Part Four, “Winter on the Other Side of the Mirror” (“거울 저편의 겨울”). The lyric subject travels from her city to another on the exact opposite end of the Earth. Moving across twenty-four hours, the planet, and both sides of the mirror, the lyric subject encounters various everyday scenes: an old friend on the street, an exhausted woman at a food court, two old blind men entering a store together, and deer at a rainy zoo. Just as the flesh enacts the pain embedded in the bone, these scenes call up historical traumas:

어린 고라니들이 나무 아래 비를 피해 노는 동안

조금 떨어져서 지켜보는 어미 고라니가 있었다

사람 엄마와 아이들이 꼭 그렇게 하듯이

아직 광장에 비가 뿌릴 때

살해된 아이들의 이름을 수놓은

흰 머릿수건을 쓴 여자들이

느린 걸음으로 행진하고 있었다

As young deer played under a tree, taking shelter from the rain

there was a mother deer, watching from a little distance

Just as human mothers and children do

While rain was still pouring in the square

women in white kerchiefs

embroidered with the names of the murdered children

marched slowly

In “Winter on the Other Side of the Mirror 6” (“거울 저편의 겨울 6”), Han grounds this historical trauma in specific events: “Walking on the street of white people/built by white people,/looking up at the statue of Roca/who trod the memory of utter slaughter on horse hooves//I, who think about massacres on this side and the other side of the mirror” (“백인들이 건설한/백인들의 거리를 걷다가,/완전한 살육의 기억을 말의 발굽으로 디딘/로카의 동상을 올려다보다가//거울 이편과 반대편의 학살을 생각하는 나는”). The poem reveals that the speaker’s travel was from Gwangju to Buenos Aires, cities that carry memories of state violence—the Conquest of the Desert and the Gwangju Uprising.

And so, if the unbearability of the physical body leads the lyric subject to desire death, the tragedy of human violence compels her to wonder how to go on. Having traversed linguistic, existential, and historical distances, the collection comes full circle. The lyric subject now poses her question simply: “If life is just a massive funeral/I wanted to know what was left for us” (“사는 일이 거대한 장례식일 뿐이라면/우리에게 남은 것은 무엇인지 알고 싶었다”). This lucidity arises from witnessing a historical event: “That late spring, what flew from the trees wasn’t pollen/Broken fragments of hope that strike/though curled feet are sometimes cut and bled/a pair of shoes taken off on the blocked street never returned” (“그해 늦봄 나무들마다 날리는 것은 꽃가루가 아니었다/부서져 꽂히는 희망의 파편들/오그린 발바닥이 이따금 베어 피 흘러도/봉쇄된 거리 벗겨진 신 한 짝은 끝내 돌아오지 않았다”). The Gwangju Uprising, a democratization movement opposing the coup d’état led by future military dictator Chun Doo-hwan, took place in late May 1980 in Gwangju, South Korea. A series of student-led demonstrations were violently suppressed by the military, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of protesters. However, as “June” (“유월”) arrives, the body ails with a hope that refuses to leave: “But hope was like virus/…What ails inside of me, what in the end/refuses to leave, my body is” (“그러나 희망은 병균 같았다/…무엇이 내 속에 앓고 있는가, 무엇이 끝끝내/떠나지 않는가 내 몸은”).

The body is ambivalent in Han’s poetic world. It is inherently destructive—it begins to die as soon as it is born, and it cannot live without consuming the other—yet the life force within it is just as persistent. For Han, the struggle between these two poles is never resolved in an unequivocal affirmation of life. But perhaps it is precisely this ambivalence that she is compelled to preserve in the face of systemic violence. This imperative to live through death brings the lyric subject closest to a language that is both inside and outside at the same time, as she has long yearned for: “Live, live and/say that you live/I covered my ears but/it wasn’t a voice you hear with ears It was/not a song you could block/with your ears” (“살아라, 살아서/살아 있음을 말하라/나는 귀를 막았지만/귀로 들리는 음성이 아니었다 귀로/막을 수 있는 노래가/아니었다”). And Han continues to speak this language. The Gwangju Uprising serves as the historical backdrop of her novel Human Acts, published a year after I Put the Evening in the Drawer. While Han’s prose does not expose the struggles through which she arrived at a language to grapple with this event, her poetry bears witness to the deep time of that language, wrought through the agony of writing poetry in the barbarity of history.

Yoonmin Kim is a PhD candidate in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Before moving to the US, she wrote on Russian Symbolist poetry and drama in Seoul. She is currently completing her dissertation on 1990s Russophone digital poetry.