Human Acts by Han Kang
In early 1980, South Korea was a heap of dry tinder waiting for a spark. Only a few months previously Park Chung-hee, the military strongman who’d ruled since his coup in 1961, had been assassinated by the director of his own security services. Presiding over the so-called Miracle on the Han River—South Korea’s rapid transformation from dirt-poor and war-shattered into a fully industrialized economic powerhouse—had gained Park support from some quarters, though numerous human rights abuses meant he was never truly popular. Recently, he’d succumbed to the classic authoritarian temptation to institute increasingly repressive measures, including scrapping the old constitution and having a new one drawn up making his rule a de facto dictatorship. By 1979 things were fraying at the edges, and Park’s declaration of martial law in response to demonstrations in the far south was, to some, a sign that something had to give.
But the assassination was no victory for democracy. Instead, into Park’s place stepped his protégé Chun Doo-hwan, another army general with firm ideas on how a people should be governed. By May Chun had used the excuse of rumored North Korean infiltration to expand martial law to the entire country, closing universities, banning political activities, and further curtailing the freedom of the press. After almost two decades of Park Chung-hee, South Korean citizens recognized a dictator when they saw one. In the southern city of Gwangju, student demonstrations had their numbers swelled by those for whom the country’s “miraculous” industrialization had meant backbreaking work in hazardous conditions, and for whom recent unionization had led to greater political awareness. Paratroopers were sent in to take over from the police, but their brutality against unarmed citizens resulted in a still greater turnout in support of the civil militias. Together, they managed a brief respite during which the army retreated from the city center.
Shoot-outs, heroism, David and Goliath—this is the Gwangju Uprising as it has already been told in countless films, and a lesser writer might have been tempted to start with such superficially gripping tropes. Han Kang starts with bodies. Piled up, reeking, unclaimed, and thus unburied, they present both a logistical and an ontological dilemma. The alternation in the original between words whose meanings shade from “corpse” or “dead body” to “dead person” or simply “body” reflects a status of uncertainty reminiscent of Antigone. In the Korean context, such issues can also be connected to animist beliefs and the idea of somatic integrity—that violence done to the body is a violation of the spirit/soul that animates it. In Gwangju, part of the magnitude of the crime was that the violence done to these bodies, and the manner in which they had been dumped or hidden away, meant they were unable to be identified and given the proper burial rites by their families.
The novel is equally unusual in delving into the complex background of the democratization movement, though Han Kang’s style is always to do this obliquely, through the experiences of her characters, rather than presenting a dry historical account. There is the class element, much of which floats beneath the surface of the novel; because the recently unionized factory girls were some of the most vocal and visible agitators for change, the authorities were able to paint the uprising as a Communist plot sparked by North Korean spies, thus legitimizing their brutal crackdown. In the chapter entitled “The Prisoner, 1990,” I paid special attention to diction in the hope that this would highlight the subtle politics of a working-class torture survivor being pressured into revisiting traumatic memories for the sake of a university professor’s academic thesis. And there is also gender politics, with “The Factory Girl, 2002,” featuring a women-only splinter group from the main union, set up to address the fact that female workers were treated more unfairly even than the men.
Another striking feature of the uprising is regionalism. It was no accident that the first rumblings, and the worst violence, were felt in the far south of the Korean peninsula, a region that has a long history of political dissent, and of underrepresentation in the central government. It also goes some way in explaining why the uprisings were suppressed with such brutality, and why the government was able to cover up the precise details and statistics of this suppression for so long. It wasn’t until 1997 that the massacre was officially memorialized, and casualty figures remain a contentious issue even today. Disputing the official figures was initially punishable by arrest and, despite being far lower than the estimates by foreign press, these have still not been revised. In terms of mentality if not geography, Gwangju was sufficiently far from Seoul to seem “off the mainland”—the same kind of mental distance as that from London to Northern Ireland at the time of the Bloody Sunday massacre.
Born and raised in Gwangju, Han Kang’s personal connection to the subject matter meant that putting this novel together was always going to be an extremely fraught and painful process. She is a writer who takes things deeply to heart, and was anxious that the translation maintain the moral ambivalence of the original, and avoid sensationalizing the sorrow and shame that her hometown was made to bear. Her empathy comes through most strongly in “The Boy’s Mother, 2010,” written in a brick-thick Gwangju dialect impossible to replicate in English, Korean dialects being mainly marked by grammatical differences rather than individual words. To me, “faithfulness” in translation primarily concerns the effect on the reader rather than being an issue of syntax, and so I tried to aim for a nonspecific colloquialism that would carry the warmth Han intended. Though I did smuggle in the tiniest bit of Yorkshire—call it translator’s license.