- Translator’s Note: The Importance of Elsewhere
As a translator from the Spanish, I find increasingly that I rarely have time to read books written in languages other than English or Spanish. Keeping up with the latest titles in Spain plus the whole of Latin America (not to mention reading as many interesting books as I can from English-speaking countries) already fills an indecent amount of my day and so, unfortunately, while I of course champion my translator colleagues’ work and know instinctively that most of it is excellent, I hardly ever actually sit down to read any of it.
To my shame, in fact, I have to date only read one work of Korean fiction (Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, translated by Deborah Smith, and published last year in the UK by Portobello Books). I enjoyed the book and have her next one on my shelves ready to read, but her work is clearly just one very small slice of what is undoubtedly a rich and varied literary landscape, of which I am only partially, hazily aware.
Andrés Felipe Solano’s book Korea: Notes from the Edge is probably as close as I’m going to get to experiencing Korea in any real sense, unless I am lucky enough one day to visit the country. As a Colombian living in Seoul, his is necessarily an outsider’s view and as such is never going to be representative of Korean writing. But it is writing about Korea—as well as writing about being a [End Page 239] writer, about not being able to write, about solitude, about the beauty and strangeness of cities, and about the way being far away from one’s origins can give one a stronger sense of identity; the pulsing aliveness that bubbles up in us when we connect with “that elsewhere that underwrites our existence,” as Philip Larkin put it in “The Importance of Elsewhere.”
More than an outsider’s view of Korea, the book gives us an insider’s view of one person’s mind, as he dialogues with himself and with the writers he is reading in response to his strange new circumstances. As Juan Villoro, chair of the judging panel that awarded the book the 2016 Library Award of Colombian Narrative, put it, the book is an attempt to “explore that other foreign country, which is a person’s inner world.” It also represents the joy of engaging with books that don’t pander to our ideas of what it means to be Colombian, to be Korean, Zimbabwean, Thai, or Bulgarian, and, by extension, the importance of publishing such books. As English speakers, we are denied access to a wealth of writing from around the world because of the lack of space created in Anglophone publishing for other voices. The small amount of space that does exist is frequently given over to books that are seen to somehow represent the countries they come from, to speak for an entire nation or group of people: not so much “The great American novel” as “The one, true image of Russia/China/Bolivia/wherever.” Both notions are, of course, fallacies; one mind, one set of circumstances, cannot ever stand for all minds, for all circumstances.
Solano trained as a journalist, and an earlier non-fiction book, Minimum Wage, in which he chronicled the six months he spent living and working undercover in a factory in a poor neighbourhood in Medellín, Colombia’s second largest city, was shortlisted for the prestigious Gabriel García Márquez Journalism Prize in 2008. In similarly intimate, clear-headed prose he builds this complicated and loving portrayal of Seoul, switching between observations about Korea (the language, food, and customs) and [End Page 240] personal meditations on writing, loneliness, marriage, war, fear, and difference. His writing, spare and yet simultaneously warm, is a master class in understatement, and I hope that this small extract will lead to more of his work being made available for English-language readers. [End Page 241]
Rosalind Harvey’s translation of Juan Pablo Villalobos’ novel Down the Rabbit Hole was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and...