[fiction] The Fruit of My Woman by Han Kang, Deborah Smith (Translator)
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[fiction] The Fruit of My Woman by Han Kang, Deborah Smith (Translator) | 627.48 KB
Title: The Fruit of My Woman
Author: Han Kang, Deborah Smith
Description:
Han Kang wrote this story in 1997, and it is in many ways a direct precursor to her 2007 novel The Vegetarian – in both, a married couple in their early thirties find their hitherto uneventful lives turned upside down when the woman starts to undergo a transformation. But while The Vegetarian eschews anything explicitly supernatural – Yeong-hye's desire to turn into a tree is seen by those around her as a symptom of mental illness, and there is nothing in the narrative itself to disprove this reading – the nameless protagonist of 'The Fruit of My Woman' really does become a plant: leaves, berries and all.
These metamorphoses are more akin to Kafka than Ovid in their allegorical relations with society. Korea has no comparable tradition of transformation, and Greek mythology has not been a major influence on its literature. Han Kang's works often strike me as retellings of myths for which no original exists, an interpretation that suits the seriousness Korean critics have dubbed her 'classicism'– diametrically opposed to the witty, light-hearted postmodernism in vogue when her writing debuted. The influence of Korean Buddhism, with its conception of violence as inherent in the human animal, seems apparent in Han's tendency to go deeper than specific societal inflections. The Vegetarian in particular melds the archetypal underpinnings of myth with the narrative strategies of modern prose fiction, gaining much of its power from the fine balance between the universality of these mythical archetypes and the specificity of its setting in contemporary South Korea, where social structures are such that pan-human violence manifests in men as danger to women, but in women as danger to themselves.
Where The Vegetarian borrows the sheer force of universals – violence, desire, art – 'The Fruit of My Woman' uses the same premise to offer a nuanced and multifaceted critique of its social setting. Though the husband is a far more sympathetic character than The Vegetarian's Mr Cheong, he still reflects damaging gender norms, dismissing his wife's longing for a different life as romantic idealism, typically feminine, while taking pride in what he considers his own steady realism. Several of South Korea's leading female authors have examined the space of the apartment as a shaping factor for female domestic life – exploring the link between their country's industrialisation (rapid and relatively recent) and homogenisation, its capitalism (valorised as a part of national identity, in contrast to the communist North) and its conformity. Alongside this, 'The Fruit of My Woman' can also be read as part of the discourse of 'ecoambiguity' cutting across East Asian literatures in response to local and regional environmental crises. Nature in all its glorious fecundity is everywhere in this story, throwing into sharp relief both the sealed, sterile apartment space – and the couple's childlessness. It is in the language itself, the style of which is notably different from that of The Vegetarian – here longer, slightly more florid sentences unfurl like many-fronded leaves, freighted with similes and other imagistic comparisons. As ever with Han's writing, it is a joyful challenge to render in translation, and one which I hope I've done justice to.
Translated by Deborah Smith
DOWNLOAD:
https://rapidgator.net/file/def051fefb484634e91470357fd3dd37/The_Fruit_of_My_Woman_by_Han_Kang_Deborah_Smith_Translator.
https://ddownload.com/qnzlipoo0qdy/The_Fruit_of_My_Woman_by_Han_Kang_Deborah_Smith_Translator.
Han Kang wrote this story in 1997, and it is in many ways a direct precursor to her 2007 novel The Vegetarian – in both, a married couple in their early thirties find their hitherto uneventful lives turned upside down when the woman starts to undergo a transformation. But while The Vegetarian eschews anything explicitly supernatural – Yeong-hye's desire to turn into a tree is seen by those around her as a symptom of mental illness, and there is nothing in the narrative itself to disprove this reading – the nameless protagonist of 'The Fruit of My Woman' really does become a plant: leaves, berries and all.
These metamorphoses are more akin to Kafka than Ovid in their allegorical relations with society. Korea has no comparable tradition of transformation, and Greek mythology has not been a major influence on its literature. Han Kang's works often strike me as retellings of myths for which no original exists, an interpretation that suits the seriousness Korean critics have dubbed her 'classicism'– diametrically opposed to the witty, light-hearted postmodernism in vogue when her writing debuted. The influence of Korean Buddhism, with its conception of violence as inherent in the human animal, seems apparent in Han's tendency to go deeper than specific societal inflections. The Vegetarian in particular melds the archetypal underpinnings of myth with the narrative strategies of modern prose fiction, gaining much of its power from the fine balance between the universality of these mythical archetypes and the specificity of its setting in contemporary South Korea, where social structures are such that pan-human violence manifests in men as danger to women, but in women as danger to themselves.
Where The Vegetarian borrows the sheer force of universals – violence, desire, art – 'The Fruit of My Woman' uses the same premise to offer a nuanced and multifaceted critique of its social setting. Though the husband is a far more sympathetic character than The Vegetarian's Mr Cheong, he still reflects damaging gender norms, dismissing his wife's longing for a different life as romantic idealism, typically feminine, while taking pride in what he considers his own steady realism. Several of South Korea's leading female authors have examined the space of the apartment as a shaping factor for female domestic life – exploring the link between their country's industrialisation (rapid and relatively recent) and homogenisation, its capitalism (valorised as a part of national identity, in contrast to the communist North) and its conformity. Alongside this, 'The Fruit of My Woman' can also be read as part of the discourse of 'ecoambiguity' cutting across East Asian literatures in response to local and regional environmental crises. Nature in all its glorious fecundity is everywhere in this story, throwing into sharp relief both the sealed, sterile apartment space – and the couple's childlessness. It is in the language itself, the style of which is notably different from that of The Vegetarian – here longer, slightly more florid sentences unfurl like many-fronded leaves, freighted with similes and other imagistic comparisons. As ever with Han's writing, it is a joyful challenge to render in translation, and one which I hope I've done justice to.
Translated by Deborah Smith
DOWNLOAD:
https://rapidgator.net/file/def051fefb484634e91470357fd3dd37/The_Fruit_of_My_Woman_by_Han_Kang_Deborah_Smith_Translator.
https://ddownload.com/qnzlipoo0qdy/The_Fruit_of_My_Woman_by_Han_Kang_Deborah_Smith_Translator.
