From a distance, Nobel Prize winner for Literature Han Kang participated in the Fair

In a packed hall at the Buenos Aires Book Fair , 2024 Nobel Prize winner in Literature Han Kang sent a recorded greeting to the Argentine public: “Although I cannot be there with you, I wanted to be able to greet you in this way. My wish is to remain united with you through literature ,” she said in a voice as soft as a sigh, projected in the Gorostiza Room. Without forced solemnity or spectacle, she offered her serene presence and celebrated the power of the book as a bridge capable of uniting territories as distant as Korea and Argentina.

The South Korean writer, winner of the prestigious Booker Prize in 2016 for The Vegetarian , didn't give interviews about her country when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year. She didn't do it out of disdain or posturing: she's been asked about it so many times that she doesn't even answer.

“The world is in too much turmoil to be celebrating,” she said, according to her translator, Sunme Yoon. The renowned writer's appearance was fleeting but exclusive: a greeting projected into a room where the audience—taking notes, recording, laughing, listening— seemed more attentive than at any other talk.

The spotlight then shifted to its Spanish translator, Sunme Yoon, who acted as a mediator with the work in its original language. She arrived in Argentina at the age of twelve, a graduate of the National College of Buenos Aires , and a philology major from the Complutense University of Madrid.

Her biography is a back-and-forth between two languages ​​that represent worlds —which, she said, are not so different. Since 2010, under the auspices of the Literature Translation Institute (LTI), part of the Korean Ministry of Culture, she has been one of the main authors responsible for translating Korean literature into Spanish.

She doesn't call herself a translator lightly. "A translator is an ideal reader, who misses nothing, who understands everything," she said . Hers isn't a technical or mechanical task: it's a form of reading so profound that it becomes creative. Sunme recounted how, in 2012, she translated The Vegetarian for the first time for Ediciones Bajo la Luna.

However, the work was published in its original language in 2007 but didn't rise to international stardom until 2019, when it received the San Clemente Prize.

In 2013, Han Kang came to Buenos Aires for the first time. At the time, she was an unknown author, but she gave a talk to a packed house, and from then on, something changed. “I think she was really amazed,” Sunme recalled. When the writer returned to Korea, she confessed: “The audience on the other side of the world understood my novel better than the Korean audience.”

That phrase hovered over the talk like a revelation. What is it about Argentina that is so deeply intertwined with Kang's work? What secret threads unite a Korean author with Latin American readers? Perhaps it has to do with what Sunmen referred to during the presentation as "Indra's net," that ancient, almost untranslatable Buddhist notion that suggests we are all connected by invisible threads , like drops of dew on an immense spider web. If one moves, they all vibrate.

Within that network, Han Kang's literature has struck a chord that others haven't . "It's a novel that reaches women, that we understand that subtlety," said Sunmes about The Vegetarian . " We're trained to fulfill a certain role. The incomprehension we women feel, those subtle injustices... I hadn't understood them as forms of violence until I read that novel."

And there's more: the connection with Borges . Sunmep suggests that there's something Borgesian about Han Kang . Not only because of her reading of the author and that possible reference to María Kodama in the novel The Greek Class, but because Han Kang traveled to Buenos Aires, in part, to experience "the land of Borges."

And he left it written : in one of his collections of poems, also translated by Yoon, we can read: “Stealthily, that city follows my city.” A line that seems to have emerged from the margins of Fervor de Buenos Aires, and yet echoes Seoul.

The talk closed with a sort of promise: there are six new translations on the way. Books that will add new threads to this web that spans continents. Someone in the audience dared to ask: "How do you live within that network, which could be Han Kang's work, and in which we are all part?" Sunme smiled before answering: "Every novel I translate is recreating a world for another culture."

The Argentine reading public is therefore awaiting a new work by Han Kang , to reconnect with that heartbreaking yet poetic universe that characterizes her. A world where the dead coexist with the living, thanks to a translation that reveals literature as tangible proof that we are still connected.