If you’ve been following the news, you know that Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in literature. It’s likely you’ve also heard that she was the first South Korean and Asian woman to receive the award for what the committee deemed her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” 

You might have even discovered that her novella The Vegetarian won the International Booker Prize in 2016, opening the door to worldwide readership and literary stardom. 

What you probably don’t know is that, long before her books appeared in English, they were already available to Spanish-speaking readers. In 2012, Argentine publisher Bajo la luna published a translation of The Vegetarian, three years before she was translated into English and four before the Booker. 

Until then, the book had only been released in Vietnam and Japan, meaning that this was the first time Kang had been published in the West. The book’s circulation was not massive, mostly limited to Argentina and a few other Spanish-speaking countries that Bajo la luna exported to. 

The episode, however, is noteworthy in the sense that it was the South Korean’s first foray into what, in the translation industry and academia, are known as “central languages” — namely English, Spanish, German, and French — and concentrate the overwhelming majority of the publishing industry. This is a key step for authors like Kang who write in less widely-spoken languages (known in the industry as “peripheral languages”) and wish to become noticed by award committees.   

How Kang got published in Argentina

Bajo la luna is a small publisher originally created by Argentine poet Mirta Rosenberg in Rosario in 1991. At first it was devoted entirely to poetry, but it later expanded to include narrative fiction, publishing Argentine authors as well as translations. Miguel Balaguer — Rosenberg’s son — and his late wife Valentina Rebassa took over after the 2001 crisis and moved the operation to Buenos Aires. 

Balaguer first heard of The Vegetarian — published in Korea in 2007 — in 2011 through Sun-me Yoon, a Korean translator who had lived in Argentina for 20 years. He remembers noticing how different she was compared to authors from previous generations, who were more focused on social realism following the Korean War and the dictatorship that lasted until 1987.

“Kang was born in 1970 and is part of a generation that grew up in a South Korea that was already an economic powerhouse,” Balaguer told the Herald. 

“She did not live through those tribulations and her literature is more attuned to global and timeless issues, which incidentally are also topics that register better with the Nobel committee.” 

A publisher and a translator’s will and desire, however, are rarely enough on their own. Another key element was the Korean Literature Translation Institute (LTI), a government body created in 1996 with the goal of promoting the country’s literature and culture abroad. On the legal page of the Bajo la luna edition, it states that publication was possible in part due to the “backing of the LTI.” 

Sun-me Yoon did the translation and the first edition was published in Argentina in 2012. The book sold a little under 1,000 copies in its first year, a sizable figure for the small publishing house. Kang even visited Argentina the following year and made appearances at the Buenos Aires Book Fair and the Chancellor Ricardo Rojas Cultural Center. 

And then in 2016, the Booker happened. The award saw the South Korean author’s career skyrocket and ignited an arms race for her publishing rights. 

“There are millions of Spanish-speakers in the world. And when a specific author starts gaining traction, their rights become very expensive,” Balaguer explained. He lost Kang’s to a small Spanish publisher, which nevertheless was able to outbid them based mostly on the fact that they were in a larger market. In 2019, Random House acquired the worldwide rights for Han Kang and is in charge of publishing her past books as well as her future ones. 

Balaguer stresses that this is a standard process for the publishing industry in central languages. The competition is fierce, not only because of market size but also for the acquisition of what scholars have called “literary capital,” and critical acclaim and translations into major languages are key to developing this. 

“If I were Dutch, I could have held on to Kang’s publishing rights and would now be buying myself a five-story mansion on the Sigel Canal in Amsterdam,” he chuckled. 

Translations and Argentine literature

The fact that a small Argentine publisher would make a point of publishing an unknown Korean author might strike some as peculiar. After all, there is no shortage of talented local writers and poets striving to be published, and the Argentine cultural scene is bursting with literature. A 2015 study by the World Cities Culture Forum revealed that Buenos Aires had more bookstores per capita than any other city in the world: 734 stores, roughly 25 every 100,000 people. 

Several factors are behind the historical strong presence of translations within the Argentine publishing industry. Argentine literature is only 200 hundred years old — considered “young” by global standards. Its initial tendency, then, was to look abroad for inspiration, mainly to European countries. 

Scholars, however, point to two historical turning points that cemented translations as a key part of Argentine literary culture.

The first took place during what is known as the “golden age of Argentine books.” Between 1938 and 1955, the Argentine publishing industry went from a small sector catering to the educated elite to a massive operation that exported to all of Latin America and Spain. 

This was the result of government policies as well as world events, such as the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and the ensuing Francisco Franco dictatorship, which forced many writers and publishers into exile and effectively sunk Spain’s publishing industry. This left a void in the Spanish-speaking book market that was filled mainly by Argentina and Mexico.  

“Approximately 40% of all books made in Argentina during this era were exported, meaning that publishers had to put together book catalogs that were more ‘universal,'” poet and translation studies scholar Santiago Venturini explained to the Herald. Translated fiction became the bulk of this production, as they allowed editors to resort to literary works of all types. 

Translators also began to get noticed, a development in which literary magazine and publisher Sur proved instrumental. Not only did they make a point of publishing their names on book jackets and covers, but cemented the figure of the writer-translator. This implied granting commissions to prestigious writers who helped legitimize translations as true works of literature through their pedigree. 

The most noteworthy of these is Jorge Luis Borges and his iconic 1940 translation of William Faulkner’s Wild Palms (Las palmeras salvajes). The work has come to be regarded, tongue-in-cheek, as a Borges text. In other words, his singular translation style that favored literary form over strict adherence to the source material means that readers at times may be confused as to which author they are actually reading.

The second turning point took place in the early 2000s, with the appearance of what have become known as the “new Argentine publishers.” These are a number of small and medium-sized publishing houses funded by local capital — Bajo la luna is considered one of them — that sprang up in response to the multinationals that dominated the publishing scene in the 1990s. While they publish Argentine authors and poets, translations have become a central part of their catalogs. 

“They begin to translate authors not only from central languages but also from more peripheral languages like Czech, Finnish, and Korean,” Venturini said, adding that this was done in part thanks to promotion policies by governments similar to South Korea’s TLI. 

For Argentine publishers, this was a way of introducing foreign literary traditions into national literature but also a path to distinguishing themselves from the competition. In a scene that was suddenly bursting with local authors, carving out a profile as a place for writers from unknown cultures and traditions became a strong branding option. 

While Kang was strictly speaking introduced to the West through this singular Argentine publishing market, Venturini considers that her translation into English in 2015 was the real starting point of her rise to fame. Publication, and the Booker prize the following year, gave her the visibility and critical acclaim that are critical to be in the running for awards like the Nobel. 

Regardless, the Bajo la luna edition will go down as part of the South Korean’s path onto the transnational literary scene.

“It was a pioneering event, no question about that,” said Venturini.