Iranian Translator Sets Out to Bring Korean Works to the World
The Iranian translator Farideh Mahdavi-Damghani visited Korea for the first time this month, and left with a project. She intends to bring more Korean works to readers in her native Iran, a country where, by her own account, almost nothing of Korean literature is currently available.
She is not a minor figure taking on a hobby. Mahdavi-Damghani is a noted translator in Iran and in Europe, even if she remains largely unknown in Korea itself. She won the Florence Literary Prize in 2004, an award that sits behind only the Nobel and the Pulitzer in prestige among literary honours, and she is the first non-Italian to receive an award from the President of Italy for her translations. Her working languages include Persian, English, French and Italian, all of which she speaks and writes fluently.
A gap she could not stop noticing
Mahdavi-Damghani has travelled widely looking for interesting projects and collaborations. Other Asian countries have caught her attention, but Korea, she explained, became her favourite. For a translator, reading is the natural way to get to know a country. That is where the trip ran into a wall.
She could not find many Korean books translated into Persian. Nor, more surprisingly, into English, French or Italian. A literature with centuries of history and a thriving contemporary scene was, from where she was standing, effectively invisible.
That absence is what turned a visit into a plan. She decided to introduce more Korean works to readers abroad, particularly elsewhere in Asia, and to make Persian one of the languages in which they appear.
Why so little Korean literature travels
The obstacle is structural, not aesthetic. Publishing is a rights business, and rights move along established routes. A novel published in New York or London has agents, scouts and editors watching for it. A novel published in Seoul has a far shorter queue of people looking, and almost none of them read Korean.
The result is a bottleneck that depends on a very small number of translators. If three people in the world can render Korean prose into fluent French, then French readers get whatever those three people choose to work on. This is the quiet reality of literary translation: the map of what the world reads is drawn by who happened to learn which language.
The Persian problem is worse
English at least has a functioning market for translated fiction, small though it is. Persian has almost nothing connecting it to Korean. There is no established pipeline, few translators working between the two languages, and limited publishing infrastructure to carry a book from a Seoul contract to a Tehran bookshop.
In practice, a Korean novel reaching Iran today would almost certainly arrive by relay: Korean into English, English into Persian. Every relay costs something. Idiom flattens, register drifts, and the second translator is working from a text that has already made compromises. A direct translation by someone who reads both languages is enormously better, and enormously rarer.
What a translator of her stature brings
Reputation is the currency. A publisher considering an unknown Korean author will hesitate. A publisher told that the translation carries the name of a Florence Literary Prize winner will look twice. Mahdavi-Damghani can open doors in Iran and in Italy that a Korean publisher could not open with a decade of book fairs.
- Selection. Someone has to decide which of the thousands of Korean titles is worth the effort, and that judgement requires a reader who knows both literary traditions.
- Advocacy. Convincing a publisher to take a risk on an unfamiliar literature is a sales job as much as a scholarly one.
- Craft. A translated novel lives or dies on the prose. A bad translation can bury an author in a language for a generation.
Korea has been trying
The Korean government has invested seriously in getting its literature abroad, funding translation grants and residencies for years, largely through the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. The institute subsidises translations, supports publishers and trains translators, and its work is visible at ltikorea.or.kr. The strategy has produced results in English and increasingly in European languages.
What state funding cannot manufacture is a translator who is personally in love with the material. The books that break through tend to have a champion, someone who badgers publishers, writes introductions and refuses to let a text disappear. Mahdavi-Damghani appears to be volunteering for that role.
Two literatures that barely know each other
The mutual ignorance runs both ways. Iranian readers know almost nothing of Korean literature, and Korean readers know little of Persian literature beyond perhaps a name or two from the classical canon. Both traditions are ancient, both have contemporary writers of real force, and the traffic between them is close to zero.
Closing that gap is slow work measured in individual books rather than cultural strategies. It starts with one translator who reads something, cannot forget it, and decides that readers in her own language deserve to see it too. The rest is negotiation, funding and years at a desk.
Whether her project produces one book or twenty, the underlying point stands. Literature crosses borders when a person carries it, and the number of people equipped to carry it between Korean and Persian is, at present, very close to one.
The economics nobody mentions
Literary translators are paid badly, and translators working between languages with small markets are paid worst of all. A commercial translator handling contracts or clinical documentation can earn a solid professional income. A translator spending a year rendering a Korean novel into Persian is doing it for reasons that have nothing to do with the fee. That is why state grants and institutional support matter so much, and why the reputation of the translator is often the only thing that persuades a publisher to gamble. The work gets done because somebody insists on doing it, and then somebody else, reading it in a language they never expected, discovers a writer they would otherwise have gone a whole life without.