Original language: Korean
Original title: Greek time
Translation: Héctor Bofill and Hye Young Yu for La Magrana (in Catalan) and Sunme Yoon for Penguin Random House (in Spanish)
Year of publication: 2011
Valuation: recommendable
There are times when an author’s literary career has twists and turns that make it difficult to keep track of him, since the published work does not follow a strict order in which it was written but publishers, for one reason or another, translate his works from messy way. This is the case that concerns us as the first translated title by Han Kang «The vegetarian» (2007), with which he had his greatest impact, was followed by «Human Acts» (2014) and then by «Blanco» (2017), but surprisingly, this much earlier work, originally published in 2011, is now being recovered. And, in this case, the chronology in the translation is related to the evolution of the author, since, paradoxically, this work is much closer to «Blanco» at a conceptual and stylistic level than if we temporarily placed it between «The vegetarian» y «Human Acts» which is where it would belong. Let’s see why.
We could try to simplify Han Kang’s work, as published to date, into two large blocks: the search for impact and narrative hardness on the one hand, and the appreciative and warm gaze on the other. In appearance, two antagonistic blocks, almost opposed, but only in appearance because while the pain and daring shown in his first translated novels hid a poetic and emotional prose, in the same way the tender and delicate look of “Blanco” and the book What concerns us barely allows us to glimpse the pain and hardness that loneliness and sadness give off. But all these elements are mixed and coexist in all his works, so that Han Kang’s style is found and preserved intact in its depth, changing only the point from which he casts his gaze, the origin from which the emotion that emerges emerges. he skillfully captures it in his texts.
The novel begins with the protagonist sitting in a class where they teach Greek; In it, she is asked to read aloud. But when she tries she sees that she can’t, that she is unable to articulate a word to the surprise of the others. This fact leads her to remember years ago when this uncomfortable and involuntary situation occurred to her for the first time, in her childhood, with her mother who was sick with cancer and she was devoted to reading, learning the language and spelling signs at a young age. With a solitary personality, he always found company in letters much more than in friends, without showing any interest in grooming himself or in having romantic relationships, thus reaching the age of sixteen when the first of those episodes of muteness appeared, being unable to articulate none of those words that I learned with so much admiration and avidity from books. The narrative, always slow and well woven, returns us after a few pages to the present, and we learn that in middle age she lives alone, without a husband whom she divorced and without custody of her only son because she was considered incapable of take care of him and watch over him due to his precarious economic situation and his hypersensitivity.
In this two-voice story, the author alternates the narration of the protagonist with that of the Greek teacher, a victim of blindness that has progressed inexorably since her adolescence and also tells us about a love she had at that age in which Feelings flood our existence and everything is discovered with the magic of the first occasions while he details how his life transition was accompanied by an emigration from Korea to Germany in his adolescence and his return to his homeland years later. In this way, the text alternates the narrative with brief episodes from the Greek class, in which the teacher and student meet, with large extensions of the past of both protagonists that take up most of the pages of the book. In a manner analogous to the Greek class and the study of ancient Greek at the hands of Socrates and Plato, the text involves constant reflections on friendship, life, death and the passage of time, imbuing its protagonists with the philosophical reasonings of the great ancient thinkers.
As in his previous novels, Han Kang’s style is organic, it overflows the body and interrelates with it, interweaving thought and body as elements that interact in an almost indistinguishable way; In this case, the pain that floods the protagonist’s life is locked up so deep inside her that not even the words come out of her own mouth, wrapped in a cloak of darkness that prevents them from coming to light as if, enclosing the pain, this would disappear swallowed by its own being. But the pain does not go away if you do not let it go, it is not absorbed even if you try, and she tries, not through her own language, a language forever linked to her life, but through a foreign language, who knows if thinking that by opening up to a new language a new world will open up to him, this time brighter, less dark because “back then, when I had the language, the emotions were clearer and stronger. But now there are no words inside her. The words and phrases have been separated from her body. The slow and leisurely pace, very common in oriental literature, fits perfectly with the story told, in which both characters approach each other, with care and delicacy, as if their emotional fragility were so brittle that they could not withstand a faster pace. accelerated, as if his blindness and her muteness forced them to slow down their movements, perhaps waiting to find something that would allow them to move forward with more determination.
With this text, the author once again demonstrates great sensitivity and brings us closer to feelings surrounded by loneliness through characters who, although not explicitly or intended, demand loudly, sometimes deafened by a great silence, the company of a kind being who shares their tragic situation with them. A company that we always need although sometimes we are not aware of it and that we sometimes find in other souls as lost and alone as ourselves.
Source: https://unlibroaldia.blogspot.com/2023/11/han-kang-la-clase-de-griego.html
