While I’ve seen a number of South Korean films, I’ve read very few novels from that country. The Cabinet (2006, South Korea, translated 2021) may very well be the first (I checked: it is). Kim is an award-winning author in his home country, and has been published in English since 2019. But it is, I think, telling that The Cabinet, his first novel to be published but the second to be translated into English (by Sean Lin Halbert), has been published in English by a UK-based genre imprint, Angry Robot.
True, The Cabinet is nominally genre (as Anglophone publishing would have it). The title refers to a filing cabinet, referred to throughout the novel as “Cabinet 13”, which contains files on “symptomers”. These are people with unusual, not entirely believable, abilities. Professor Kwon, the man who has been collating the data for decades, believes they are harbingers of a new form of humanity. Given the symptoms, so to speak, of the symptomers described in the novel, this does not seem entirely plausible.
Take the ging-ko tree man, one of the earliest symptomers to be described. He has a small ging-ko tree growing from one finger. As the tree grows, so he diminishes. Other symptomers experience “time-lag”, seemingly jumping hours or days or weeks through time. Yet others believe so fiercely there is a crocodile under their bed they die of wounds that could only have been inflicted by a crocodile. It’s all very whimsical and… well, implausible.
The Cabinet is narrated by Kong, who is employed straight from university by a research agency. No one at the agency appears to do any actual work, and no one gives Kong anything to do. While exploring the building, he discovers Cabinet 13, begins reading the files it contains, and so comes to the notice of Professor Kwon. The professor eventually commandeers Kong as his assistant, and implies Kong will take over his work — and then, in fact, explicitly demands it when he is taken terminally ill. At which point it transpires that Kwon’s files on some of the symptomers, the “chimera files”, are of interest to a mysterious syndicate.
The novel is told from Kong’s point of view, with some sections written as historical reportage about individual symptomers, or historical background which may in part explain or justify certain symptomers. Kong has no idea of the significance of the files, and no real idea of his role in reference to Cabinet 13.
Annoyingly, the translator has used a very chatty and slangy style of prose to tell the story, and it reads more like bad writing than the intimate prose that was probably intended. Of course, I’ve no way of comparing it with the Korean original. But it all reads very amateurish and frantic, and the lack of through-line to the plot, or of any explanation to the symptomers, makes for an unsatisfying read. It may well be that two of these three are characteristic of the Korean literary tradition. I wouldn’t know. But I cannot judge a novel based on a literary tradition I do not know, I can only acknowledge that my judgement may not allow for conventions of that literary tradition.
Certainly, I think on a sentence-by-sentence level some of the prose in The Cabinet is quite poor— and I wonder if it’s fair to blame that on the translator rather than the author. Umberto Eco would joke his novels were better in English than in their original Italian because his translator was a better writer than he was. WG Sebald helped translate his novels from German — but he lived in the UK and was fluent in English. Leila Aboulela writes in English, although she didn’t move to the UK until her late twenties. And yet… authors such as Jenny Erpenbeck or Elfriede Jelinek or Michel Houellebecq or Patrik Ouředník or Hanan al-Shaykh… their prose is as sharp and brilliant in their English translations as I imagine it is in their native languages.
I don’t know — and, to be fair, I find the prose in Houellebecq’s novels also occasionally too “chatty”. Perhaps it’s just weird — and foolish — to value the prose of a writer when only seen through the lens of translation.
It’s not simply the language, there are also cultural elements which don’t translate, or are simply misrepresented. In Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005, Sweden), for example, it’s implied Myrorna is a “funky” clothing store when it’s actually a chain of charity shops. (In his defence, the translator had lived only in Denmark, and was so dissatisfied with his rushed translation he refused to put his name to it and instead did an “Alan Smithee”.)
I suspect part of the problem is that I don’t know what position Kim Un-su occupies in South Korean literature. Elfriede Jelinek is a Nobel Laureate; Michel Houellebecq is a divisive figure but no one has ever questioned his literary credentials. Where does Kim lie in the South Korean literary firmament? Is it too much to expect him to be a Korean Umberto Eco? The Cabinet was, after all, published by Angry Robot, a mid-sized genre UK imprint. Are my expectations too high simply because this is a translated work?
Undoubtedly.
And yet… I may unconsciously hold the book to a higher standard than I no doubt should, I also consciously recognise that a) the original text has been translated into English from another language, and b) it is a product of an entirely different literary tradition. Allowances must be made. Except… I have read translated fiction that does not require me to make those allowances — it is straightforwardly brilliant.
It makes me wonder if giving a translated novel “the benefit of the doubt” is doing it any favours. Happily, it’s not something I’ve had to think about often, but perhaps I’ve just been lucky in my choice of translated fiction. Perhaps my enjoyment and appreciation of the films of Andrzej Żuławski and Krzysztof Kieślowski meant I could handle the bizarre prose of Adam Wiśniewski-Snerg better (although I still think Robot (1973, Poland) is quite badly plotted).
I suspect, and no doubt people can think of plenty of examples to dispute my thesis… but I suspect that translated authors are often positioned in the translated market as they were in their home market. And that doesn’t always work. Stieg Larsson is actually a little bit more literary than his English translations, but the “Nordic noir” market is quite populist. The Perry Rhodan books were pulp sf in German, yet all attempts to publish them in English ultimately failed. But both Erpenbeck and Jelinek are high literature.
Had The Cabinet been pitched a bit higher, perhaps it might have been a better read. Perhaps that’s just my own personal taste bouncing out of the book and trying to find an explanation for it (because reviews, of course, demand such explanations).
Perhaps I would have found the book just as dissatisfying a read had I been Korean and read it in that language.
