Everything about this feels painful but also somehow beautiful. Snow and cold weather do not get enough credit for being deadly and gorgeous. Friendship, grief, generational trauma, trauma denial...all of these things are a maelstrom in this quiet, gut-punching novel. At times I wasn't even sure what I was reading because I felt like I was drifting away on the imagery. This hurts.

Han Kang never fails to amaze me with the prose. Her writing is so poetic and symbolic, and the way she writes about nature in We Do Not Part is amazing and breathtaking. The novel follows Kyungha as she journeys through a snowstorm to retrieve a bird at the request of her friend, Inseon, who suffered an accident.

The element of snow in We Do Not Part is so immersive throughout the book, but it also perfectly portrays the cold and the violence of Korean history mentioned in the story. I often imagined the visual of blood red against a stark snowy background and it’s such a striking contrast; Kang does a good job with creating that atmosphere. There is a solemn tone; in its essence, We Do Not Part is gruesome and sad, but it’s also such an important read. However, I’m not familiar with Korean history, so I’d say it would help to learn about it before reading this.

I try not to compare books from the same author, but I have to say this feels and reads quite different from The Vegetarian which has been the only Han Kang book I’ve read so far. We Do Not Part didn’t flow as coherently, the language was more ambiguous, and there was a somewhat confusing back and forth between reality and imagination. That said, it doesn’t take away the fact that the book touches on friendships, war and history, family, and generational trauma so hauntingly and stunningly.

In the end, I realize how powerful the title is and those four words strung together will stay in my mind for a while.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for the ARC.

2.5 || I feel quite strange giving a mediocre rating to the latest Nobel laureate's 2025 release. I mean, Han Kang just won the Nobel prize in literature, which is no small feat, and she is the first South Korean to win it, as well.

I guess I should preface by saying this is my second of Kang's books that I have read. I got to read an ARC of her 2023 release (it was originally published in Korean in 2011, but was published for the first time in English in 2023), Greek Lessons, and I rated that book a hesitant 4 stars.
Basically, after reading We Do Not Part, I find I have the same issues I had with Greek Lessons, but they felt more pertinent in this novel. This could also be a case where upon reading a second work by Kang, I feel quite confident in saying that her storytelling style is one based on vagueness. I did find Greek Lesson to be confusing and hard to follow, and We Do Not Part was even more convoluted. So, perhaps this is something that I was willing to overlook the first time I read Kang's work, but not something I can keep glossing over, if not for the simple notion of wanting to actually understand what the author desires to communicate through each of her books.

The synopsis told me that this was a novel about a woman that must travel to Jeju Island in order to retrieve her friend's pet bird, and that is the main premise, but I am afraid that all the other things Kang wanted to convey—and perhaps educate me on—were somehwhat lost on me.

Was this novel's focus supposed to be on our MC/narrator, Kyungha, and her current unstable state of mind? Was I supposed to want to know more about her backstory and what sparked her descent into slight madness? I did want to know more—I wanted to know why she suddenly found herself alone and scared, after stating in the first chapter that she had a daughter and a family. I wanted to know if somehow losing her family was truly what led Kyungha to no longer be able to tell the difference between dream or reality. Or maybe it's what Kyungha herself suspects—she initially hypothesizes that her current mental state's direct cause was her research and publication of her book on the Gwangju Uprising. But even Kyungha starts to question her theory, and this is barely touched on after the very first chapter.
So many questions left unanswered. I don't always need everything to be spelled out for me, and vagueness can be something I actually tend to enjoy in literature, but, alas, the ratio between questions and actual context that could give me some answers in this particular novel is way too wide for me.

Was this story really about Kyungha's friend, Inseon? Was this just a way for Kang to tell us—through Inseon—about the Jeju uprising that occurred on 04/03/1948? It could be, because we start to learn in bits until the latter half where there is a lot of storytelling done by Inseon in which she is recounting her island's history from her parent's perspectives, as well as her own and others who she has spoken with. The thing is, I would not be able to confidently categorize this book as historical fiction. Yes, we come to discover certain details about Jeju 4.3 (this is what it is known as in South Korea), and there was use of allusion to another massacre that occurred in South Korea later in 1980: the Gwangju Uprising. BUT! I would not have known or understood most of the history stuff if it weren't for my own research. I feel like maybe towards the end certain aspects of Jeju 4.3 were spelled out a bit more clearly, but for most of the book, I was grasping at straws. Google helped me out and gave me the context I felt that I needed. Which brings me to a theory I have: I think that you will either 1) already be aware of this particular aspect in Korean history, or 2) you will be forced to do your own research, because there are even city names that aren't spelled out and Kang only gave us the first letter, or 3) you are the chillest of the chill readers and don't need or care to know everything.

Lastly, I wanna touch on what I think this story is really about: Kyungha and Inseon's friendship. And this is definitely what I enjoyed most about this novel; their history and scenes together are what drove me to keep going. I should also mention quickly before continuing that, of course, the writing is beautiful. This is something I enjoyed about Greek Lessons, and Kang's delectable prose was ever present in We Do Not Part. This along with what Inseon meant to Kyungha and vice versa, were the two elements that kept me from rating this any lower than 2.5 stars.
Even though we don't get much from Kyungha's past, we learn a lot about Inseon, making her shine a bit more brightly, and it's an endearing notion because Inseon shines through Kyungha's eyes.
In a time where both women aren't surrounded by friends and family they can turn to, they realize that their friendship was and is extremely valuable.

I'm gonna leave it at that. If you have enjoyed Kang's previous work, then you are probably going to enjoy this one! (:

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House | Hogarth for this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

The bonds of shared friendship and horror meld together in this horrific and dreamlike novel mingled with images of stark white snow stained with red drops of blood. Kyungha’s friend Inseon has had an accident and was transported from her home on Jeju Island to a hospital in Seoul. But Inseon’s pet bird Ama needs to be taken care of so Kyungha travels by plane and bus to get to Inseon’s home on the island during a major snowstorm. Her real and dreamlike journey takes us down the road of friendship and remembrance as the book unspools the horror of thousands of lives cruelly extinguished and families destroyed during Korea’s history that had been long buried. This is a stark and visual read with the experience and condition of the landscape and environment during the snow storm harkening to the realities of what occurred in the late 1940s and early 1950s. I sometimes found moving back and forth between the real and dreamlike parts challenging, which probably was intentional. This is a book that definitely highlights a not-to-be-forgotten part of Korean history presented in a unique way by the author. Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book.

Snow. Engrossed. Wonder. South Korea. Powerful. Soul-shattering. Take care when wandering into the detritus of what you are writing. Every human piece of me sunk into these meltingly written words on the pages. My imagination using lived experience to bring forth visions of new perspectives and places never before visualized or conceptualized. Ardent feelings bubbling up all along the way. Phew. This was powerful and it would behoove you to add this to your books read in a lifetime. Not to mention pertinent to this time and space in America right now. Oof, I’m left with a lot of grief and empathy and reminders that we have to keep fighting for empathy and for all humanity.

Kang turns the natural into something skeptical. Something as pure and welcomed as snow, can turn into a glue that melts deeper and deeper into our skin, like the memories of the past Kang’s narrator describes. We Do Not Part is quite literally a force of nature: hypnotic, mesmerizing, and aptly chilling

Nobel Prize winner Han Kang’s We Do Not Part opens with a writer’s repeated nightmares in Seoul four years after publishing her book on the massacre at G----, presumably the Gwangju Massacre at the heart of the Han Kang’s earlier Human Acts. Struggling with these nightmares, researcher-writer Kyungha also struggles futilely to write her will, starting over day after day.

Unexpectedly, she receives a brief message from the photographer with whom she had previously worked, entreating her to come at once. A former documentary filmmaker and now a woodworker, Inseon has been seriously injured and transferred from the island of Jeju to a hospital in Seoul. Requiring several weeks of constant treatment, Inseon begs Kyungha to travel immediately to Jeju to save the life of Inseon’s white budgie (parakeet) Ama, who won’t survive another day without food and water.

Facing a blizzard on Jeju and needing to travel by buses as well as hike through the dark to Inseon’s remote home, Kyungha faces mortal danger. While traveling, she recalls her work and friendship with Inseon, a former trip to Inseon’s home, and stories passed on to her from Inseon’s now deceased mother.

Thin on traditional plot, We Do Not Part is comprised primarily of nightmares, memories, and passed-down experiences of massacres that military regimes and local police have inflicted upon their fellow citizens.

Neither a happy nor enjoyable book, We Do Not Part is an important, unforgettable one sure to open most non-Korean readers’ eyes to political atrocities, none of which I had heard of despite some occurring during my lifetime. At times, readers may wonder whether characters, both human and avian, are flesh and blood or spirits, but such questions seem in keeping with the dreamed and historic nightmares permeating this story of inseparable, although perhaps fatal, friendship.

Thanks to NetGalley and Hogarth/Random House for an advance reader egalley of this attention-grabbing new work from Han Kang.

This mostly worked for me, and it really seems like Kang at the peak of her prowess. It’s a harsh yet surreal exploration of the brutality of Korean history, suspended between dream and reality, life and death. I wanted a little bit more meat to the relationship between Kyungha and Inseon, but it’s an unflinching and intimate exploration of state violence. The most obvious comparison is to Human Acts - the true historical basis; the frank depictions of violence - but there’s something of The Vegetarian in here with the surreality and even The White Book with the hazy, loose form. A novel that I think is more rewarding when read as part of an ouevre.

This is my first novel by Han Kang, the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Kyungha, a writer suffering from migraines and abdominal spasms, receives a message from Inseon, a friend who left her career as photographer/film documentarian to become a woodworker. Inseon has been hospitalized because of an injury and asks Kyungha to travel to her house on Jeju Island to save her pet bird. A snowstorm impedes Kyungha’s travel, but her eventual arrival at her friend’s home brings her face to face with a dark, forgotten chapter in Korean history.

For me this was a challenging read both because of its style and its subject matter. The experimental style, often bordering on stream-of-consciousness, with its ambiguity I sometimes found confusing. The narrative switches frequently and suddenly between past and present and between perspectives so I struggled with orienting myself. Then there are sequences, especially in the second half of the novel, which blur the boundaries between dream and reality so it is difficult to determine what is real and what is imagined. Of course, this blurring is appropriate given that the content emphasizes the difficulties of penetrating a history kept hidden.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t comment on the beautiful, poetic prose with its vivid metaphors. The descriptions of snow are gorgeous: “white thread-like flakes draw empty paths through the air” and “snowflakes swirl wildly as if inside a giant popcorn machine” and “Snowflakes resembling a flock of tens of thousands of birds appear like a mirage” and “Each snowflake made its endlessly slow descent, seeming to thread together in mid-air like giant motifs in a lace curtain” and “a flurry of snow coruscating like fine grains of salt” and “the flakes were floating down like feathers now, and I could see their crystalline shapes” and “As the snow lands on the wet asphalt, each flake seems to falter for a moment. Then, like a trailing sentence at the close of a conversation, like the dying fall of a final cadence, like fingertips cautiously retreating before ever landing on a shoulder, the flakes sink into the slick blackness and are soon gone.”

Of course, the snow, like so much other imagery, is symbolic. Kyungha finds herself almost buried in snow, just as the past has been buried. Her struggle parallels the difficulty of re-visiting the past. The ferocity of the snowstorm mirrors the brutality of the events that occurred on Jeju Island. What cannot but strike the reader is the contrast between the beautiful language and the horrific content.

My lack of knowledge about Korean history was definitely a factor in my understanding of events being described. I might recommend that readers familiarize themselves with the events in South Korea between 1948 and 1954, but that would undoubtedly lessen the emotional impact of what is revealed. Nonetheless the reader must be prepared to read about torture, ethnic cleansing, and genocide so that, like Inseon, the reader might find that “nothing one human being did to another could ever shock. . . again.” I imagine that most readers will be motivated to do some research after finishing the novel.

The message of the book, as its title clearly suggests, is that we cannot and should not be separated from our pasts and each other. Trauma lingers long after the violence ends, even for generations, but healing can be found in remembrance and human connection.

This poignant and powerful novel demands much of readers. Not only is it challenging in terms of style, but it also asks readers to bear witness to traumatic events and to remember. It’s a book worth not just reading but re-reading because it’s so masterfully written that it is impossible for a reader to grasp all its artistry and nuances in one read.

Kyungha is a writer who has become haunted with nightmares after writing about a little known terrible Korean massacre. She has a friend, Inseon, woodworker and film maker, who she confided about her nightmare and idea to collaborate to bring her nightmare’s scene to film. Kyungha gets a call from Inseon, there’s been an accident and she’s in the hospital. When they meet at the hospital, Inseon pleads with Kyungha to go check on her pet bird. A serious snowstorm hits during her travel, and she barely makes it to Inseon’s home on Jeju Island. Once there, reality is a blur. Truth about Inseon’s hidden family tragedy (the Jeju uprising and subsequent massacre (truly genocide) of believed communists by South Korea’s army supported by the U.S. government) comes to light revealing a horrific hidden massacre decades earlier. This book is incredible. Descriptions of Inseon’s documentaries throughout make it feel kind of like mixed media. At every step, I wasn’t sure what was actually happening in real time. Memory, art, history, grief, and haunting nightmares meld together. The prose about generational trauma hit so hard and heartbreakingly so. A very dark but important read.

I read and loved Han Kang's The Vegetarian yesterday, but I couldn't get into the writing in this novel.

Dreamlike, unusual, powerful.

I loved, loved, loved the first half of this novel, which was so, so spooky and eerie and, like, somehow simultaneously deeply embodied and totally dreamlike. I loved the incredible scenes of Kyungha in the snow, Inseon in the hospital, Kyungha alternately having her dream and lying on the ground under the air conditioner and eating bean juk and wanting to die. It was totally immersive and I loved it.

And then... I didn't love the second half of the novel so much, just because it wasn't doing exactly the same things that I loved in the first half. But I can also tell that the second half of the novel is the entire reason the first half of the novel was written.

I would recommend this book; it's evocative and powerful and excellently written and I love Han Kang. But it's not really the kind of book that you can evaluate or judge the way you can ordinarily judge a commercial work of fiction. It's just doing something so personal and weird (which I do love).

[Indirect translation] obscures the specific challenges that arise in Korean-Swedish translations, and thus the joy of these two languages meeting.

Behind the walls of the publishing industry, countless decisions are made to bring our favorite novels to our shelves. These decisions grow ever greater when it comes to translations, and particularly translations into languages other than English. In the following essay, Linnea Gradin explores the complex process of bringing Korean literature to Sweden, featuring commentary from Swedish translators and publishers in her analysis of monumental author Han Kang’s latest release in translation: 작별하지 않는다/Jag tar inte farväl/We Do Not Part. Discussing indirect translation, questions of form, and even the choices made in translating a single word, Gradin presents both the burdens and blessings of such a unique language pair.

Han Kang, one of South Korea’s biggest international authors, broke into the English-speaking literary fiction space with a bang in 2016 when she won the International Booker Prize for The Vegetarian (originally published in 2007), a darkly insightful look at Korean society told through the story of a woman who one day decides to stop eating meat in a quiet act of resistance that turns increasingly obsessive. That same year, Human Acts (originally published in 2014)—a novel that delves into painful parts of the country’s past—was also published in English, further cementing Kang as a leading voice of Korean literature worldwide.

Born in the city of Gwangju (where Human Acts is set), Kang is from a family of writers: her father is a teacher and award-winning novelist, and her two brothers are writers too. Kang herself has been widely praised and won many prestigious awards both domestically and internationally, and is known for her ‘poetic’ yet spare and quiet style among Korean readers. In her work, she often comes back to themes of remembrance and Korean history, approaching the subjects in a deeply empathetic though notably neutral way, never telling the readers what to feel or think. After winning the Booker Prize, her work—particularly the English translations of The Vegetarian and Human Acts by Deborah Smith—found itself at the center of discussions about the complexities of translation.

With her latest book, We Do Not Part, scheduled for English-language publication in January 2025 (almost a year after it was published in several European countries), I again find myself reflecting on translation and publication practices—and how different stories are mediated across different parts of the world.


The first time I seriously considered the realities of translation, I was doing something I almost never do: reading a book translated into Swedish, my first language. At some point in my life I had started reading almost exclusively in English, and then made an unspoken rule to only read translated literature in English as well. I was living in England, where English translations are obviously much more prevalent than Swedish ones, and besides, I found Swedish translations of English choppy and stiff—maybe because I’m fluent enough in both to notice. As a result, I would only read a Swedish translation if the source language was another Scandinavian language (which I imagined would be a more natural fit), or on the rare occasion that the text wasn’t yet available in English. This was the case of Han Kang’s We Do Not Part.

All that said: a few years ago, I found myself capitalizing on a “Buy four, get one free” deal at my local bookstore and purchased the Swedish translations of Sun-mi Hwang’s The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly and Han Kang’s Human Acts. I told myself that the Korean originals were so far from both English and Swedish, linguistically speaking, that it wouldn’t matter which language the texts were translated into. And I was mostly right; I noticed no odd phrasing, and I particularly enjoyed Human Acts. But it was only later that I discovered that they were both re-translations of the English versions, and not direct translations of the Korean originals.

Discovering this phenomenon of “translation-hopping” (also known as indirect translation) firmly established my fascination with translated literature, not only as a reader, but also as someone who is fascinated by the politics of publishing. On the one hand, indirect translations can be used to fill a gap in the market, and—for practical or financial reasons—it is sometimes easier, especially for smaller languages like Swedish, to find English-to-Swedish translators than translators that work from another small language, like Korean. According to the Swedish publisher, when Kang’s English translations blew up in the United Kingdom, the Korean-to-Swedish translators would have needed eighteen months to complete the The Vegetarian, and a further few months for Human Acts—which, in the already slow world of publishing, would have set publication back two to three years—whereas an English-to-Swedish translation would ensure that Swedish readers could have access to Kang’s writing while the Booker win was still on everyone’s mind. In this way, re-translations can offer smaller-language markets a chance to keep up with trends, and help to contribute to a more diverse literary landscape.

But as a reader, you’re often not aware of these behind-the-scenes decisions, and when I discovered that the translations I had been reading were in fact not of the originals, it just felt wrong. This sense, almost of betrayal, was rooted in some subconscious hope that the texts I was reading were the same as those that readers of the original language would experience. But if the translator can’t even read the original, this idealized (albeit misconstrued) notion of what translation is drifts even further out of reach.

Of course, on a logical plane, most of us know that no translation will ever be an exact replica of the original, and even word-for-word translations will go through a process of transformation. But indirect translations turn the volume up a bit on these age-old questions: How much creative freedom is a translator allowed, and how can we best safeguard the intentions of the original text? Is it more important to convey the original text “word for word” and leave it to the reader to overcome any potential awkwardness? Or should translators focus more on capturing the essence and feeling of a text through words that are already familiar to their readers, even if it means deviating even further from the original?

Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in between, or there is no answer at all. But when you rely on indirect translation, it is hard to even enter the conversation. Just like each reader brings their own interpretation to the reading experience, so each translator brings theirs. With indirect translations, the original text will always be filtered through the English translator’s interpretation before it is filtered through the Swedish, and there’s no good way of knowing where they have strayed from the original and why. It will thus always echo both the strengths and the weaknesses of the English translation, and any awkwardness will be the result of English-to-Swedish difficulties, rather than Korean-to-Swedish. It could be that these types of “errors” are easier for Swedish readers to subconsciously correct than ones based on a language they are much less familiar with, but it obscures the specific challenges that arise in Korean-Swedish translations, and thus the joy of these two languages meeting.

This discussion is made even more poignant in the case of Han Kang, for whom the English translation of Human Acts by Deborah Smith has been both widely praised and criticized for its rather liberal approach to translation, which Smith has discussed in an essay for Asymptote. When The Vegetarian and Human Acts were then re-translated into Swedish based on the English versions, the creativity of Smith’s translations carried over. According to the Swedish publisher, it has been argued that the Swedish translations of both The Vegetarian and Human Acts are in some ways closer to Smith’s English translations than the Korean originals, in the sense that they, intentionally or not, mimic the uniqueness of Smith’s versions, rather than that of Han Kang’s.

What, then, of Kang’s most recent work in Swedish and English translation, We Do Not Part?

For anyone concerned about indirect translations, there is good news: since the release of Han Kang’s The White Book, Kang has been rendered into Swedish directly from Korean by translator duo Okkyoung Park and Anders Karlsson, which has given Swedish publishers the ability to make their own decisions on when and where to take creative liberties. However, this doesn’t necessarily guarantee “faithful” translation (what does that even mean?)—as with any language pair, translation between small languages offers unique challenges and semantic hurdles of its own.

As mentioned, I first read Han Kang in Swedish when I incidentally encountered the indirect translation of Human Acts. Based on real events, this harrowing story follows a wandering boy in the aftermath of the Gwangju uprising, a student protest in May 1980 that was violently suppressed by South Korea’s military regime. To this day, it is one of my all-time favorite novels for the way it deals with such a heavy topic with sensitivity, engaging with the tragedy without feeling gratuitous.

Years later, reading We Do Not Part first in Swedish and then in English via an early ARC—and now living in South Korea myself—I can’t help but see connections to her earlier work as Kang returns to similar themes. We Do Not Part follows the author Kyungha (Gyeongha in Swedish), who suffers from nightmares and migraines after writing a book about a massacre. In the sweltering Seoul summer, Kyungha experiences a physical and mental collapse, struggling with everyday life as dreams and visions torment her. Wasting away in isolation, she takes cold showers to escape the heat, and occasionally, walks to the restaurant across the street to eat 죽 (juk).

There doesn’t seem to be much keeping Kyungha tethered to this world. But, when she receives a phone call from a friend who’s been in a terrible accident, she agrees to fly to the southern isle of Jeju to care for the friend’s pet bird until she recovers. While on Jeju, Kyungha is reminded of her previous visits to the island: the stories her friend used to tell her about her family, and the island’s tragic but largely unacknowledged past.

In a mixture of dreams, memories, and flashbacks, the imagery shifts from gently falling snow to blizzards as the water washes away all evidence of harm. As both Kyungha and her friend convalesce in their own ways, the story of another bloody massacre gradually comes to light. Throughout it all, Kyungha eats 죽.

It is this word, 죽, that I keep returning to as I consider the peculiarities of translating between two small languages like Korean and Swedish. In the Swedish translation of We Do Not Part by Park and Karlsson, 죽 has been rendered as risgröt, or rice porridge: a translation which is correct, but doesn’t quite capture the nuance of the original word. The Korean 죽 is a light yet nurturing porridge—commonly made with rice, but sometimes made with other grains and legumes—and often eaten when sick. Making 죽 for someone is a sign of care, as years of interacting with Korean culture and people has taught me.

The much richer Swedish risgröt, on the other hand, is a hearty and festive food, boiled in milk and mainly eaten during the Christmas season. As far as I know, it holds no deeper meaning beyond signaling the arrival of the holidays, though the generalized gröt, or porridge, does hold some connotations of health and wellness.

By contrast, the English translators e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris have opted for an italicized transliteration of the original Korean word, ‘juk,’ perhaps partly in recognition of the cultural significance and some untranslatable quality that this small word holds.

Having lived in South Korea for a year and studied the language for many more, I am partial to the way that yaewon and Morris have approached this. It feels more faithful to the context of the story: a woman trying to heal her trauma, and a country trying to heal its collective wounds. Juk becomes emblematic of the process of recuperation that Kang serves the reader.

But I do have to ask myself whether this type of translation would have been possible in Swedish. Translation theory and preferences aside, though a Swedish transliteration system for Korean does exist, it is not as standardized nor as widely used as the English—even though the Swedish vowels ‘å’ and ‘ö’ are phonetically much closer to some Korean vowels than the strange configurations that English has to resort to. Furthermore, in an email, the Swedish translators noted that while words like ‘kimchi’ and ‘soju’ may have become viable in Swedish text, ‘juk’ has not yet reached this level of cultural saturation. They are also of the opinion that there’s no specific cultural significance to the word that the Swedish ‘risgröt’ doesn’t capture, and in either case, the context already makes it clear to readers why Kyungha can stomach eating it. Even so, yaewon and Morris are partial to transliteration here, as am I. Neither choice is more “right” than the other, as even the somewhat awkward ‘risgröt’ manages to provide the reader with a sense of comfort, but it does seem to be a choice informed at least partially by what amount of cultural literacy the translators expect of the reader; depending on the target audience, publishers and translators sometimes prefer to assume that readers are starting from absolute scratch, especially when the source language is considered particularly unfamiliar to the readership, as in the case of Swedish readers of Korean literature.

Instead of juk, Park and Karlsson spent considerably more energy on big picture issues like trying to untangle Kang’s use of tense throughout the novel and the passages that Kang has written in Jeju dialect—distinct enough for some to consider it its own language.

As Kyungha visits the island, the reader is transported back in time through flashbacks and memories to witness the gruesome repression of the Jeju uprising of 1948–49, during which 14,000–30,000 people are estimated to have been killed and some 40,000 displaced to Japan. After decades of censorship, the records of these events are limited; this history’s inaccessibility is reflected in Kang’s use of language, which many Korean readers struggle to understand, and the fragmented structure of the narrative.

Park and Karlsson tell me that they normally avoid translating dialects because it feels a bit inauthentic and contrived, but in this case they felt it played a big role in the narrative and decided to approach these passages through a sense of contrast: trying to capture the distinct and lovable Jeju-accent by giving these sections a more old-fashioned, colloquial, and softer feel, even though Kang uses it to recount atrocities. This produces a potent dissonance between form and content.

I must admit, however, that despite reading the novel both in Swedish and in English, I did not know that parts of the narrative were written in dialect until a friend informed me. That said, these sections landed like a gut-punch, so if we take the goal of a translation as conveying the same experience of a text from one readership to another, it seems to have been successful.

I believe this is because Kang has an astute ability to write about tragic events with respect and care, seen across her oeuvre and particularly in Human Acts and We Do Not Part, which shines through even in translation. Though the two books are loosely connected, We Do Not Part is quite distinct from its predecessor, with an erratic and sometimes hard-to-follow narrative where scenes nestle within scenes and readers are forced to stay alert as Kang switches tenses seemingly at random. Where Human Acts is bold and outraged, We Do Not Part has a much more somber tone that is at times hard to interpret, made all the more complicated by the structure of the text.

With such a fragmented narrative, Kang relies heavily on motifs to tie the threads of We Do Not Part together: snowflakes, birds, tidal waves, tree trunks, and, of course, juk. While the Jeju dialect at first seems to be a more load-bearing element of the novel, one that might affect the reading experience more than a single word, it is juk that feels like the beating heart of the story to me, as the narrative time spent eating juk is another way that Kang urges readers not to forget, word by word and spoon by spoon.

Where to draw the line between what to translate and what to leave “untranslated,” or when to depart from the original text, is a case-by-case judgment that every translator has to grapple with, and translators are in the best position to make an informed choice based on the context of the publishing landscape and their own understanding of both cultures. This small word, then, can tell us a lot about the difficulties of translating between languages, especially when the interaction between those two languages is so limited and translators bear the responsibility of introducing readers, sometimes for the first time, to an entire literary landscape, as is with Swedish and Korean. While I would gladly be momentarily confused by new and unfamiliar words—with the ability to look them up later and learn something new—publishers and translators often have different preferences in their translations, and it is often these details that might differ from one translation to another, rather than bigger structural issues, where the effect produced seems to be the main concern.

Juk besides, the quality of both the English and Swedish translations of We Do Not Part is rather encouraging for readers of Kang in all languages, indicating that no particular Germanic language is “better” than another for translating a language like Korean when the proper resources are put into it, and readers can rest easy knowing that the translators have chosen what they think will work best for their readership. Even so, just as each translator and each reader brings their own experiences to the text, so too does the language in which we read affect our experience.

Being able to read in more languages than my native tongue puts me in a position where I can choose translations that best suit my tastes, compare and contrast, and access texts that have not yet reached one market or another. In an ideal world we would not have to rely on indirect translations, but for readers who read in Swedish or English exclusively, translations are key to increasing access and cultural literacy, and any translation—perhaps even one that is indirect—might be better than none. Still, I can’t help but wonder what the result would have been if We Do Not Part had been translated into Swedish based on the English translation. Probably a completely viable translation, which, in a pinch, would have been better than no translation at all, but also one shaped by the choices of English translators for an English-speaking audience. In such a case, we might not even have the privilege of discussing details like juk or how to capture a dialect, because the choice would have already been made by the first translator. While no translation is ever perfect or complete, in that they can never be exactly what the original was, it is just those “untranslatable” qualities between languages and cultures that make translation exciting. With direct translations, Swedish readers get to fully join the conversation and experience the joy of exploring the unique meeting point between Korean and Swedish, from the larger questions of how to capture a dialect, to a warm bowl of juk.

Linnea Gradin is a freelance writer from Sweden, currently based in South Korea. She holds an MPhil in the Sociology of Marginality and Exclusion from the University of Cambridge and has always been interested in matters of representation, particularly in literature. She has also studied Publishing Studies at Lund University and as a writer and the editor of Reedsy’s freelancer blog, she has worked together with some of the industry’s top professionals to organize insightful webinars, develop resources to make publishing more accessible, and write about everything writing and publishing related, from how to become a proofreader, to avoiding ‘white room syndrome’, and what a novella is. Catch some of her book reviews here and here.

*****

An enigmatic atmospheric novel that likely will serve as the introduction for many to Kang's work. This moves in time and space (and through a blizzard) to make points that I suspect I missed as I was caught in the story and because I am less conversant in Korean politics than you might want to be to understand all of this. Kang doesn't focus as much on a linear plot as she does on language and philosophy. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. One I admired more than enjoyed.

Thanks very much to the publisher and NetGalley for the advance review copy of We Do Not Part. This is my first encounter with Han Kang's beautiful prose, but it certainly won't be the last. We Do Not Part is a quietly moving exploration of friendship, family bonds, and lingering trauma from a beyond-horrific event in South Korean history, the 1948 Jeju massacre. Highly recommend!

In We Do Not Part by Han Kang, the author again returns to a long-suppressed part of Korean history—the massacres in the late 1940’s of supposed communists and leftist sympathizers. The story unfolds through the eyes of two women as they attempt to get past their current day struggles to reconcile the past and what their families experienced.

There is stunningly beautiful, poetic writing here that both cocoons the reader inside of the story at times but also works to keep the reader at a distance at other times. It is a strange combination of immediacy and distance as dreams, reality, shadows and swirling snow disorient and play with time and place. Although the references to snow were so frequent, they almost became too much; it was such a good symbol for covering things up while providing a path, cold and suffering but with the ability to insulate, softness and beauty with harshness and silence.

Kang’s exploration of these dark historical periods, both in this novel and in “Human Acts,” is significant. It personalizes nearly unbearable situations, prompting us to reflect on past and present circumstances more directly. This novel is memorable and will reveal new insights with each reading.

Thank you to Random House /Hogarth and NetGalley for the digital ARC.

4.5 stars

Oh, where to begin with the majesty that is Han Kang. I can't string together a sentence that doesn't make me, a humble reader, feel dwarfed by her power over the written word - with all due credit to her amazing translator, of course. Thank you to Random House for entrusting this mesmerizing novel before publication in exchange for this review.

There isn't much I can say that hasn't been said about this treasure. Every word - every image - matters and helps slowly unwind the tragic past shared by these two women. The Jeju massacre was a dark, grisly moment in time that seems all but forgotten by too many Western students of history. I've encountered it only once before in fiction, in Lisa See's Island of the Sea Women. Though that telling is more straightforward, it doesn't pack anywhere near the emotional wallop. Han Kang is unlatched in her gift for use of imagery, so vividly rendered, to show (rather than simply tell) readers what she's trying to convey. It's a blissful reading experience, and I suspect this is a book I'll read every year and come away with something new.

I don't think I am the right audience for this particular novel. I was initially interested in it because I enjoyed Kang's previous novel, The Vegetarian, but I really struggled to connect with this book and story in a meaningful way.

This is likely a case of me being the wrong reader!

We Do Not Part is a poignant tribute to friendship, sisterhood, motherhood, and the cyclical connections between suffering and survival. The novel unfolds in three parts, narrating the journey of a young woman who travels to Jeju Island to rescue her friend's injured pet bird. However, her journey leads her to uncover the harrowing history of the Jeju 4.3 Massacre of 1948. Han Kang masterfully portrays forgotten tragedies—those that are often overlooked outside Korea—with lyrical and evocative prose. In this work, her writing transcends mere evocativeness to become hypnotic, drawing a seamless line between reality and dream in a narrative that could easily have lost its way, yet instead remains deeply poignant as it ties together all its themes.

By the end, the novel left a lasting emotional impact on me, one I can't recommend highly enough. I know I’ll return to this book again, drawn to its intricately layered, beautifully translated text in search of deeper meaning.

4.5/5 stars (rounded up). A powerful, at times repetitive, and often gut-wrenching read. I might even find this novel more moving than Human Acts, and both works would make excellent companion pieces. It’s no surprise that these books contributed to the author’s Nobel Prize.

A heartbreaking yet beautifully told tale. Interwoven stories and history collide. Despite the sensitive subject matter the writing is very palatable. This will haunt me for a long time.