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.

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........

© Buenos Aires Herald