Literary girl who makes a Turk delighted

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Literary girl who makes a Turk delighted

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Translator Lee Nan-a [JoongAng Ilbo]

After novelist Ferit Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year, Lee Nan-a’s name appeared almost as frequently as the writer himself. Lee, 41, is a lecturer in the Turkish Language Department at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies and she was the woman who translated Pamuk’s novels into Korean.
Lee’s main area of expertise is translating Pamuk. She has translated all of the author’s five novels into Korean. After Pamuk won the Nobel Prize last year, Lee became a literary celebrity.
“I was lucky,” she says. “It’s not a bad thing to be known an expert translator of Pamuk’s novels. Actually it’s a great honor.”
A profile of Lee recently appeared in a Turkish daily newspaper after Pamuk selected Lee for special praise, naming her as one of two translators to whom he feels most grateful. The other was Maureen Freely, who was responsible for most of Pamuk’s English translations. His novels have been translated and released in 51 countries.
“I think I am the only one who majored in Turkish literature out of all translators of Pamuk’s novels,” she says. “Pamuk only started getting attention from the West after 2000. But we’ve known each other for more than 10 years.”
Lee was the first Korean scholar of Turkish literature to be awarded a doctoral degree in the subject. She lived in Turkey between 1989 through 1997, and completed her doctoral thesis on Turkish contemporary literature while she was there. That was how she came to know Pamuk. She became mesmerized with his writings after she read his novel “The New Life.” They became close friends and she was invited to Pamuk’s ranch to read some of his his drafts before they were published.
“There is an expression he uses,” she says. “He says writing is like digging a well with a needle. Maybe I don’t work with the same kind of intensity, but when I translate his writings I feel like somebody excavating a trench. His novels are so precise and meticulous that the translation feels like physical labor.”
When she was working on “The Black Book” there was one sentence in a paragraph that she was unable to understand. After struggling with it for days she sent an e-mail to the writer. He sent back a reply, asking Ms. Lee to connect the first letter of each paragraph in that chapter. She did and the Turkish words that emerged were Pamuk’s home address in Turkey.
“His phrases are intensely long and descriptive,” she says. “But he asks his translators to be as close as possible to the original text. That’s why the books are can become very tangled when they are translated into Korean. But what can you do? That’s his world. Personally I think ‘The Black Book’ is the essence of Pamuk’s work. So many of his personalities are hidden in the book.”
As for her job, she believes her main task is to stay as invisible as possible so that the original text shines through the process of translation.
“I was always a literary girl,” she says. “It makes me proud think that I am a pioneer for Turkish literature in Korea.”

By Sohn Min-ho JoongAng Ilbo
[myfeast@joongang.co.kr ]
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