Book: GREEK LESSONS
Author: Han Kang
Published by: Hamish Hamilton
Price: ₹799
Is it ironic or ingenious that a book that is predominantly about the failure and the inadequacy of language has illuminating prose? Set in Seoul, Greek Lessons shifts between two unnamed characters, a man and a woman, struggling against the loss of language. The man, who narrates his sections in the first person, is a teacher of ancient Greek with a degenerative ocular condition. But he refuses to learn Braille and, inevitably, approaches complete blindness and the loss of ability to read and write. The woman, observed primarily in the third person, is one of his students. She is a poet who has become mute after a succession of tragedies: the death of her mother, her own attempted suicide, her being forced to relinquish the custody of her young son. The two ultimately find a shared language that only they understand. Yet, the novel is more than the story of these two individuals. There is a third entity that must be reckoned with: language itself.
Han Kang’s prose is evocative, yet elliptical, and it complements the inner torment and alienation of her characters perfectly. Language, Han shows, is both wonderful and terrible, at once insufficient for human purposes and too powerful to tame. In this novel, it becomes a character itself, a force that the protagonists must confront. Han injects into the narrative fascinating insights on Hangul, the alphabet system used for writing the Korean language, and how it differs from the syntax of ancient Greek, and from German, which the man learned in his childhood. Language becomes, above all, a source of self-revelation.
But how does one judge a translated work when one does not know the language in which it was originally written? In any text, the content is irrevocably tied to the style; there is no separating the two. The difficulty of translating lies in the reconstruction of this relationship without the translators letting too much of themselves into the translated work. While it is impossible for a non-Korean speaker to know how much of the novel is Han and how much of it are her translators, Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won, the end product is one that is poignant in a restrained way.
Han leans on Greek philosophy to shed light on her characters. Plato’s writings are the subject of the titular Greek lessons, especially his investigations into ideal forms, of which humans see only shadows. The protagonists think of themselves as rummaging among the shadows of ideal writing and speech.
Han is also an astute chronicler of unusual women. In Greek Lessons, the woman does not expect language lessons to help her recover her ability to speak. One of the allures of ancient Greek for her is that nobody has spoken it for centuries. She is drawn to its silence. As the novel nears its conclusion, a silence spreads, as captivating as it is distancing. Perhaps this silence is an effect of the protagonists growing closer, conversing in their own verbal and nonverbal language, shutting the reader out.
