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Quote by Deborah Smith

“Alongside Han Kang, there's only one other author I've chosen to translate so far - Bae Suah. Her work is radical both stylistically and politically, influenced by her own translation practice (she's translated the likes of Kafka, Pessoa, and Sadeq Hedayat into Korean). Her language is simply extraordinary.”

Quote by Deborah Smith

Author

Deborah Smith, born in 1955, is an accomplished author whose works have gained widespread popularity. She is known for her unique narrative style and profound thematic explorations. more

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“I think folks need to understand the whole background of Donald Trump. I find from time to time, I talk to people about the campaign and they say, gosh, I didn't know that Donald Trump gave a bunch of money to Jimmy Carter and to Hillary Clinton and to Harry Reid and to John Kerry.”

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“I first came across her [Bae Suah] when I read some elderly male critic castigating her for 'doing violence to the Korean language', which of course was catnip to me, especially as I'd recently discovered Lispector doing pretty much the same to Portuguese.”

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“I've translated two of Bae's novels, A Greater Music and Recitation, which are coming from Open Letter and Deep Vellum in October and January respectively. A Greater Music is a semi-autobiographical book centred on a Korean writer moving to Berlin, learning to live and even write in a foreign language.”

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“There's no linear narrative - the structure is more like a series of variations on a theme (how identity is shaped by language), with the past constantly bleeding into the present, dreams into reality. And the language, while incredibly lyrical in places, also has this underlying dissonance, the sense of it having itself been translated.”

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“People hear from Donald Trump that he's such an extraordinary success. They didn't know about Trump airlines and Trump mortgages and Trump vitamin network and Trump steaks and Trump Taj Mahal. They didn't realize a lot of small people have been crushed by Donald Trump's rise to become a very wealthy man, successful financially, but this is a guy who has not been a uniform success.”

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“To finish off this whole Olympics by finally getting the gold medal, it's the best feeling in the world.”

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“But there's also a strong emotional core to counterbalance the experimentalism, with some incredibly moving passages around the narrator's relationship with her (also female) German teacher. It's beautiful.”

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“You can't control Ted Cruz for instance. No one has suggested you could do that and Marco Rubio, everyone tried to stop Marco Rubio from going against a sitting Republican governor in Florida. He did it anyway and won.”

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“I was in the second year of my PhD when I first had the idea - I'd recently started working as a translator, which meant firstly that I was hearing about amazing-sounding books from other translators, and also that I was getting enough of an insider's view of the publishing industry to be aware of all the implicit biases that made it so difficult for these books to ever get published, especially if they weren't from European languages (harder to discover, editors can't read the original, lack of funding programmes, authors who don't speak English).”

“Plus, publishing's inherent conservatism, means that what little did get through was weighted towards the commercial end of the scale, which is not the kind of writing that excites me.”

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