That said, I am extremely familiar with comic books and graphic novels (total nerd! and yes, of course I saw Avengers: Endgame��and��Captain Marvel��on opening night), but I’ve never tried to write about them��in the ways in which I’ve written about translated fiction. Or even poetry. Although I feel like this post is pretty much in parallel with any of my posts on poetry in the sense that I know from the start that I don’t have the proper set of terms and concepts to clearly elucidate what makes a poetry collection “good” or “great” or “fine” or “garbage,” but I have some undefined, general understanding of what I like. ��

Since I haven’t even had time this week to steal a��fun framework from Sam Miller, I think I’m going to simply write��something��about each of the four books��I read, namely one aspect of��what makes reading graphic novels interesting.����

First though, a couple digressions. (Would this even��be��a Three Percent post if I went straight at that��topic?)����

Over the years, a number of people have asked me��why we don’t track graphic novels in the Translation Database. The answer is so much more mundane and dumb than hoped for, but also has some odd corollaries. Basically, I can’t figure out how to get accurate, reliable numbers on manga published here in the U.S.��

When booksellers or translators ask about graphic novels in translation, they usually are thinking of books from Drawn & Quarterly or��Fantagraphics��or First Second or NYRB Comics. They’re not necessarily thinking about Dragon Ball or Naruto or��Fruits Basket��or��Death Note. All of which have tons of volumes available in English, mostly from presses I don’t regularly come in contact with.������

This is unfortunate, especially since it results in Japanese works in translation being��grossly��under represented in the Translation Database. I have done a lot of research lately to try and capture all the Japanese “light novels” that have come out (again, thank you Rachel��Cordasco), but manga is something I don’t currently have a hold on.��

And so we end up with a weird situation in which, if I were to add the translated graphic novels that I��do��know about, it’ll ignore far too many Japanese works. OR, I could figure out all the manga, and all the D&Q/Fantagraphics/NYRB Comics books would��be a pretty tiny percentage of all the graphic novels in translation that are available.��Which��actually makes me wonder what the language distribution really��would��be. Like 90% Japanese, 10% French, 10% everything else? I feel like Spanish graphic novels are a bit of a rarity, much less a book from the Balkans or��Baltics.����

Someday. Someday . . .����

by Aisha Franz, translated from the German by Nicholas Houde (Germany)

After an unexpected breakup, a young woman named Selma experiences a series of reveries and emotional setbacks. Struggling to relate to her friends and accomplish even the simplest tasks like using a modern laundromat, she sinks deeper into depression. After witnessing another couple break-up and chancing upon the jilted male of the couple, Anders, at his pet store job, Selma realizes that her mysterious neighbor is the woman of that same couple. Her growing despair distances her from from her eager and sympathetic friend. One day, as the mysterious glamorous neighbor is leaving for a business trip, Selma discovers the woman has dropped her key card to her apartment. Selma initially resists but eventually she presses the key to her neighbors lock and enters.

Aisha Franz is a master of portraying feminine loneliness and confusion while keeping her characters tough and real. Her artwork shifts from sparseness to detailed futurist with ease. Her characters fidget and twirl as they zip through a world both foreign and familiar. Base human desires and functions alternate with dreamlike symbolism to create a tension-filled tale of the nightmare that is modern life.

A book with a swear in the title—is��this��not��the most “on brand” graphic novel for me to start with?����

For this book, which I didn’t love as much as the others, but did totally enjoy, I want to highlight the idea that��graphic novels are, for me, the Netflix of reading.��Not just in terms of comic books as monthly “episodes” in a particular series, but in the way that you can generally finish a graphic novel in a few sittings, a few hours. In less time than it takes to watch��Avengers: Endgame.��

And as I’ve been reading these books, I’ve gotten so much gratification about being able to��finish things. Contrast this with the—probably never–��Ի徱�Բ�—p������𳦳�s��of reading��Anniversaries��or Marie-Claire Blais. Not that one is “better” than the other, but the process of reading��Against the Day��by Thomas Pynchon over 55 audiobook hours and that of reading��Shit Is Real��over two beers on a Friday night is wildly different.������

For me, personally, the main benefits are two-fold: 1) being able to actually��finish��something really triggers that lizard��part of the brain that gives you an adrenaline boost for things like this, and 2) it’s much easier to think about a narrative’s “structure” if you can digest it in one or two sittings. Trying to keep the shape of��Against the Day��in my mind—over the FIVE months I’ve been reading it—is impossible. I have to keep rereading the synopses of each section, and reading other overviews. And will have to read a lot more after I’ve finished to try and hold all the pieces, all the storylines, all the ideas in mind at once to see how these things fit together.����

A graphic novel can be like a good TV episode or miniseries in that you actually��can��hold the various parts in mind simultaneously and examine how things fit together or don’t. What the progression is, and��how various scenes mirror or play off of one another.��Narrative structures are fascinating, and it can be hard to pick them out when it takes a month/twenty hours to read a novel.����

I don’t have a lot to say about��Shit Is Real��other than it was a bit heartbreaking and surreal and I liked that. And it had a lot of pages like these, which allowed me to be able to read it in one sitting:��

��

And��here’s a short review from����that will give you a bit more context:��

We take for granted that visions of tomorrow’s technology will be drawn with sleek lines and popping sheen, but Aisha Franz’s Shit Is Real��tacks in the opposite direction, rendering a��Black Mirror–esque world with chalky pencils and deliberately childish figure-work. The result is hypnotically surreal. It provides a backdrop for the achingly relatable tale of Selma, a woman who’s just been booted by her boyfriend and is trying to sort out her life while navigating a complicated friendship, recurring nightmares, and an awkward romance born in a pet shop. Sexual frustration and crippling loneliness abound, yet the book is curiously buoyant and consistently engaging

��

��by Anneli��Frumark, translated from the��Swedish by Hanna Strömberg (Sweden)��

One thing that’s easy to dismiss—for non-comics readers—is the depth and weight of the stories told in graphic novels.��Red Winter��has all the makings of a novella, and was as much of a gut punch as anything else I’ve read this year.��

��The story opens��in media res��and slowly unveils the situation of��Siv��(a married mother of three who lives a not-so-amazing home life with her labor-centric husband) and Ulrik (a young communist she’s having an affair with, who is trapped by his communist ideals and his age).��It unfolds through a variety of perspectives, each section presenting the viewpoint of one of the characters impacted by this affair:��Siv��and Ulrik, obviously; but also��������’s��children, her husband, etc.����

��Granted, I’m a sucker for books in which various perspectives clash and bounce off one another, in which you can see the emotional motivations and rights and wrongs of each of the characters. But this affair, the��doomed��(1970s Sweden) aspect of it, the issues with the communist party at that time—they all hit home.����

Although none of them are as impactful as when��������’s��daughter is left alone for the night.��This section (54-?) is��a testament to the sort of storytelling you can find in graphic novels that you can’t exactly replicate in a normal prose book.��There’s a latent anxiety in the drawings, and in her actions exploring the house, answering the phone (and accidentally covering for her mom), her fears of waking up and finding that her mom��still��isn’t home . . .��

Again, I don’t have the right critical vocabulary at hand, but��there’s something intriguing about how your mind fills in narratives in graphic novels based on existing tropes, subtle artistic elements, and��unadorned dialogue. (By which, I mean, it’s perfect that graphic novels NEVER have “he yelled” or “he whimpered” or any other dialogue tag—the reader��sees��those tags��and��knows��how the lines are being spoken.)����

That same principle can be extended much more broadly though, to more complicated emotions and reactions.����

And there is something compelling about��allowing the reader to fill things in . . . I’ve always been a fan of the Cortazar/Calvino reader-interaction theories, but��that’s a bit more limited��with prose than it is in relation to��graphic novels.����

This was my favorite of the four books in this post. I’m not 100% sure I know why, but I��really��got into this. Read it in a sitting. Felt things.��And enjoyed the cartooning and color palate:��

��

��

by Jérôme Ruillier, translated from the French by Helge Dascher (Madagascar)��

Speaking of the art, let’s talk about��The Strange, a graphic novel that’s��likely going to get the majority of its attention because of its status as an allegory about immigration (and on that level, it��is��horrifying and unnerving), but for which the art does so much heavy lifting.������

I hate talking animals in fiction. Drives me absolutely insane, since the rules about what the animal knows/doesn’t know (aka how much its simply a human in polar bear form), is usually inconsistent and logically troubling. Which then leads to a lot of questions about��why you chose to use an animal to speak in the first place?��And then shit goes sideways and I can’t focus on the narrative because I’m nitpicking over how a dog would or wouldn’t think and gah. Fuck books with animal narrators.����

But then we have this.����

All characters are “animals” in this book, emphasizing how “the��stranges” stand out in this society. And for me, for that reason, it works. It’s not forcing some sort of bullshit logic, or over-explaining an animalistic perspective—it’s simply illustrating how society quickly identifies others as��other.��There’s a lot going on in presenting the protagonist of this graphic novel as a hulking dog, much larger than the duck/cat/mouse people who surround him. Is that realistic, or some sort of prejudice of the mind? ����

It’s also worth noting that this book (#19 on Paste Magazine’s ““) is clearly French—and loaded with shitty quotes from Marine Le Pen—but could so easily apply to parts of 2019 America. Remember when the future was all flying cars and home robots, and not a burning trash fire, no water, and insane amounts of xenophobic hatred? Remember when “the future” meant something space age and glorious and not imminent doom? I know this is a digression, but things have gone off-the-rails, and I want to spend some time with some books/movies that present almost idealistic amounts of hope about the future, instead of seeing the next thirty years as the end of everything.��

I mean, not to get too political—and this is a Chad W. Post statement, not anything from Open Letter or the Ģ����ý—but it’s 2019 and we’re having states ban abortion. We are living in a backward world in which the wrong side is fucking up. Constantly.��

Again: Not to get too political, but instead of wasting your time on this bullshit, why don’t you try and pass legislation so that my one-year-old son has even a 50% chance of living to the age of 80. Instead of being the worst combination of moralistic, misogynist, xenophobic, pro-Uber-capitalist, and just overall disconnected from people.����

��/end rant.��

by Ancco, translated from the Korean by Janet Hong (South Korea)

I have��yet to talk about translation at all in this post. (Although, apologies again for a minor political interlude. @ me all you want. I kind of don’t care anymore.) But given that I talked to Janet already about this book—which is great! And violent! And quite complicated in its structure!—this seems like a good time to highlight a few issues in translating/publishing graphic novels versus doing the same for more conventional novels.����

One of the big things—for both translators and publishers—is lettering. From a very pragmatic perspective, if you already have a book available in Korean, drawn with word bubbles of a particular size,��you would prefer to change as little as possible and just replace the text in the original word bubble with words in a new language.����

Obviously.����

But if you’re going from Korean to English? How easy is that, really? There are a number of languages that require 20% fewer—or more—words when going into English, which is an insane percentage to think about when you’re talking about fitting these words into a specifically sized bubble.����

That’s a logistical issue. One that translators don’t necessarily have to consider when they’re translating a novel.����

Another thing: For the most part, graphic novels are told through dialogue. Which is one of the hardest things for translators to translate. Novels in translation that fail—or receive “toxic” reviews—are generally those in which the dialogue sounds flat or off or dumb or not native. Sure, every example cited here has some sort of first- or third-person narration, but dialogue still drives the majority of graphic novels. (I think.) And that makes it a trick thing! Get the tone right—in a predetermined amount of space/words . . .����

Bad Friends��is phenomenal, by the way. Maybe one day there will be a major��U.S.-based graphic novel award in translation for this book to win. Because it deserves it.��

But up first is the following conversation with Janet Hong, winner of the TA First Translation Prize, translator of Ha Seong-nan’s����(which is selling really well for us!), and of��by Ancco, about which I’ll have more to say on Monday.

Even if you haven’t read��Bad Friends, or know just a little about it, I think you’ll find this interview really interesting. And I want to publicly thank Janet for taking time out between her vacations to answer all these questions so thoroughly.

by Ancco, translated from the Korean by Janet Hong (Drawn & Quarterly)

Chad W. Post: Before we get into talking about Ancco’s Bad Friends, I wanted to ask you about your career in translation in general. Recently on Twitter you mentioned that��Flowers of Mold��by Ha Seong-nan (which we just published at Open Letter) was the first book you translated—18 years before it was published in English! Yet, within the last couple years, you’ve had��Impossible Fairy Tale��by Han Yujoo come out—which earned you the TA First Translation Prize—and now��Bad Friends.��What has this journey as a translator been like for you? Has anything changed—culturally, or with publishing—that led to getting so many books picked up in such a short period of time?

Janet Hong: You said it—it’s been a journey in every sense of the word. As I mentioned before, a story from Flowers of Mold—“The Woman Next Door”—is the first translation I’d ever attempted, as an end-of-term project for a Korean language course in my undergrad. My professor urged me to submit it to the 2001 Korea Times translation contest, and I ended up receiving the grand prize, and then a grant soon after to translate the rest of the collection. In my ignorance, I assumed everything would happen fairly easily and quickly, so I’ve wondered many times myself why it’s taken ridiculously long to have a book-length translation come out, and then have several follow right on the heels of one another. Maybe I’d needed to begin on a high note to sustain me for the long road ahead?

Just to clarify, Korea has always enjoyed a strong literary tradition, with authors producing intellectually and aesthetically diverse work that is constantly evolving, so it isn’t that Korean literature went through a major change. However, it is true that there was very little interest in translated Korean literature when I was starting out, so timing played a huge role in Korean literature gaining a global appeal. Even ten years ago, Korea—despite its long, rich literary history—remained a largely untapped literary mine, yet there were several crucial elements already in place: the Korean Wave, or the mass popularity of South Korean culture, which had been building since the nineties; the success of Kyung-sook Shin’s , which was published in the U.S. in 2011; and Korea being the Market Focus of the 2014 London Book Fair. The publication of Han Kang’s and its 2016 Booker win were like putting a lit match to dry tinder.

I think my own approach as a translator has also changed quite a bit from when I first started. I find most literary translators focus their energies on translating novels, rather than short story collections, because it’s already notoriously difficult getting publishers to take on translations, but it’s even more difficult to get them to take on short stories in translation. Translators will sometimes work on a few short stories by their authors and place them strategically in journals to whet readers’ appetites, but the novels are always the main course. Still, that never stopped me from going after short stories, because I personally love them and my favorite authors to this day are masters of the form, like Alice Munro. Maybe if I’d pursued more novels earlier on, I wouldn’t have had such a long wait?

Besides translating mostly short stories, I also wasn’t very picky in the beginning and said yes to every translation job that came my way—movie subtitles, picture books, plays, book blurbs and proposals, samples of fiction/self-help/biographies/memoir/children’s, I did it all. Sure, I was getting lots of practice, but I could have been wiser with my time, focusing on projects I was truly passionate about, instead of trying simply to make money.

When my first full-length translation—Han Yujoo’s novel The Impossible Fairy Tale—was published in 2017, it was sort of a wake-up call for me. At that point I’d been working as a literary translator for nearly 16 years, but I felt I had hardly anything to show for it. I realized I had at least two collections by Ha Seong-nan that I’d already translated sitting in my computer—that’s when I queried you about Flowers of Mold.

Which leads to a realization I had: As a literary translator in today’s world, it’s not enough to just translate. Unless the authors you translate have literary agents (and even when they do!), you have to take on a more proactive role, actively connecting with agents/editors/publishers to hustle the work yourself. So these days, especially for my authors who don’t have agents, I’m the one pitching to editors and publishers. I also try to connect my authors with agents. And I don’t make any commission. It’s because I believe the work I have the privilege of translating is so good it needs to be shared and read.

CWP: It’s interesting to me that the three tiles mentioned above cover three different forms: a novel, short stories, a graphic novel. Do you feel more comfortable translating one type of writing versus the others? Which—if any—poses the most challenges to you as a translator? I can imagine a novel being tricky because of all the interlocking aspects, or resonances that connect across dozens of pages; short stories being hard because of their brevity and concise prose; and graphic novels because of the space restrictions . . .��

JH: Since I’ve worked on many short stories, I’m probably most comfortable with this form, but I find translating novels isn’t all that much different. What poses the most challenges to me, honestly, is Han Yujoo’s writing. Ha ha. Her work relies heavily on wordplay to build suspense, as well as to move the narrative forward. In fact, she’s all about dismantling the traditional narrative to demonstrate that fiction isn’t just a story—that it doesn’t have to be—and she does this by playing on the Korean language. As the translator attempting to replicate this in another language, I sometimes wonder if I’m fighting a losing battle, but when I manage to find a solution of some sort, I feel an immense satisfaction that’s hard to describe.

I also find translating sound effects in graphic novels to be extremely difficult. Because so many Korean words are based on onomatopoeia, I spend way too much time trying to find the perfect word that describes, say, the sound of metal hooks sliding along a curtain track. Maybe I’d have an easier time if I’d been immersed in the comic universe, but I guess it’s getting a little easier!

CWP: How did you come to work on Bad Friends? Were you part of the process in bringing this to Drawn & Quarterly’s attention? ��

JH: No, not at all. Except for a few like Art Spiegelman’s landmark Maus, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Guy Delisle’s books about his travels, I hardly read graphic novels before, let alone Korean graphic novels.

It was D&Q who got in touch with me—they’d gotten my contact from a representative at LTI Korea. They were looking for a translator to work on several Korean graphic novels they were planning to bring out, which they’d only read in French translations. They asked if I could provide a few translation samples, including one of Bad Friends—in other words, I had to audition for the job. I wasn’t entirely sure if I wanted to get into translating graphic novels, since the work seemed quite painstaking and I was pretty certain it wouldn’t be financially lucrative (not that translating fiction means the big bucks!), but as soon as I read Bad Friends, I became practically possessed. I knew I had to translate it.

Since it was my first graphic novel and I wanted to do it justice, I spent a ludicrous amount of time on the translation and revision. Though they were gracious beyond belief, I probably drove the editors crazy with my incessant tweaking. It got to the point where my husband would joke I was losing money each time I opened the Bad Friends file on my computer to fuss some more. That’s how much I love that book. I would have translated it for free.

CWP: I don’t know much . . . well, anything . . . about the South Korean comic book/graphic novel scene, so these questions might be really naive or silly, but here goes: Was this originally published as a graphic novel, or was is serialized in some way (either in shorter volumes or online)? Is Ancco’s work representative of the Korean scene? If so, are the books always this dark and violent? (There are so many bleak parts of this book!)��

JH: Bad Friends was never serialized; it was originally published as a graphic novel. It won the Korean Comic Today prize in 2012, and the French translation was the first Korean graphic novel to win the prestigious Prix Révélation at Angoulême in 2016, making Ancco the second Asia-born cartoonist to be awarded the honor. Until Bad Friends, I knew nothing about the South Korean comic/graphic novel scene, but I’m seeing in the few Korean comics I’ve read or translated recently an extremely wide range in style, subject, tone, and treatment. For example, the incredibly evocative, tender, and heart-wrenching comic I worked on recently—Umma’s Table by Yeon-sik Hong—left me in tears, just as Bad Friends had, but I’d say the two books sit on opposite poles of the Korean comic world.

CWP: As someone more familiar with structures and literary techniques in traditional prose narrative, I’m struggling trying to figure out how best to describe the ways in which this narrative come together—the uniqueness of how it’s told. Do you have a good way of explaining this book? And/or do you have any suggestions for readers new to graphic novels about how best to approach and read them?

JH: You know, I hardly even noticed the structure at first. I think the brutal aspects shocked me into just going with the story; I couldn’t tear myself away. R.O. Kwon, who wrote a blurb for the book, said a similar thing, about how she’d meant to read just a few pages before getting up for a glass of water, but ended up reading the whole thing glued to her chair, while completely parched.

In short, I think the flashbacks and sections broken up into different periods of Pearl’s life suit the narrative extremely well. One reviewer said the approach is reassuring, because it tells the reader that Pearl survived the extreme violence of her past. The sections in the present also offer the reader some much-needed relief from the bleak chaos of the earlier years.

For me, the back-and-forth between past and present almost mirrors the way we process trauma and memories. Sometimes you can only look back at grief or nightmarish events in bits and pieces from a distance, either after much time has passed or if you’ve ended up in a completely different (better) place.

The book begins with Pearl, a kind of stand-in for Ancco, who is now a well-adjusted, mostly happy cartoonist, working into the late hours of the night, as many artists do, when a certain smell brings back her turbulent youth. (By the way, Ancco has said that smells are everything to her work. She doesn’t mean the actual smell of something, but a smell that conjures a certain time or feeling. I also want to interject here that Bad Friends is a work of fiction, though many elements are based on Ancco’s life.) As Pearl reflects on her adolescence, she feels a mixture of emotions: grief over the loss of a pivotal friendship with her old friend Jeong-ae, who has a more troubled domestic life than Pearl; relief that she has managed to escape the physical abuse and sexual harassment of her past; and guilt over the fact that Jeong-ae hasn’t been so lucky. These emotions are obviously difficult to articulate and even seem to be at odds with one another, so I think the structure serves the narrative well, as Pearl tries to make sense of a time in her life that was intense, hellish, yet electrifying,��and wrestles with what it means to be a good friend, or in this case, a bad friend.

CWP: Are there other Ancco books in the works? Or any other projects that you’re working on that you’d like to pitch?

Yes, there is! I’m scheduled to translate Ancco’s Nineteen, an earlier short story collection that Drawn & Quarterly will be bringing out in 2020, which was published in French as Aujourd’hui n’existe pas. It’s different from Bad Friends—not as violent, but just as bleak and powerful. In one story, you can see the beginnings of what eventually became Bad Friends.

At the moment, I’m working on some really dark, transgressive stories by Kim Yi-seol, as well as the work of extraordinary feminist author Kang Young-sook, whom I met on my most recent trip to Korea through none other than Ha Seong-nan. Kang writes about the female grotesque, delving into varying genres as urban noir, fantasy, and climate fiction, and she also happens to be one of Ha’s closest friends. I’m beyond excited to share Kang’s award-winning story, which will be published in the next issue of The White Review.