On Eating and Books

Abstract

Francis Bacon’s often-quoted metaphor about books, “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested” (Eagleton 1997), is one of the inspirations for this analysis of selected eating-related episodes in books, to be more precise, in two novels. The two excerpts come from contemporary Korean novels. One excerpt is the opening passage from Please Look After Mom by Kyung-sook Shin, which describes a villager’s cooking shed. The novel was originally published in Korean in 2009 and translated into English by Chi-Young Kim in 2011. The other is a scene from The Vegetarian by Han Kang, published in 2007 and translated by Deborah Smith in 2015, describing Yeong-ho’s violent meat-feeding by her father. The works are selected for several reasons. First, it is important that for the convenience of a more inclusive understanding, the English translations and not the Korean originals will be focused on. It is necessary to mention that the works have another common denominator: both novels were also translated into Lithuanian by Martynas š iaušiunas Kašinskas. The Vegetarian was published in Lithuanian in 2017, and Please Look After Mom appeared in Lithuanian bookstores in 2019. Their publication in Lithuanian was another strong incentive for the choice of the texts, even stronger than the availability of the texts in English. The Lithuanian literary context offered yet another perspective on these works. It may be argued that the prose works of these Korean authors are the only Korean presence in the kaleidoscope of world and local literature published in Lithuanian recently, and create a possibility to “highlight everything that the exclusive focus on a national literature tends to obscure” (BU 2019). However, the embeddedness of translated fiction in the mechanisms of Lithuanian literature will not be analyzed in this chapter.