In Han Kang’s latest novel, a character saws off the tips of two of her fingers in a woodworking accident. Surgeons reattach them but the treatment is gruesome and agonizing. Every three minutes, for weeks on end, a caregiver carefully, dispassionately sinks needles deep into the sutures on each finger, drawing blood, to prevent the fingertips from rotting off.

在韩江最新一本小说中，一个人物在木工事故中被锯掉了两根手指的指尖。外科医生重新将指尖接了回去，但治疗过程既可怕又痛苦。每隔三分钟，护理人员就会小心翼翼、同时又不失冷静地将针头深深地扎进每根手指的缝合处抽血，以防止指尖腐烂，这个过程持续了数周。

“They said we have to let the blood flow, that I have to feel the pain,” the patient tells a friend. “Otherwise the nerves below the cut will die.”

“说是缝合部位不能结痂，要继续出血，我必须感受到疼痛，”病人告诉朋友。“否则被切除的神经上方就会彻底死掉。”

In her fiction, Ms. Han has probed at the seams of her country’s historic wounds. She has burrowed into two of South Korea’s darkest episodes: the 1980 massacre in the city of Gwangju, which crushed a pro-democracy movement, and an earlier, even deadlier chapter on Jeju Island, in which tens of thousands of people were killed.

韩江在小说中探究了韩国的历史伤痛。她深入描写了韩国最黑暗的两段历史：镇压了一场民主运动的1980年光州大屠杀；以及更早、更为血腥的济州岛大屠杀，它造成数万人丧生。

Ms. Han has attracted a wider audience, both at home and abroad, since being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in October. An English translation of the novel set on Jeju, “We Do Not Part,” is being released this week in the United States, more than three years after it was published in Korean.

自从去年10月获得诺贝尔文学奖以来，韩江的小说在国内外吸引了越来越多的读者。这部以济州岛为背景的小说《不做告别》的英文译本本周将在美国出版，距离韩语版出版已过去了三年多。

上个月，韩江从瑞典国王卡尔·古斯塔夫手中接过诺贝尔文学奖。获得诺贝尔文学奖后，韩江与学生们在斯德哥尔摩合影。

Her works on South Korea’s authoritarian past have seemed all the more relevant since December, when the president briefly imposed martial law. He has since been impeached and arrested.

在去年12月韩国总统短暂实施戒严后，她关于韩国威权历史的著作似乎更具现实意义。韩国总统在那次事件后遭到弹劾和逮捕。

Ms. Han, who has largely shunned the limelight since receiving the Nobel, said in a rare interview that she was still contemplating the recent events. In her books, she said, it was never her intention to turn from one tragic chapter of modern Korean history to another.

韩江自获得诺贝尔奖以来一直远离公众视线，她在一次罕见的采访中表示，她仍在思考最近发生的事件。她说，她的书并不是刻意从现代韩国历史的一个悲剧篇章转向另一个悲剧篇章。

But after “Human Acts,” the Gwangju novel, was published in 2014, she was plagued by a nightmare. Trying to make sense of its haunting images — thousands of forbidding, dark tree trunks standing on a snow-covered hill as the sea encroaches — led her to Jeju, a southern island with aquamarine waters, now mostly known as a balmy travel destination.

但在2014年关于光州的小说《少年来了》出版后，她被一场噩梦困扰。为了理解梦中那些挥之不去的画面——成千上万阴森的黑色树干矗立在白雪覆盖的山丘上，被海水侵蚀——她来到了济州岛，这是一座拥有碧绿海水的南部岛屿，如今多以温暖宜人的旅游胜地而闻名。

It was there that between 1947 and 1954, after an uprising, an estimated 30,000 people were killed by police officers, soldiers and anti-Communist vigilantes, with the tacit backing of the U.S. military. About a third of the victims were women, children or elderly people.

正是在这里，一场抗议事件后，1947年至1954年间据估计有3万人在美军的默许下被警察、士兵和反共民兵杀害。约三分之一的受害者是妇女、儿童或老人。

In “We Do Not Part,” the protagonist, Kyungha, a writer who is tormented by a recurring nightmare after publishing a book about a city called “G—,” plods her way through heavy snow engulfing Jeju, on a journey that leads to revelations about multiple generations of a family afflicted by the massacre.

《不做告别》的主人公庆荷是一名作家，在出版了一本关于“G—”市的书后，她被一场反复出现的噩梦所折磨，她艰难地穿越覆盖济州岛的大雪，踏上了一段旅程，最终呈现了一个饱受大屠杀事件影响的家族几代人的故事。

Writing about deeply individual encounters with some of South Korea’s painful moments, Ms. Han said, left her feeling profoundly connected to the experiences of victims of atrocities everywhere, and to the people who never stop remembering them.

韩江说，通过描写个体深刻经历的一些韩国痛苦时刻，她感到自己与世界各地暴行受害者的经历，以及那些一直铭记这些暴行的人们有着深刻的共鸣。

“It’s pain and it is blood, but it’s the current of life, connecting the part that could be left to die and the part that is living,” she said in Korean in a video call from her home in Seoul. “Connecting dead memories and the living present, thereby not allowing anything to die off. That’s not just about Korean history, I thought, it’s about all humanity.”

“这是痛苦，这是鲜血，但这是生命的洪流，连接着可能已经死去的部分和活着的部分，”她在首尔家中的视频通话中用韩语说。“连接死去的记忆和活着的现在，从而不让任何东西消亡。我认为这不仅仅是关于韩国历史，而是关于全人类。”

韩国济州岛上的一座纪念碑，纪念20世纪40年代末和50年代初在此遇难的数万名民众。一名男子指着纪念碑上祖父的名字。“实际上，每个济州人都是幸存者、目击者、失去家人的悲痛者，”韩江说。

Theresa Phung, the general manager of Yu & Me Books in Manhattan’s Chinatown, said the store had been seeing a level of excitement about Ms. Han’s works, and a surge in sales, that doesn’t always follow a Nobel.

曼哈顿唐人街Yu & Me Books书店的总经理特蕾莎·冯（音）表示，韩江的作品最近引起了人们的高度关注，销量也出现激增，这并不是每一个新晋获得诺贝尔文学奖的作家都能做到的。

“One of the most impressive traits is her ability to take very specific scenarios and cultural contexts and bring you into that moment, but she’s very aware that those hyperspecific moments are repeats of history,” Ms. Phung said. “Whether you’re reading about what’s happening in Gwangju or around a dinner table, those are lives you see everywhere and problems that you see everywhere.”

“最令人印象深刻的特质之一是，她能够抓住非常具体的场景和文化背景，让你融入到那个时刻，但她非常清楚，那些极其具体的瞬间是历史的重演，”冯女士说。“无论你是在阅读光州发生的事情，还是在餐桌上发生的事，她描述的都是你随处可见的生活，以及随处可见的问题。”

Born in Gwangju to a novelist father, Ms. Han spent a couple of years early in her career as a magazine reporter, while also working on her poetry and short stories. As she was trying to write her first novel at 26, she rented a modest room on Jeju, overlooking the water, from an elderly woman who lived downstairs from her.

韩江出生于光州，父亲是小说家。她早年曾做过几年杂志记者，同时也在创作诗歌和短篇小说。26岁时，她试图创作第一部小说，她租下了一间位于济州岛的简朴房间，可以俯瞰水景，房东是住在她楼下的一位老妇人。

During a walk to the post office one day, her landlady pointed to a cement wall near a hackberry tree at the center of the village and said matter-of-factly, “This is where the people were shot and killed that winter.”

一天，在去邮局的路上，房东指着村中心一棵刺槐树旁的水泥墙，不带情绪地说：“这就是那年冬天人们被枪杀的地方。”

That memory returned to Ms. Han as she struggled to understand her feverish dreams, which she came to realize were about time and remembrance, she said.

当韩江努力理解她那些激烈的梦境时，那段回忆又回到了她的脑海中。她说，她后来意识到，那些梦境与时间和记忆有关。

“It comes up like that out of nowhere,” she said. “In effect, everyone in Jeju is a survivor, a witness and a grieving family member.”

“它突然就这样冒出来，”她说。“实际上，每个济州人都是幸存者、目击者、失去家人的悲痛者。”

Ms. Han, 54, first rose to broad acclaim among English-speaking readers in 2016 with her novel “The Vegetarian.” Its transfixing language and unflinching tale of a housewife’s quiet revolt against violence and patriarchy captured readers around the world, and it won her the International Booker Prize for fiction that year. Her works have been translated into 28 languages. The latest release, “We Do Not Part,” was translated into English by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris.

2016年，54岁的韩江凭借小说《素食者》首次获得英语读者的广泛赞誉。这本书用扣人心弦的语言毫不退缩地讲述了一名家庭主妇对暴力和父权制的安静反抗，吸引了全球读者，也让韩江获得了当年的国际布克奖奖。她的作品被译成28种语言。她的最新作品《不做告别》由e. yaewon和佩奇·阿尼耶·莫里斯翻译成英语。

In South Korea, Ms. Han had been an established writer of poetry, short stories and novels for more than two decades. But her global success broadened her readership at home, where her deft recounting of Gwangju — a foundational moment for South Korea’s democracy — landed her on a blacklist of authors and other cultural figures.

在韩国，韩江已是从事诗歌、短篇小说和长篇小说创作20余年的知名作家。但她在全球范围内的成功扩大了她在国内的读者群，在她巧妙地讲述光州事件这一对韩国民主具有关键意义的时刻之后，她被政府列入了作家及其他文化人物的黑名单。

在韩国光州一个为韩江而建的临时书咖啡馆“少年来了”，来访者将她书中的段落写在便签纸上。在光州“少年来了”咖啡厅阅读。这里是韩江的故乡，也是1980年韩国一场惨剧的发生地，当时军方屠杀了许多民主运动人士。

She speaks, as in her books, with the discipline of a poet, choosing each word and phrase with deliberation and care. Kim Seon-young, who edited the Korean version of “Human Acts” and has since become a friend, recalled that Ms. Han once jokingly told her that if her plane crashed, Ms. Kim was forbidden to change a syllable they’d disagreed about, even if the grammar was slightly off.

和她的写作一样，她说话时带着诗人的严谨，总是深思熟虑、字斟句酌。金善英（音）曾编辑韩语版《少年来了》并和韩江成了朋友，她回忆韩江曾经开玩笑地告诉她，如果她乘坐的飞机失事，金善英不得更改她们曾经争论过的任何内容，即使语法稍有偏差。

Ms. Han’s Nobel, the first for a South Korean author, has been celebrated like an Olympic feat, with her books selling out, giant banners around the country congratulating her and throngs of TV cameras flocking to the neighborhood bookstore in Seoul that she had quietly run for six years. Her son, who is in his 20s, felt so besieged by the attention that he asked her not to mention him in interviews, she said.

作为韩国第一位诺贝尔文学奖获得者，韩江获得了奥运冠军般的赞誉。她的书迅速售罄，全国各地悬挂着祝贺她的巨型横幅，大量电视摄像机涌向她曾悄然经营了六年的首尔社区书店。韩江说，她二十出头的儿子因受到过多关注而感到十分困扰，甚至叫她在采访中不要提到自己。

Since receiving the prize, she has been trying to get back to her quiet life of writing, mostly in a sunlit room with wooden beams looking out over a small yard. She said a scant snow was fluttering down, dusting the wildflowers she planted last year, which had bloomed white before shriveling in a cold snap.

自获奖以来，韩江一直在努力回归安静的写作生活，通常是在一个洒满阳光、有木梁的房间里，窗外能看到一个小院子。她说，稀薄的雪花正在飘落，轻轻地覆盖她去年种下的野花，它们曾在寒流来临之前开出白色的花朵，但很快就枯萎了。

“Being able to stroll around freely and to observe how people live, under a degree of anonymity, free to write without any burdens, that’s the best environment for a writer,” Ms. Han said.

“可以自由地散步，观察人们如何生活，在一定程度的匿名下自由创作而没有任何负担，这对一个作家来说就是最好的环境，”韩江说。

The Nobel came during another tumultuous period for South Korea, which has yet to come to a conclusion, and which looked at one point as if it could result in bloodshed. Two days before Ms. Han left for Sweden for the ceremony, President Yoon Seok Yul declared martial law and sent armed troops into the National Assembly — something that hadn’t happened since the time of the Gwangju massacre.

韩江获得诺奖之际正值韩国的又一个动荡时期，至今尚未结束，甚至一度看起来可能会导致流血冲突。韩江前往瑞典参加颁奖典礼的两天前，韩国总统尹锡悦宣布戒严，并派遣军队进入国会——这是自光州大屠杀以来未曾发生过的事情。

Ms. Han said she watched the developments unfold, on edge, until the National Assembly repealed the martial law decree in the early morning hours.

韩江说，她一直紧张地关注着事态的发展，直到国会在清晨宣布废除戒严。

“The memories of ’79 and ’80, whether they experienced it directly or indirectly, they knew it should not be repeated, and that’s why they took to the streets in the middle of the night,” she said, referring to the lawmakers and protesters who resisted Mr. Yoon’s decree. “In that way, the past and present are connected.”

“无论是直接经历还是间接经历，1979年和1980年的记忆让他们明白，历史不应重演，这就是为什么他们在深夜走上街头抗议，”她在提到反抗尹锡悦命令的立法者和抗议者时说。“通过这种方式，过去与现在是相连的。”

上个月，尹锡悦总统宣布实施戒严后几个小时后，警察和抗议者聚集在首尔国会大厦外。