Why reading Harry Potter in Korean is so fun
It has probably been about a decade and a half since I picked up a Korean edition of a Harry Potter book. I saw one in my local library, nestled among other Korean selections, and I remembered the old childhood thrill come back to me.
I have been a Potterhead since I was in elementary school in Korea, and I still thank the Harry Potter series for sparking the desire to write stories to this day. My first few Harry Potter book-reading memories were written in Korean. When I moved to America at age 10, I eventually finished the series in English. I realized some time later than I never went back to finish my run in Korean from book 1 to book 7. I picked up Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - Part II (in Korean publications, they divided up the book into few different parts probably so that kids didn’t have to carry a brick around all the time). I packed it with other books from the library and brought it home.
The first chapter gave me a fresh shock over the tone of the now-teenager main characters Harry, Hermione, and Ron. I have never read them in Korean language more grown up than probably a twelve or thirteen years old. A peculiar sense of time jump amused me.
Upon reading more, I felt a familiar sense of reading Korean words translated from English. Harry Potter itself is a great fun as it boasts rich world-building and magical everyday lives, but this certain reality shift between what’s natural in English and what’s been made Korean is a different experience. Phonetically translated names and objects. The way people talk to each other is never really colloquial in Korean conversations. Things that are not commonplace in Korean culture. It was exoticism.
It came clear to me when I reached a scene where the 6th year students arrived to their first Potions class with Professor Slughorn. The students described bubbling boiling pots and smelling aromas that reminded them of some kind of flower or handle of a broomstick or this 당밀 타르트 (treacle tart).
Food imagery has been one of the most powerful sensory experiences through reading for me as a reader. It is without a doubt that any mention of food would pull me into the pages right away. But treacle tart? In both English and Korean, I frankly don’t know what in the whole wide world a treacle tart is. (I chuckled when I Googled 당밀 타르트 in the search engine and the first result was a Korean blog that compiled a list of all foreign dishes mentioned in the Harry Potter series. At least I’m not the only one who is fascinated by these strange foods from a Korean perspective).
Reading these unfamiliar words that I would have never come across in normal Korean lifestyle is what makes it so exotic to me. It makes me wonder what they are and learn about what is on a foreigner’s dining table so often that they cannot fathom to consider their food foreign to anyone at all. This notion goes beyond food of course — to plants, clothing, figure of speech, school system, societal values, unspoken mannerisms, and so on.
Even now as a decently settled American, I still enjoy the exoticism whenever I revisit the Harry Potter series. After all, it is of British culture.
The mixture of exoticism of magic as a Muggle in real life and another layer of exoticism of language as someone who is not a native English speaker nor culturally British person creates a unique experience of immersing into a world where there are all these barriers between myself and this made-up world that is amusing and curious, instead of scary and stressful.
I still have much of my borrowed book left to read, and I am very happy about that. I am going to try to savor this unfamiliar yet delicious magic as long as I can, hoping that I could extend my return date a bit more to do so.
Thumbnail photo information:
Brought from Goodreads page about the said book :https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/224913._2
Brought from the original jacket cover created by Mary GrandPré and David Saylor
Copyrights and trademarks belong to J. K. Rowling, Warner Bros, and Moonhak Soochup Publishing Eo., Ltd