54th Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards Judges' Report
The judges of The Korea Times' Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards, from left, Sogang University Professor Emeritus of English language and literature Brother Anthony, Ewha Womans University associate professor of interpreting and translation Jung Ha-yun and Seoul National University professor of English language and literature Min Eun-kyung / Korea Times file
The growing interest in Korean literature among global readers owes much to the passion and creativity of a new generation of translators devoted not only to honing their craft but to discovering and selecting fresh new writings to introduce to the world.
This year’s submissions for The Korea Times Modern Korean Translation Awards brought to light works by some of the most distinctive young voices in Korean literature today, from the poets Lee Hye-mi and Hwang In-chan, to fiction writers Kim Ji-yeon, Lee Seul-ah, Im Sol-ah and Jeong Ji-hyang. Their work aims at capturing the mood, mindset and sensibilities of young men and women navigating the realities — both social and psychological — of 21st-century Korea. In terms of style and theme, their writing will be of particular interest to readers of a similar generation around the world.
This year, we saw a decline in the number of poetry entries and we had to make the difficult decision to not name a Grand Prize winner and to award only a commendation to the translation of Hwang In-chan’s poems. The translations demonstrated fluency and readability in English but lacked lyrical tension; they read more or less straightforward, perhaps even as prosaic poems. We do want to note that we appreciated the translator’s attempt to preserve the respective structure of each poem by handling the line breaks and line composition with care. We hope that this award will encourage the translator to polish the translations further so that they work as poems in their own right.
In the fiction category, our discussion centered on two entries: “We in the Same Place” by Park Seon-woo and “SAKUTEIKI (The Craft of Gardens)” by Kim Ji-yeon. After a lengthy debate about the merits and shortcomings of each entry, we reached a decision to award a commendation to the former and the Grand Prize to the latter.
“We in the Same Place” is a short but complex narrative of three intersecting lives, growing apart, then coming together in a small, precarious corner of Seoul. The story shifts from one first-person narrator to another, then to the third-person voice. This narrative strategy reflects the story’s theme and the translation follows these shifts accurately. However, the distinctive first-person voice that commands attention in the original is not fully rendered in the translation, which results in a version that has lost much of its original texture. The translation also feels stylistically altered overall, with additional sentence breaks and quite a number of condensed passages throughout.
This year’s Grand Prize-winning entry “SAKUTEIKI (The Craft of Gardens)” is a story of love and loss that on the surface does not read like one. The narrative is delivered in a highly distinctive voice, quiet and controlled. The translation is faithful to the subtleties of the original and maintains focus on the mood and tone of the story. We could tell that the translator fully appreciates the virtues of the author’s style and storytelling choices, which clearly is a strength, but also felt that the English could be stylistically enhanced to render the voice more vividly, especially in the second half of the manuscript. The translator’s decision to provide footnotes for cultural references also left us questioning whether the footnotes would help readers or get in the way of immersing themselves in the story.
We would like to applaud all three winners for their accomplishments and hope that this recognition helps them find their paths in the field of translation. We urge them to keep working and reading, for there is a rich pool of Korean works awaiting readers around the world, all communicating through the universal language of literature.