56th Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards Poetry Grand Prize winner Sooj Heo
Poetry Grand Prize winner Sooj Heo, right / Courtesy of Sooj Heo
Cover of Pak Seo-won's poetry collection, which includes "Calling 1" / Courtesy of Choicheuks Publishing
As a visual artist based in Germany, Sooj Heo, the Grand Prize winner in the poetry category, is a devoted poetry lover who discovered the beauty of language and translation while rendering Korean poems for her friends who couldn't read the language.
“I wanted to share the ones I loved with friends who could not read Korean, so I used Google Translate’s camera feature. The mistranslations fascinated me — how words slip, meanings deform and reassemble. That curiosity led me to start translating myself, to see if I could bring the poem’s voice across with more care and clarity,” she recalled.
Heo is especially drawn to Korean women poets born in the 1950s and '60s, with Kim Eon-hee (1953-), Choi Seung-ja (1952-), Kim Hye-soon (1955-) and Yi Yeon-ju (1953-92) among her favorites.
“Their poems carry the suppressed tension of living as talented women in a patriarchal culture, which I find powerful and haunting,” the winner said.
Asked what motivated her to select Pak Seo-won’s poems, Heo said it happened by chance.
“I was looking for poems with the same intensity and discovered Pak Seo-won while reading other works published by Choicheuks Publishing, the publisher of Yi Yeon-ju’s collected poems. I read [Pak's] collection 'Amudo Eopseoyo' in one sitting and asked a friend to send me her complete works, which were published by the same press. When I read, I fold the corners of pages I want to revisit. With this book, I folded so many that choosing just 10 poems to translate became the hardest part.”
The most challenging aspect of the translation, the winner said, was preserving the rawness of Pak’s language.
“It was difficult to maintain that breathless, incantatory rhythm in English while still making the lines sound natural and readable,” Heo said, adding that it was difficult emotional work as well. "It wasn’t simply about sadness or heaviness — her language pulled me into her state of delirium and made me experience it.”
The winner said “Calling 1” was particularly difficult to translate.
“I was happiest when I finished translating 'Calling 1.' It was the first of the 10 poems I worked on, and also the most challenging. The sentences run without pauses or periods, making it hard to grasp both meaning and rhythm. I had to take the poem apart to understand it bit by bit, visualize each fragment, rebuild it in English and shape the rhythm," Heo said.
To Heo, translation feels almost therapeutic — a way to reconcile her complex relationship with language.
"I moved to the United States as a teenager, and English was always a challenge for me. When I entered graduate school in Korea, my Korean felt incomplete. It wasn’t until I moved to Berlin a few years ago that I began to let go of the belief that language must be perfect to be expressive. Meeting people who spoke many different tongues, I became more comfortable assembling my own language from what I had.”
She is a photo artist, but also plans to continue literary translation. Currently, she is taking an online course at the Literature Translation Institute of Korea’s Translation Academy.
“Translation is about showing those I live with how the world is sensed and related in the language of my mother tongue. As an immigrant, this act of making that inner world intelligible in another language is deeply important to me,” she said.