57th Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards Fiction Commendation Award winner Jude Vandervort

For Jude Vandervort, translating Korean literature meant learning to move beyond the precision of scientific writing and embrace the possibilities of interpretation.

A recent Rutgers University graduate who majored in cell biology and neuroscience with a minor in Korean, Vandervort won the fiction Commendation Award in this year’s Korea Times Literature Translation Awards for his translation of Jeong Ji-a’s novel “Bead by Bead.”

The experience helped the aspiring health care professional see translation not simply as transferring words between languages, but as a literary art shaped by the person doing the translating.

“It meant so much to me to learn how to stray from the literal and venture into more poetic verse,” Vandervort said in a written interview with The Korea Times.

That interest first emerged while analyzing Korean articles in language classes at Rutgers in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Vandervort, who also served as a senior student ambassador for the university’s Asian Languages and Cultures Program, became fascinated by how a sentence’s emotional effect could change in English.

Beyond vocabulary and cultural concepts that resist easy equivalents, there were subtler differences in feeling and nuance.

“That made me more interested in translation as an art of interpretation, where the translator infuses their own worldview into their translation, thereby uniquely marking its emotional effect,” Vandervort said.

The winning work appealed to Vandervort for its dark subject matter and unusual narrative perspective. Its carefully shifting tone gradually reveals the identity of the speaker, making the translator’s handling of voice especially important.

For Vandervort, the aim was to convey death’s inevitability without making it purely frightening.

“I most wanted to convey the inevitability of death, not in a scary way, but in a comforting way, one that informs us that it’s a natural part of life.”

Achieving that effect required resisting habits developed through scientific study.

“I come primarily from a science background, so most of my writing has been more objective and quantitative,” Vandervort said.

The challenge was to preserve the original’s poetic qualities without producing English that sounded overly formal or literal. At times, that meant allowing room for choices that departed from a direct rendering.

One example was the phrase “cold-hearted,” used to describe a daughter lifting a parent into a bathtub.

Vandervort chose it partly to echo a recurring pattern of temperature-related imagery, including warmth, heat, ice and cold. But the word also offered an emotional ambiguity that alternatives such as “heartless” or “cruel” did not.

“Cold-hearted seemed more temporary and hinted more at a warped sense of cruelty that I felt better represented the actual loving nature of the daughter,” Vandervort said.

Working through such decisions encouraged a freer approach to writing and strengthened an understanding of translation as an act of creation, rather than a neutral passage between languages.

Vandervort plans to continue translating in spare time, choosing works that resonate personally and offer English-language readers something they might otherwise be unable to encounter. Poetic stories exploring love and death hold particular appeal.

Alongside those literary interests, Vandervort is applying to graduate programs in nuclear medicine technology, with the goal of entering the health care field.