57th Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards Kevin O'Rourke Prize winner Ku Bon-seung

For Ku Bon-seung, translating fiction began with wanting to share something remarkable with friends who could not read Korean.

After reading a novella by writer Danyao in the summer of 2025, Ku asked for permission to translate it. The author suggested translating the whole collection instead.

That exchange led to Ku’s English translation of “Giraffe Is the Name of the World,” which won this year’s Kevin O’Rourke Prize in The Korea Times Literature Translation Awards.

Working on Danyao’s fiction helped Ku understand translation as a form of testimony — taking responsibility for conveying an experience that a summary could not adequately capture.

“I experienced something remarkable while reading Danyao’s works, and I knew that this quality was holistic, irreducible to a well-delivered summary,” Ku said in a written interview with The Korea Times.

Simply sending friends the Korean text and suggesting translation tools would not have fulfilled that responsibility.

“If I wanted to make a testimony, I should indeed make it — be responsible for it,” Ku said. “I think there’s a communal beauty in that.”

Born in Korea, Ku moved to Dallas at age 10 and has lived there since, graduating this spring from the University of Texas at Dallas with a degree in cognitive science.

An early introduction to working between languages came through interpreting for Ku’s mother. Although the experience was not enjoyable, being useful brought some satisfaction.

In middle school, Ku began posting translations of gaming materials on Korean internet forums. Translating favorite song lyrics later made the activity a pleasure in its own right.

College brought a first venture into fiction through English-to-Korean translations of two visual novels by Estonian game developer etherane.

Those years in Korean online communities also led to a friendship with Danyao. “Giraffe Is the Name of the World,” translated mainly in July, became the third piece Ku translated for the collection “The Great Chain of Being.”

The story demanded close attention to a narrator whose detached, matter-of-fact voice persists while recounting family deaths and approaching death.

Ku wanted to preserve that restraint, which gradually becomes more than a way for the narrator to cope.

“To preserve the texture of the narrator’s voice would be to preserve the texture of the world,” Ku said.

One persistent challenge involved the Korean sentence ending “-dago handa,” which marks reported speech. It appears eight times in close succession as the narrator recounts the world’s creation myth.

For Ku, repeating English equivalents such as “it is said” drew attention to wording that felt unobtrusive in Korean. Varying the expressions or moving them within sentences did not resolve the problem.

The solution came in the manuscript’s final edit: retaining only the first “Or so it is told” and removing the rest.

“It’s virtually invisible now!” Ku said.

Ku’s next priority is finishing the collection, including reworking the title novella, an early attempt at Korean-to-English literary translation.

“I got better, so I should be able to do better, and so on,” he said.

Alongside looking for full-time work, Ku is translating and localizing etherane’s game Hello Charlotte 3, hoping to finish by year’s end. Other ambitions include translating another Danyao novel, every song by Swans and creating Korean subtitles for the 2012 animated film “It’s Such a Beautiful Day.”

“But maybe I’ll never get to do them!" he said "Who knows!”