57th Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards Poetry Commendation Award winner Noh Hye-yeon

For Noh Hye-yeon, returning to poetry began with opening old files and rediscovering a pleasure that corporate work and anxiety over artificial intelligence had pushed aside.

An in-house translator at an automotive company, Noh spent this summer revisiting poems by Lee Su-myeong that she had first translated in graduate school. Revising them brought her back to the literary ambitions she had struggled to sustain.

“Flipping through my Roget’s Thesaurus again, I realized just how much I was enjoying translation and how much I’d missed it,” Noh said in a written interview with The Korea Times. “For the first time in a long while, I was doing something that genuinely brought me joy.”

Her translations of 10 poems by Lee won the poetry Commendation Award in this year’s Korea Times Literature Translation Awards.

The recognition follows her fiction Grand Prize in the competition in 2023. In the intervening years, however, her confidence in a future as a literary translator had faltered.

“The arrival of GPT felt like a natural disaster to me as a translator,” she said.

Noh continued pursuing literary translation through the Literature Translation Institute of Korea’s Translation Atelier program through 2024, but balancing that ambition with earning a living proved difficult. Over the past two years, a demanding automotive industry job and growing familiarity with corporate language left her feeling increasingly distant from literature.

Lee’s poems offered a way back.

Born and raised in Korea, Noh briefly studied architecture in the United States and later worked in filmmaking in Korea. She returned to school to study English language and literature before pursuing a master’s degree in Korean-English translation.

There was no defining moment that drew her to literary translation. She simply found herself enjoying class assignments.

Graduate school also introduced her to Lee’s poetry. Three poems in her winning submission — “Understanding Space,” “Your Paper” and “How to Fall Under the Minari Family” — originated as translations from that period, though she substantially revised them.

“To me, Lee’s poems are poetry in its purest form,” Noh said. “There’s something about them that feels strange yet oddly natural.”

She wanted English-language readers to experience the freshness of Lee’s unexpected combinations of ordinary words.

Preserving that effect, however, meant confronting meanings that English could not easily hold together.

Lee’s collection “Always Too Many Rains” plays with Korean homonyms, including words that can mean either “night” or “chestnut,” “apple” or “apology,” and “hat” or “mother and son.”

“What makes these poems so fascinating is that both meanings work, but each creates a completely different image,” Noh said.

In one passage, she translated the Korean word “moja” as “hat”: “I go into the long syntax of the bones and lie down. A fleeting hat throws me away.”

References elsewhere to clothing guided her choice, but the alternative image of a mother and son remained possible.

“And yet, neither interpretation feels out of place in the poem,” she said.

Noh translated about 20 poems before selecting 10, leaving out several heavily dependent on homonyms because she remained uncertain about her choices.

Despite those difficulties, the work restored a sense of joy. She hopes to translate more fiction and eventually find readers for works she has already translated independently.

“I want to keep doing something that brings me joy.”