57th Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards Poetry Commendation Award winner Park Se-yeon

For Park Se-yeon, translating poetry meant reading the same lines perhaps a hundred times — and finding that they still had the power to move her.

Working on poems by An Hee-yeon, the Korean-English translator and English instructor read aloud, listened to recordings and repeatedly revised her English versions. Familiarity did not diminish their emotional force.

“I never grew tired of them. Instead, they moved me more deeply each time,” Park said in a written interview with The Korea Times. “Even now, some lines bring tears to my eyes.”

Her translations won the poetry Commendation Award in this year’s Korea Times Literature Translation Awards.

Park was drawn to the way An observes human vulnerability without passing judgment or turning it into sentimentality. She wanted English-language readers to encounter the same tenderness, along with the unsettling emotions that emerge from the poet’s vivid, unexpected images.

“What drew me to An Hee-yeon’s poetry was the warmth, courage, and honesty of her gaze,” Park said.

“She looks at how vulnerable, imperfect, and sometimes unsettling we can be, without judging or sentimentalizing what she sees.”

For Park, those qualities are inseparable from the poems’ ability to take readers somewhere unfamiliar without prescribing how they should feel.

Bringing that experience into English required balancing emotional intensity with the restraint of An’s language. Park’s greatest challenge was preserving the poems’ concision, rhythm and form without weakening the feelings beneath them.

One example was “Fuss,” among her favorites. The poem combines self-loathing, loneliness and self-mockery with a gaze toward animals and ordinary things that Park described as both sharp and tender.

Its speaker covers herself in flour, leaves a notebook on a bus and hammers nails into a wall late at night. The gestures carry humor, but also suggest a loneliness that has accumulated over time.

“The speaker seems to cry out without ever raising her voice,” Park said.

Preserving that contradiction became a matter of attending closely to the poem’s physical structure. She revised repeatedly, weighing and cutting words while trying to remain close to the original word order, line breaks and clipped rhythm.

The process deepened her appreciation of close reading — not merely as a responsibility of translation, but as one of its rewards.

“Every revision brought something new to light,” she said.

Park studied at Ewha Womans University’s Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation, where she credits her professors with deepening her interest in literary translation.

A longtime reader of Korean literature, she saw translation as a way to bring together that love and the language skills she had spent years developing.

“I was drawn to literary translation because it offered a way to contribute to something I love through a skill I had spent years developing,” she said.

Alongside teaching English and maintaining a longstanding interest in film, Park continues to follow new Korean poetry, short stories and novels.

She hopes to keep translating, creating opportunities for writers and readers to connect across languages.

“I hope to continue translating and, in my own small way, help bring Korean writers and readers around the world closer together so they can share in the pleasure of literature.”