By Brother Anthony, Professor Min Eun-kyung and Professor Jung Ha-yun
It was a great relief for the judges to have their number increased to three this year. There were so many good translations being submitted in the fiction category that the final screening required a great deal of close reading in order to pinpoint the entry that really deserved the highest award. There were almost thirty entries for fiction this year, surely a record, and ten for poetry. As usual, the judges received the entries anonymously.
This year, like most recent years, the judges found the entries for poetry disappointing, with only a few deserving closer examination. It is clear that not many people are able to combine a deep understanding of Korean poetry with the linguistic and poetic skills required to produce convincing English poems as translations.
However, in this year's fiction category, there were a large number of what we felt were good draft translations of works of fiction. However, there is a considerable gap between a good draft version and an excellent, completed translation. Sometimes the entries showed weaknesses suggesting a lack of time, or effort, for the final polishing and revision. Often, it was clear that the additional editorial help of an English native speaker would have been needed to remove the tiny blemishes in grammar, word order or vocabulary. Several submissions showed a high, but not perfect, level of English style. We can only encourage translators to recognize their limitations and stress that it is not shameful to work closely as a team in translating; indeed, it is almost always necessary.
In recent years, the final shortlist for fiction has consisted of translations that really stood out by their readability as well as their accuracy. We were therefore disconcerted to find that this year no work of the highest quality had been submitted. The more readable translations were less successful at capturing the quality of the narrative voice and thus struck us as missing an essential component of the original text. The more accurate translations, on the other hand, were often too prosaic to make compelling reading.
Finally, however, we decided to award top prizes in both categories, and 2 commendations in fiction, although we hope that the translators will spend a little more time fine tuning their translations before publishing them.
The Grand Prize in Fiction goes to "Possibly" by Yoon Sung-hee, a strange, yet sweet tale about a group of dead teenagers in the afterlife, translated by Irene Park. The translation tackled, quite successfully, the difficult task of conveying in English the many subtle emotional layers of the original story, although quite a number of individual sentences needed fixing. The first Commendation Award goes to "An Angel Stays Here" by Jeon Gyeong-rin, translated by Jessica Conte and Han Hae-min; the second Commendation Award goes to "Ode for Longing" by Park Wan-suh, translated by Andrew McCullough.
In poetry, we only found the set of translations of poems by Kim Hye-soon, translated by Song Chae-pyong and Anne Rashid, at all convincing. The translator(s) skillfully handled the rhetorical structure and lyrical flow of the original text. The poems are about the female experience of life, and proved challenging but also rewarding.