Anna Jiwon Park has been covering the politics at The Korea Times since the summer of 2024, when she joined the press pool for the Office of the President in Korea. Prior to that, she spent about five years reporting extensively on financial markets, regulatory authorities and the financial industry. She joined The Korea Times in 2019 after spending eight years as a broadcast journalist at Arirang TV, Korea’s leading global broadcaster, covering politics, defense and culture.
Fiction Commendation Prize Winner: Grace Payer
Grace Payer
By Anna J. Park
By Anna J. Park
Grace Payer grew up in Iowa, the United States and spent her middle school years in Korea. Later she studied at the University of Minnesota where she studied Korean, among other subjects. She is currently studying sociology at Seoul National University in Korea.
She began various kinds of translation several years ago, thinking literary translation was something she would like to do in the remote future; she never felt she was prepared or worthy enough to actually do it. Upon reading novelist Kim Sa-gwa's writings, she took the dive into literary translation.
“I found her short story collection '02' (Changbi, 2010) and read it over a few days during a dreary winter in Seoul. I was between semesters, tired and burnt out, but Kim Sa-gwa's writing help break me out of the monotony that I had fallen into,” Payer said.
“In the titular story of that collection the narrator addresses the audience saying, 'I don't want you to read. I want you feel. I want you to feel this for a long time. You have to feel this for a long time.' Many of the stories in that collection gripped me, but 'Burial' did especially, and I felt that by translating I was honoring my promise to be more than a reader, to feel something and to feel it for a long time,” she continued.
She said one of the challenges she had while translating Kim's work was that she needed further research on various texts used in the story: “Kim makes explicit references to a number of other texts which allowed me to go on a scavenger hunt for the original quotes from Arnold Hauser and Kathy Acker. And that proved to be a fun side project in itself.”
She also stressed that literary translators do not lose their own pleasure in the work.
“There is a perception of translators as altruistically forgoing their own creative pursuits to painstakingly recreate works by already established writers. But translation should be embraced as a creative pursuit in its own right. I can't be totally removed from the worlds or words that I translate ― they affect me, and I unquestionably affect them in my use of language. There can be pleasure in the work of translation. Satisfying translations don't deny themselves that pleasure,” she said.