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.
Poetry Commendation Prize Winners: Yoo Ji-young, Clarque Brown
Yoo Ji-young, left, and Clarque Brown
By Anna J. Park
By Anna J. Park
Born and raised in Seoul, Yoo Ji-young went to the U.S. at the age of 16 to study. She graduated from Cornell University with a degree in sociology and South Asian Studies. After spending some time as a sales manager, she now teaches English at a local institute. Yoo, however, has always kept a deep passion for literature, and languages as varied as Nepali, Hindi and Spanish.
Clarque Brown grew up in Florida in the U.S., and earned her bachelor's degree in psychology from Amherst College in Massachusetts. She is also fluent in French and Spanish. After graduating, she won a Fulbright scholarship to teach English in Korea for two years. She went back to the U.S. in July this year, and is currently taking a master's program in education at Harvard University.
Yoo and Brown met this spring and became friends through their shared passion for literature and languages. They decided to collaborate as co-translators and worked on the poet Heo Yeon's poems including "Fifty Meters.”
It was Yoo who recommended Heo's poems for the joint translation: “I wanted to translate Heo's poems primarily because of the poet's gift for evoking raw, intense emotion with a handful of what I would call 'neutral' words. In many of his poems, rather ordinary words and images are juxtaposed with each other in such uncanny and even irrational ways that the end result is an experience as much surreal as thought-provoking.”
Brown said she was also drawn to the poet's imagery and themes: “I was immediately intrigued by the strong and often surreal imagery, and the visceral nature of his work. As someone who has studied Latin American literature and been influenced by writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who championed magical realism and surreal imagery, I was immediately drawn to some of the more mystical moments in his poem, where it felt like the boundary between reality and the dreamy world of emotions and instincts had worn very thin.”
One of many challenges in the translation was a decision-making process of choosing the closest English words for the original Korean text.
“While the author's deliberate use of homonyms and many other ambiguous expressions made his poems open to various interpretations and thus imparted a pleasant sense of mystery in Korean, our attempts at translating them into English very often ended up oversimplifying the poems by limiting them to one particular interpretation,” Yoo said.
“Poetry is always difficult to translate because it often operates outside of the realm of predictable grammatical patterns and rules. (…) It can be very difficult to take a language like Korean, which is so nuanced, and find words or phrases in English that capture the same ambiguity,” Brown added.
Yoo said she believes a good work of translation almost invariably entails some degree of reconciliation: “A translator has to maintain a fine balance between the writing's message and its aesthetic form ― and its cultural context to some extent ― and this is especially true in the translation of poetry. In doing so, one has to tackle the difficult question of how far one would want to stretch his or her imagination into the unknown, almost like a counterfactual historian.”
Brown stressed the importance of keeping the uniqueness of original texts.
“I tend to enjoy reading translations that remain true to the original text, even at the risk of sounding a bit 'foreign' or strange to a reader of another language. (…) I think part of the beauty of translation is preserving the uniqueness of the text; when I read a translated text and something about the diction feels different than what I'm used to, it makes me wonder about the cultural and grammatical patterns of the original language, and what details I'm missing by reading the translation rather than the original. I enjoy this feeling of curiosity and mystery,” Brown said.