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| Poetry Grand Prize winner Mattho Mandersloot |
Mattho Mandersloot is a freelance translator who grew up in the Netherlands and the U.K. He earned his bachelor's degree in Classics at King's College, and master's degree in Translation at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), before completing a master's in Korean Studies at the University of Oxford. He has been living in Seoul since 2019.
He first came to Korea at the age of 17, as a full-time taekwondo athlete.
"Over and above the parts of Korean culture people tend to fall in love with ― food, music, dramas ― I fell in love with the language. The more I interacted with it, the more it grew on me," he said. "Having been exposed to the art of translation from a very young age, since I took Latin and Greek in high school, the decision to become a translator followed naturally."
Mandersloot published his first translation into English, "Demons" by Kang Hwa-gil, in 2019 and has translated four novels since, including "Kim Jiyoung, born in 1982" into Dutch.
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Mandersloot translated Choi Jeong-rye's poems for The Korea Times' Translation Award. He met Choi when she was a writer in residence at the National Centre for Writing in Norwich in 2018 and was immediately gripped by her work.
"I found her poetry at once relatable and incredibly imaginative, at times even cinematic," he said.
He has led workshops at the Poetry Translation Centre in London featuring Choi's poems and won the Oxford Korean Poetry Translation Prize in 2018 for his translation of Choi's earlier poetry.
"One of the things that makes Choi's poetry so vivid, is the way in which she alternates voices," Mandersloot said. "Some poems feature multiple characters talking to one another. In the original, the reader picks up on that very easily, as in Korean you can recognize spoken language simply by looking at the verb ending. In my translation, I aimed to convey the different voices as much as I could."
He believes that a good translation in poetry should aim to carry across the music of the original. "I often find myself trusting my ears; if it doesn't sound right, it won't do," he said.
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