Sora, how did you get started in literary translation?
I started out translating short stories, but my big break was with
Shin Kyung-sook’s novel, I’ll Be Right There. It was a big project, too.
A long, sprawling novel by a major author whose previous translation, Please
Look After Mom, had made the bestseller lists. But it wasn’t actually the
first novel I’d translated.
The first was City of Ash and Red, by Pyun Hye-young, which
finally got published this year. It was a long wait, but in a lot of ways I’m
grateful for that. It was a tricky novel to translate, and the long path
towards publication gave me plenty of time to go back, rethink my approach, and
revise.
Can you tell me a bit about contemporary Korean literature? What's the most
exciting trend that you can see?
I think the most exciting trend is the increase in self-avowed
queer writers. That is, we’ve seen queer-themed poetry and prose in Korean
literature, dating back to its very origins, but not many publicly
queer-identified writers. That has been changing.
The other thing I would add is that while Korea is typically seen
as having a homogeneous, conformist culture, its modern literature—at least,
the parts of it that I’ve read—has always been diverse, outward-looking, and
grappling with questions of identity and selfhood. For instance, it’d be easy
to assume that Korean literature from the 1950s wouldn’t have much to say about
race, or that there’s no way a novel published back in 1909 would
feature a queer relationship, and yet there they are.