Translating the Fresh and Unexpected: A Conversation with Spring Contest Judge Sora Kim-Russell

By Tiffany Troy and Mia Xing

Sora Kim-Russell is a literary translator based in Seoul. Her recent publications include Pyun Hye-young’s The Law of Lines, Hwang Sok-yong’s At Dusk, and Kim Un-su’s The Plotters. She has taught literary translation at the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference, LTI Korea, and Ewha Womans University. She served as the Spring 2021 Contest Judge for the Columbia Journal.

What is literary translation to you?

In the past, I think I would have given an idealistic reply of how literary translation is a bridge to culture and communication. Sometimes I think of literary translation as a form of empathy, a way of reaching out to other people that would not have otherwise been possible. Other times, I see it simply as a form of creative writing, like another genre or form of discourse.

But lately I’ve become more skeptical, having experienced the business side of translation, because at some point regardless of all your hopes and ideals, you ultimately have to sell a book and you want the book to sell. There are certain hard realities that go with that.

You write a lot about your Korean identity and the nuances that are specific to the Korean language. How did you learn Korean and enter the field of literary translation?

It began as more of a personal endeavor. I learned Korean to explore my relationship to Korea. Despite being mixed, I didn’t grow up speaking Korean and only started formally learning the language in college. 

I learned Korean to a point where I was good enough to read novels in Korean that were not available in translation. At that time, there was a lot of Korean poetry in translation, but not as many novels in translation. I kept coming across books by new writers, particularly writers who combined social critique with humor, horror, fantasy, and so on, that I thought friends outside of Korea would enjoy, too, and began to ponder whether literary translation was something I could do.

Around the same time, a friend of mine encouraged me to try out for the literary translation contest sponsored by The Korea Times. I translated some poems and ended up winning the grand prize. That was the beginning of my journey, which started out of a personal desire to speak to my Korean relatives without an interpreter and gain access to my heritage, but later turned into a professional career.

You are a writer of your own right. How does your creative writing shape your translation, and how does your translation feed into your creative work?

Sadly, I don’t do as much creative work as I used to. I struggle to balance the two. I’ve read about other writer-translators who write in the morning and translate in the afternoon. I guess the logic is that writing is harder, so you do it first and save translation for the end of the day when you’re tired? For me, it all seems to draw from the same pool of creative energy, so doing both in one day is challenging. 

Also, with writing, one of my struggles was always structure. I like playing with words, but figuring out the shape of a poem was less spontaneous. With translation, the structure has already been put in place by the author, so it’s easy for me to give all my energy to the wordplay of translation. 

As for how my creative writing shapes my translation, I know how opinionated I am about my own writing and the choices that go into it. 

I recently had a personal essay translated into Korean, and I confess I became that nightmare writer who demands a million edits and rewrites because the translation went in a few different directions than the original. It’s not that I was expecting it to look exactly like the English; I knew that was impossible. But I disagreed with how some of it was interpreted, so I ended up suggesting rewrites that were different from the original but kept what I hoped was the same spirit.

How do you approach translating idiosyncratic elements of languages in translation? For instance, in Korean, you have last names first. How do you incorporate those specific ways of talking when you translate?

There are a couple of ways that I approach translating idiosyncrasies. The first thing I look at is if the idiosyncrasy is specific to the language or specific to the writer. 

For name order, the general preference is to preserve Asian name order (i.e., last name first). But there have been times where I’ve switched it up in a translation after discussion with the publisher. For example, what if the author prefers to have their personal name appear first and their family name last? Do you do the same with the characters’ names in their book, or stick with traditional name order? In one case when that came up, the publisher and I made the decision to keep the name order consistent all the way through, from the author’s name on the cover to each of the characters’ names. Also, some publishers will already have a style guide they follow, so it’s not always the translator’s choice. 

In Korean, we also use a lot of titles as terms of address, like “Older Sister,” “Aunt,” “Uncle,” etc. So do you preserve these? What do you do with characters with no names, only titles? Pyun Hye-young writes a lot of workplace situations, so you’ll have, for example, “Section Manager” or simply “Coworker” with no name attached. Sometimes the argument falls on the side of preserving the culture: if this is how the language is spoken, then we should keep it as is. When this issue arises, I step back and look at who the author is, what the work is, and what their goals are. In Pyun’s case, titles create a sense of distance or estrangement among her characters, and so, for her, it can work well to keep those titles.

For Hwang Sok-yong, he’s aware of himself as a Korean novelist writing for an international audience, and so his work tends to be more consciously Korean in both content and form. Having said that, even his Korean readers aren’t necessarily familiar with some of the historical or folkloric subjects he writes about, and so sometimes he’s teaching this cultural content to other Koreans within the original text. If I were to simply translate every Korean cultural term in his work into English equivalents, it would do a disservice to his work. 

For Pyun Hye-young, who is Korean in the way that most Koreans are, in that she’s not consciously thinking about it, I’m less likely to preserve those idiosyncrasies unless they serve the story. 

What draws you to the works of Pyun Hye-young and Hwang Sok-yong?

What initially drew me to Pyun Hye-young was her horror-driven earlier work, which was a genre I felt familiar with. But what keeps me hooked is the tension between her narrative voice and the content of her writing. She writes about messy situations, things falling apart, buildings falling down, relationships imploding, corpses rotting, everything disintegrating around the characters, but she does so in this controlled, clinically detached third-person point of view, like a scientist looking down on rats in a maze. 

Translating Korean into English in an overly “literal” way tends to already come across as dry and flat. But add to that an author like Pyun who deliberately writes in a dry voice, and the translated prose can end up sounding stiff and awkward. So I have to find ways to finesse the language, to ensure that it comes across as a style and not as bad writing.

With Hwang Sok-yong, he is playful and funny, with an easy looseness to his prose, kind of like he’s right there next to you, telling you the story over drinks. Also, his working-class characters are a part of Korean society who we don’t often get to see in literature. So I really appreciate and admire that about his work.

How do you capture different literary styles in translation?

Collaboration is important to capturing style because you can have an idea in your mind that you’re going to translate it this way or make it sound that way, but you never really know if it works until someone else reads it.

I had a funny experience early on, when I first started translating Hwang Sok-yong’s work. The novel I was working on has an opening scene where a father finds out that his wife is having yet another girl and not the son he wants. He gets so mad that he flips the breakfast table and all the food goes flying into the yard. To me, the scene read as comical and over-the-top, but a friend of mine read it as sad and traumatic. I mulled over it for days, wondering if I was being culturally insensitive and misreading the moment. But in the end I felt it was important to balance the silly with the sad, like the moment when a dish of kimchi ends up on someone’s head.

Aside from getting as much feedback as possible, I look at how the sentences are constructed in the original, how jokes are set up, which words are chosen over other words, etc. These physical artifacts of writing are things that a translator can look at and lean on.

For Pyun, I try not to preserve the stylistic dryness of her prose in every single sentence. Instead, I try to leave in enough for the reader to pick up the pattern or style without beating them over the head with it. 

For Hwang, I spend a lot of time reading the work out loud, to try to keep the language lively and preserve the storyteller aspect. 

Do you have any advice for beginning translators hoping to go into publication?

I have different responses depending on my mood. Normally I would say the No. 1 advice for any beginning translator is to read as much as you can. Obviously you want to read a lot in your source language, but you also have to read broadly and deeply in your target language because that will help you to know what’s possible and where to push the boundaries of the language. Likewise, look at what translators of other languages are doing.

For me, some of the most eye-opening experiences have come from meeting translators who work with language pairings that are different from mine. It’s surprising sometimes how similar languages are, and issues I thought were unique to my language are issues that everybody is dealing with.

The other practical advice is to learn the business. Learn how to read a contract and how to negotiate. Learn how to say no and how to say “I deserve more” because you never know when someone will try to underpay you or undercut you or push for difficult deadlines. It can be tough because they’re not necessarily malicious; we’re just all under pressure. I’m still learning how and when to assert myself. But people who do well in this field tend to come in with an understanding of what they’re up against and how to work with other people.

You can learn more about Sora Kim-Russell at her website.



About the authors:

Tiffany Troy is the Translation Editor at Columbia Journal. 


Mia Xing is a junior majoring in comparative literature and society as well as philosophy at Columbia College.