S136.

Collaborating in Korean: The Value of Co-Translating

Room 2102A, Kansas City Convention Center, Street Level
Saturday, February 10, 2024
10:35 am to 11:50 am

 

The particularities of the Korean language—from the disparities between spoken, written, and poetic Korean to the vast changes the lexicon has undergone within the past few generations—can make translating partnerships invaluable when working from Korean to English. Four cotranslators of poetry discuss their process and how having a partner of differing background, age, and familiarity with various versions of the language may lead to more accurate, creative, and engaging translations.



Outline & Supplemental Documents

Event Outline: Co-Translating_in_Korean_EventOutline_AWP_2024.pdf

Participants

Moderator:

Jack Jung studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. He is a cotranslator of Yi Sang: Selected Works (Wave Books 2020), the winner of 2021 MLA Prize for a Translation of Literary Work. He is an assistant professor of English at Davidson College.

Jeanine Walker is the author of the poetry collection The Two of Them Might Outlast Me; her poems have appeared in Bennington Review, New Ohio Review, Pleiades, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She translates poems in Chuncheon, Korea, where she teaches English at Kangwon National University.

Sanskrit scholar Shim Jaekwan is the author of seven books on Buddhism, Indian language and script, and manuscriptology, as well as the translator into Korean of the English textbook, The Hindu Temple. He currently teaches world cultures and Indian studies at Sangji University, Korea.

Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox, winner of the 2015 Donald Hall Poetry Prize, and cotranslator of Yi Won's The World's Lightest Motorcycle. She has received fellowships from the NEA, Kundiman, and ALTA and is a program coordinator for Miami Book Fair.

Michael Joseph Walsh is the author of Innocence (CSU Poetry Center) and coeditor of APARTMENT Poetry. His poems, reviews, and translations from the Korean have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Guernica, Fence, jubilat, and elsewhere.

#AWP24

February 7–10, 2024
Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City Convention Center