VOL.69/2024.04

Successful Import Case of Korean Literature in the U.S.A.

Black Ocean, Lee Young-ju, the 2022 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize for Cold Candies

2023.02.20

The idea for doing Moon Country, the contemporary Korean poetry series at Black Ocean, started around the time Janaka Stucky, the publisher, came to Korea for a series of readings and literary events in 2017. Along with the editor Carrie Olivia Adams, we decided we’d like to publish work that stood on its own, but also would be in conversation with the other Black Ocean titles. So that is why we set out to publish edgy, avant-garde, contemporary work published in Korea within the last 25 years or so.
The series’ name comes from the famous poem and book Moon Country Mischief (the title of a Korean book: 『달나라의 장난』) by Kim Soo-young. A goal we have is that we want these books to challenge national literature discourses, we want to invite readers to inhabit these books as bodies of experience rather than view them as objects of knowledge or history, and we want to be a platform for readers to be radically altered by the power of the work. Even though Kim Soo Young’s poem is about Korea after the war, it is also about make-believe, the Moon Country, written in a language of his own invention. People think translation is from language A to language B, but really poets often use their own invented language that is used in the country they are the founders of. When you really get into a poem, you enter a portal into an imagined country. When I first read Jae Kim’s translation of Lee Young Ju’s Cold Candies, I had a tingly feeling that it was a special book. His translation style, especially the way he mimics the syntactic grammar of the source text, the fluidity of that defamiliarization, and the attention to detail, teaches you how to read the language. He creates a philosophy, a blueprint for his aesthetic choices, and those choices give you special access to Lee Young-Ju’s poetic country.

Looking back, I think Jae was really systematic in the way that he went about translating and editing the manuscript. When he received feedback, oftentimes a choice he made in one poem led to him changing all the other poems in order to achieve consistency. This book has a lot of surreal imagery, fluidity, and ambiguity; it speaks in the language of sibling intimacy, but also has a lot of strikingly sharp, shocking, and dark moments. By being consistent, Jae does an excellent job of balancing the tension between those disparate elements. But also, in the music, you can feel the artistry and love Jae has for the language. Like Cold Candies, the dissonance between something sweet and cold, the beauty of the consonance, these poems sing and break your heart. So, I think that has a lot to do with why the book was able to find such success.
Another reason probably has to do with Jae’s advocacy for the work. The translated Korean titles you see winning awards have to do with not only the quality of the work and the translation, but also the effort and enthusiasm of the translator. Jae submitted his translations to all kinds of contests and publications, so by the time he submitted his manuscript to us of his work, we knew that he was going the distance to introduce Lee to an English language audience. Especially with poetry, it is really important for translators to be advocates for the work that they translate if they want to find readers. Lots of books get translated and published, but not all of them get read and recognized. In poetry, you don’t have agents, and the small presses that publish poetry are primarily run by small groups of dedicated volunteers. Submitting to journals, and contests, finding reviewers, and building an audience for poetry, especially poetry in translation, is energy intensive. Editors at presses can only do so much, and the majority of this outreach work falls upon poets and translators. I think Lee Young-Ju was fortunate her work found Jae.
Finally, although it is not the primary reason, I think why you see a lot of Korean books winning and getting nominated for these international awards, is because of the cumulative labor of a big community of writers, scholars, translators, and presses that built up this momentum over time. I think of Don Mee Choi’s groundbreaking translations of the generation of Korean women writers that came before Lee Young-Ju, her translations of Kim Hyesoon and Choi Seung-ja in particular, the tireless effort of the editors at presses like Action Books, Wave Books, Noemi Press, Open Letter, Zephyr Press, Tilted Axis, etc. who are publishing so much great work in English translation, the many and often young and first-time translators making this literature happen, the readers and reviewers who open themselves up to the work, editors at journals and magazines like Asymptote that actively seek out and promote works in translation, and finally, the consistent institutional support granted to us by LTI (Literature Translation Institute of Korea), without which a series like this would not be possible.

Written by Jake Levine (Editor, Black Ocean)