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| Anton Hur | |
Anton Hur debuted in 2018 with his first literary translation, The Court Dancer by Kyung-Sook Shin. He's amassed dozens of credits in the few years since, while garnering unprecedented recognition, including becoming, in 2022, the first Korean translator longlisted and shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. Other accolades include nominations from the National Book Awards, Dublin Literary Book Awards, and the National Book Critics Circle Awards. Hur also became a first-time novelist with the spectacular Toward Eternity (HarperVia) earlier this year. His latest translation is also his first fantasy title, Kim Sung-il's Blood of the Old Kings (Tor, $27.99; reviewed in this issue), the first in a planned trilogy.
Your output has been explosive since your first title in 2018! I assume requests must outweigh your availability.
Very much not! The 2022 International Booker Prize double-longlisting [for Sang Young Park's Love in the Big City and Bora Chung's Cursed Bunny (also shortlisted)] was the "establishing event" for me. It was only after the Booker that I really started to turn things down, but mostly because I feel like it's the duty of established translators to do that for emerging translators or colleagues who are a better fit for the book. Before then, it was a real struggle, not just to get work but to get basic respect from Korean rightsholders and institutions. A lot of things changed because of the Booker and I'm so grateful for 2022. And we didn't even win!
Kim Sung-il's gratitude glows in his acknowledgements: "What Anton has accomplished with my original text is tremendous--as a translator myself, I could only hope to do so well. I thank him for his brilliant work." Can we assume that you'll finish the Mersia Trilogy?
Honestly, I cried a little when I saw that. He's such a gracious human being and a terrific writer. I tease him about how he's going to get tired of being called a master storyteller. Translating is easy when the source text is so excellent, and this book was extra fun because the book is more like a science fiction thriller than a classical fantasy epic, although it is that as well. I think I'm allowed to say that I've handed in Mersia II, and I'll start work on Mersia III early next year. I kept screaming with glee as I translated them, and I hope the glee translated onto the page!
You translate all manner of genres--literary fiction, short stories, essays, memoir, sci-fi/speculative, poetry. With Blood of the Old Kings, your first fantasy title, did your translating process change?
Oh yes, I definitely learned a lot translating high fantasy for the first time. I didn't read much fantasy before working on Blood of the Old Kings. I lean more toward science fiction, and Blood is helpfully very science fiction for high fantasy, you just have to replace fossil fuels with dead sorcerers, but you get that lovely epic sweep of fantasy that we all adore.
I have translators Jack Hargreaves and Robin Munby to thank for helping me get the voice for this book in workshop; they're much better read than I am, especially in this genre, and so the translation was much easier with their help. I approach genre like gender--it's all just marketing--and I'm more focused on creating the right author's voice in English. It's like getting sheet music and figuring out which instrument sounds the best for it.
How do you choose your titles?
I do have a genre preference for science fiction, but really I'm like any good reader--I love books and writing and stories and language and all of that, and very few actual readers read in just one genre. Everyone loves finding a book they otherwise would never have imagined could exist or change their life, and it's my job as a professional literary translator, as someone who works in publishing, to find those books and put them in front of readers. I'm always looking for a book like that, something I was surprised and delighted by. And those books always find me!
I can never thank translators enough for broadening my reading. You've become my go-to cipher into Korean literature, as I've sadly lost my Korean literacy.
The Asian American, and especially Korean American, reading community have been so crucial to the reception of my work, I would've been less than nothing without them. There is such complicated feeling around heritage language, and I do understand and feel bad that anyone should feel that way about circumstances beyond their control, and the political forces that surround language acquisition and language fluency. I think a lot about the role translation has in such communities and take this role very seriously.
You recently became an author with the speculative novel Toward Eternity. What was that process like, creating your own story instead of translating others?
The funny thing about this book was that it felt just like translating a book when I was writing--it kept telling me what was going to happen next and I just wrote that down. I didn't write the book, language did. Jon Fosse jokes that aliens tell him what to write through telepathy, or maybe he wasn't joking? Anyway, that was the vibe. It was editing the book that was very different, because my agent and editor requested major structural changes and that was really fun to do. My editor would suggest things so carefully and respectfully, and I would immediately pick up a sledgehammer and start whacking at the manuscript. It was so much fun to be able to just bash things, get rid of them, rewrite them, and write new chapters! Tara's suggestions especially became my favorite chapters of the book.
Will you be translating your novel into Korean?
Bora Chung will be translating it into Korean. Isn't that hilarious?
As I catch my breath at that news... enquiring minds must know--what can we expect next?
So really big things are coming down the pipeline translation-wise, like, huge. There's a fantasy tetralogy that I recently finished translating; the first volume of that will be coming out from Harper Voyager. We do have a title but we are trying to tweak it still, but every Korean I tell this news to gets very excited because the series is like our Game of Thrones and Tolkien rolled into one. It's beloved and legendary.
The other thing is that I'm a judge for the 2025 International Booker Prize and the longlist is going to be incredible. I know the power of this prize better than most people because I have experienced it at a level probably not even some actual winners have, so I am very keen on delivering a great time for readers, translators, writers, booksellers, reviewers, and the entire reading community. It'll be an amazing celebration.
Also there will be new Bora Chung, some authors who have never published in English before who I'm very excited about, and I'm also under contract to write a novel in Korean. So--that's a lot! --Terry Hong