Photo by Anton Hur
Interview by Alex Valente
Alex Valente: Anton, it is a pleasure to finally have a one-on-one conversation—I’m glad I finally have a chance to talk to you without the Twitter algorithm getting in the way! Your geographical background is impressive, growing up between Sweden, Hong Kong, Ethiopia, and Thailand, but it seems Korea, and its literature, is the one that struck you the most. You’ve recently said that your pride is not a nationalistic one, so what is it that drew you to it?
Anton Hur: I think no matter where you get to live in the world, there will always be something about the language of your family that will assert a primal claim on who you are. Literature especially has so much to do with cultural memory and it is a dynamic archive of our very selves. Translating those memories is a way for me to access and contribute to that memory on an incredibly satisfying level. For example, translating Kang Kyeong-ae’s The Underground Village: Short Stories allowed me to tap into the cadences of my maternal grandparents, who were from what is now North Korea, as was the author and the rhythms of her language. I find Kang’s sharp and visceral Korean to be different from most South Korean writers, who tend to be more subdued. Many previous translations of Kang were unsatisfying to me because they did not sound like my mother’s side of the family. They just weren’t aggressive enough to my ear. I tried to bring out a different texture in mine—the texture of my family. I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I didn’t respond to the work on a personal level, and I wouldn’t have responded on a personal level if I hadn’t been Korean.
AV: Deriving personal access to a communal experience while translating it for another community is one of the perks of the job, especially when the text resonates with us so deeply—but you’re also a very vocal advocate for queer Korean literature: does the same reasoning apply?
AH: Absolutely. Korean literature is very, very queer and queered. I’ve argued before that, with modern literature especially, queerness was present since day one in the first modern short story published by a Korean. I am tired of this fact being erased by Western journalists who care more about the white saviour narrative of their coming to save an ignorantly homophobic Korea.
The problem is, these Westerners profit from positioning Korean queers as helpless victims that need white people to give them their voice and their “platform”, erasing our agency and our efforts. They hate the fact that a Korean queer like me can speak English all on my own and doesn’t take their white saviourism seriously. You can see it in how their attitudes shift when I don’t play the demure Asian. Did I mention that half my family is basically from North Korea? I don’t play demure. Ordinarily I wouldn’t care about what the anglophone community thinks, but I do have to live in it because English is my artistic medium. This is why it’s important for me to stop these neo-colonizers from appropriating my cause, which is why I’ve ended up as “a very vocal advocate for queer Korean literature”. I think the fact that you describe me in that way is interesting, because I don’t feel particularly vocal about it, but I do understand how Asians are perceived outside of Asia; the littlest thing I do suddenly looks like a lot. If anything, my Korean friends find me conservative and reactionary.
AV: I feel that anyone working in the arts today who says anything (and says it consistently) about queer issues and identities tends to be, by necessity, “vocal” about it: it’s who we are, though not all we are, and the erasure spreads quickly––especially in anglophone narratives, as you point out. How would you say, then, that your translatorial practice affects this reclamation? How do you highlight––or simply maintain––that queerness, in the most exemplary colonial language that is English?
AH: What you say about being “vocal” about queer issues and identities is guaranteed to be even more amplified if we add in the fact that I’m Asian. You have to realize that when I say Asian, I mean Asian. I am not a Canadian or an American or any other part of the diaspora. I am a Korean citizen who has always had Korean citizenship and no other citizenship, even as a child, and I live in Korea. Being queer and white in this space makes you “vocal”; being queer and Asian makes you downright “shrill”, just for existing out in the open. Can you imagine the kind of reception a queer African writer receives in Western discourse? The level of micro- and macro-aggressions they have to endure? I literally cannot even imagine it. You’re being shoved into the closet harder, ironically by your race and sexuality being amplified more, if that makes sense. But I’m going to use that effect instead of letting it hinder me. Is this colonial language surprised that the subaltern speaks? Great. Look at me translating queer works, look at me subverting your colonial language by not “correcting” certain “translationese”; by bringing out the closet reading; by demanding to be treated better than mediocre translators who have their jobs only because they’re white and heteronormative; by being consistently queer and Korean despite the glare.
AV: I feel like you’re probably not siding with the arguably outdated “invisible translator” camp; how does your approach navigate the process of letting the texts speak for themselves and the visibility of you as the translator?
AH: Do you know that Qingyuan Weixin quote about once believing rivers were rivers and mountains were mountains, then realizing that rivers were not rivers and mountains were not mountains, then later still, realizing that rivers were rivers and mountains were mountains? I kind of understand what that means now. It’s not that my understanding has reverted to its first state; it’s that I have sort of gone back to it but understand it in a different, hopefully more enriched way. I don’t believe such invisibility within the text is possible, and the fact that I once believed it—with a sort of Dorothea Casaubon-esque, youthful moralistic enthusiasm—was necessary at that time because I would need a direction to orient myself to later on in my career, even if I would never quite get back there.
I did go on believing rivers were not rivers for a while but at the end of the day, I find myself trusting my authors a lot. I couldn’t resist trusting them—I happen to have great, absolutely great authors. It’s just that historically, and even now, translations from Asian literature tend to obscure queer readings—for example, the whole debacle around the Netflix translation of Evangelion. So I’m not going to translate Korean works like a white missionary translator or a meek, churchy yuhakseng would. If I see a pink feather boa, I’m going to translate a pink feather boa, in excruciating detail. That’s what happens when I’m translating. When I’m being a translator, which is almost completely separate from the actual act of translating, I’m going to wear a pink feather boa. I should say something profound about the visibility of the translator as my reason, but who am I kidding, I just like the attention.
AV: I honestly don’t have anything to add to that. In closing, though, two lightning round questions: what’s a text (book, comic, article, poem) everyone should read, in your opinion? And, what is a text you would love to translate at some point in your life?
AH: I’m going to cheat and say: I want everyone to have faith that somewhere, quite near to them, is some text—book, comic, article, poem—that will change their lives, and they should constantly be on the lookout and keep their minds open. And it’s really the same answer for the second question. I want to translate something that will blow my mind.
Anton Hur was born in Stockholm and divides his time between Seoul and Incheon. He is the English translator of Kyung-Sook Shin’s The Court Dancer and Kang Kyeong-ae’s The Underground Village: Short Stories, with five books coming out in 2021 to 2022.
Alex Valente (he/him) is a half-Tuscan, half-Yorkshire white European currently living on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and sel̓íl̓witulh land. He is an award-winning literary translator from Italian into English, though he also dabbles with French, and regularly struggles with Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and Dutch. His work has recently been published in NYT Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, The Short Story Project. His latest book is now out with Penguin Random House US, and he has two novels due in 2021.