[57th Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards] Poetry Commendation Award winner Noh Hye-yeon

For Noh Hye-yeon, returning to poetry began with opening old files and rediscovering a pleasure that corporate work and anxiety over artificial intelligence had pushed aside. An in-house translator at an automotive company, Noh spent this summer revisiting poems by Lee Su-myeong that she had first translated in graduate school. Revising them brought her back to the literary ambitions she had struggled to sustain. “Flipping through my Roget’s Thesaurus again, I realized just how much I was enjoying translation and how much I’d missed it,” Noh said in a written interview with The Korea Times. “For the first time in a long while, I was doing something that genuinely brought me joy.” Her translations of 10 poems by Lee won the poetry Commendation Award in this year’s Korea Times Literature Translation Awards. The recognition follows her fiction Grand Prize in the competition in 2023. In the intervening years, however, her confidence in a future as a literary translator had faltered. “The arrival of GPT felt like a natural disaster to me as a translator,” she said. Noh continu