[57th Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards] Poetry Commendation Award winner Park Se-yeon

For Park Se-yeon, translating poetry meant reading the same lines perhaps a hundred times — and finding that they still had the power to move her. Working on poems by An Hee-yeon, the Korean-English translator and English instructor read aloud, listened to recordings and repeatedly revised her English versions. Familiarity did not diminish their emotional force. “I never grew tired of them. Instead, they moved me more deeply each time,” Park said in a written interview with The Korea Times. “Even now, some lines bring tears to my eyes.” Her translations won the poetry Commendation Award in this year’s Korea Times Literature Translation Awards. Park was drawn to the way An observes human vulnerability without passing judgment or turning it into sentimentality. She wanted English-language readers to encounter the same tenderness, along with the unsettling emotions that emerge from the poet’s vivid, unexpected images. “What drew me to An Hee-yeon’s poetry was the warmth, courage, and honesty of her gaze,” Park said. “She looks at how vulnerable, imperfect, and sometimes