On Translating Modern Korean Poetry

This research monograph explores the intricacies and complexities of translating modern Korean poetry. It highlights the difficulties entailed in translating Korean poetry, due to the lexical, structural, social, expressive and attitudinal levels with which the translator must be engaged.

Jieun Kiaer is Associate Professor of Korean Language and Linguistics at the University of Oxford. She publishes widely on East Asian translation, with particular emphasis on Korean translation. Her publications include The Routledge Course in Korean Translation (2018) and Korean Literature through the Korean Wave with Anna Yates-Lu (2019). Kiaer is the series editor for Routledge Studies in East Asian Translation.

Anna Yates-Lu is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology in the Korean Music Department at Seoul National University. Her research focuses predominantly on the traditional Korean sung storytelling art form pansori, which she has analysed from a variety of different methodological approaches, and she teaches and performs the genre herself. She has been active in providing translations and subtitles for performances and films, most recently The Singer (Cho Jung-rae, 2020).

Mattho Mandersloot is a literary translator working from Korean into English and Dutch. He earned a BA in Classics from King’s College London, an MA in Translation from the School of Oriental and African Studies and an MSt in Korean Studies from the University of Oxford. Among others, he has translated bestselling authors Cho Nam-joo and Hwang Sun-mi. He has also led poetry translation workshops for the Poetry Translation Centre in London. In 2020 he won the Korea Times’ 51st Modern Korean Literature Translation Award for his translations of Choi Jeongrye’s poems.