Visual artist Sooj Heo, who is based in Germany, has been awarded the Grand Prize in the poetry category at the 56th Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards. Heo discovered her passion for poetry translation through a unique journey that began with sharing Korean poems with her international friends who couldn't read the language.
Heo's translation adventure started with an unexpected source of inspiration. "I wanted to share the ones I loved with friends who could not read Korean, so I used Google Translate's camera feature. The mistranslations fascinated me — how words slip, meanings deform and reassemble. That curiosity led me to start translating myself, to see if I could bring the poem's voice across with more care and clarity," she recalled.
The award-winning translator has developed a particular affinity for Korean women poets born in the 1950s and '60s. Her favorites include Kim Eon-hee (1953-), Choi Seung-ja (1952-), Kim Hye-soon (1955-), and Yi Yeon-ju (1953-92). "Their poems carry the suppressed tension of living as talented women in a patriarchal culture, which I find powerful and haunting," Heo explained.
Heo's selection of poet Pak Seo-won's works happened through serendipity rather than deliberate planning. "I was looking for poems with the same intensity and discovered Pak Seo-won while reading other works published by Choicheuks Publishing, the publisher of Yi Yeon-ju's collected poems. I read [Pak's] collection 'Amudo Eopseoyo' in one sitting and asked a friend to send me her complete works, which were published by the same press," she said. The selection process proved challenging due to the quality of Pak's work. "When I read, I fold the corners of pages I want to revisit. With this book, I folded so many that choosing just 10 poems to translate became the hardest part."
The translation process presented significant technical and emotional challenges for Heo. Preserving the rawness of Pak's language was particularly difficult. "It was difficult to maintain that breathless, incantatory rhythm in English while still making the lines sound natural and readable," Heo explained. Beyond the technical aspects, the work took an emotional toll. "It wasn't simply about sadness or heaviness — her language pulled me into her state of delirium and made me experience it."
Among the ten poems Heo translated, "Calling 1" proved to be the most demanding piece. "I was happiest when I finished translating 'Calling 1.' It was the first of the 10 poems I worked on, and also the most challenging. The sentences run without pauses or periods, making it hard to grasp both meaning and rhythm. I had to take the poem apart to understand it bit by bit, visualize each fragment, rebuild it in English and shape the rhythm," she detailed.
For Heo, translation serves a deeply personal purpose, functioning almost as therapy while helping her navigate her complex relationship with language. As someone who moved to the United States as a teenager, she struggled with English throughout her youth. Later, when she entered graduate school in Korea, she found her Korean feeling incomplete. "It wasn't until I moved to Berlin a few years ago that I began to let go of the belief that language must be perfect to be expressive. Meeting people who spoke many different tongues, I became more comfortable assembling my own language from what I had."
Despite beginning her career as a photo artist, Heo is now transitioning toward becoming a professional literary translator. She is currently enrolled in an online course at the Literature Translation Institute of Korea's Translation Academy to develop her skills further. "Translation is about showing those I live with how the world is sensed and related in the language of my mother tongue. As an immigrant, this act of making that inner world intelligible in another language is deeply important to me," she concluded.
