Poetry Grand Prize winner Gene Png
Gene Png is a Seoulbased illustrator and Korean-English literary translator from Singapore. She came to Korea to study at Yonsei University’s Underwood International College, earning a bachelor’s degree in Asian Studies.
After completing the regular program at the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea), she became a mentee for the Emerging Translator Mentorships program at the U.K.-based state agency, the National Centre. She expects to take on freelance translation projects in the coming weeks.
Png first got into literature translation when she met Korean American literary translator Sora Kim-Russell in school.
“When she described to us the work that she does, I was immediately invested. Literary translation felt like something that combined my love for reading and writing, and something I could see myself doing for a long time,” she said. “I haven’t been translating for long — only two years, since I only started translating when I started the regular program at LTI.”
She translated a selection of Jeong Hanah’s poems, including “Everlasting Snow,” to enter the competition for this award.
“I love the imaginative worlds that Jeong Han-ah creates. Through the lens of fairytales, folktales and her very own characters, she captures both the beauty and ugliness of our reality, and she does so with a mastery of tone and register,” she said. “Also, I appreciate writing that is honest and bare, and Jeong Han-ah’s prose is exactly that.”
Png said that making word choices to deliver the puns and wordplay in the poems precisely was the most challenging part of this work.
”Jeong Han-ah uses quite a bit of wordplay and puns in her poems so I struggled with translating those. I spent a lot of time looking up homonyms and synonyms, and deciding which meaning I was going to prioritize,” she said. “I didn’t know if I was making the right choice (and still don’t know), but that process reminded me once again of what I cherish most about translation, that it’s an art form with endless possibilities.”
Winning the highest honor, the Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism Award, along with the grand prize, she believes a good translator has the ability to deliver the same experience of the original work to new audiences.
“I think good translations are capable of recreating experiences for new audiences. Perhaps it is something achieved through attentive reading and genuine care for the story and its characters,” she said.