Poetry Commendation Award winners Lee Jeong-ju, left, and Shane Ingan

Shane Ingan is a translator from Indiana, United States. Having an English teacher father, Ingan was introduced to literature from a young age, as his father would tell stories from "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" at nighttime. Although he never had formal training in Korean or translation, he learned the language from podcasts and talking with native Koreans.

Lee Jeong-ju is a translator from Korea who briefly lived in Germany and Thailand. She is currently working as a business manager, having majored in business. But since she was young, she has always had a passion for literature, writing her first short story at age 11.

Lee first got into translation by chance 14 years ago, when she translated the subtitles of an English-language movie for her Korean friend to watch. “I wanted my friends to enjoy what I was reading and watching without being hindered by the language barrier. It was purely for fun, but the experience helped immensely when I worked as a freelance translator for a few years,” she said.

“Now I am back in the business world, but my goal is to still translate books, particularly poetry and fiction. Winning this prize has really given me fresh motivation to move toward that goal.”

For Ingan, it was fairly recent that he got into translation, although he was introduced to literature translation about a decade ago. Going through a life crisis during the COVID-19 pandemic, he decided to jump into the field and has been enjoying the work on and off in recent years.

Currently, Ingan and Lee are working on a full translation of Shin Kyeong-nim's 1990 poetry collection. The co-translators worked on a selection of Shin's poems, including "Short Thoughts in Early Spring,” for this contest.

Expressing their admiration for the poet, they said that they felt more of his work should be shared with the world.

“I believe Shin to be a criminally underrated contributor to world literature. He has had some poems translated into other languages, but not enough ... In 2010, a bilingual edition of it came out as part of the Cornell East Asia Series. I learned a lot flipping through the pages of that book, admiring aspects of Kim (Young-moo) and Brother Anthony's translation, quibbling with other parts of it and seeing if I could do better,” they said.

“Besides that, I simply feel an affinity for the man Shin Kyeong-nim. This affinity is essential to the translation of poetry. You feel it or you don't. If you feel it, you have some hope of bringing the poet's voice over into your own language."

The co-translators said the most difficult part of working on Shin's poems was delivering the rhythm and sentiments of the original texts.

“Sometimes you can bring over into English something of the poem's original rhythm just by feeling it. Other times you have to really hunt for rhythmic variables that might be paralleled in a more technical way,” Ingan said.

“If you're lucky, you hear the poet's voice and you're halfway there. If you're really lucky, the English words fall into place. Other times, you have to accept that the sound of the poem in Korean just isn't going to translate, so you focus solely on sense and imagery.”

Lee added: “It is often difficult to express sentiments in another language, just how they feel to you, especially in poetry, as it is more compact and you can't explain things at length. Finding the appropriate vocabulary and keeping it short enough so as not to disrupt the flow of the original poem was the most challenging part for me.”

For Lee, a good translation means breaking down language barriers to bring people together under creative work.

“People who speak completely different languages are connected through a good translation. They can enjoy one thing, feel the very same sentiment and understand the creator's intention without being affected by the language barrier,” she said.

Ingan expressed he believes staying true to one's translation makes a good translation.

“If you're honest in your effort to really hear the poet's voice in your own language — and headstrong enough not to settle for anything less — then you've got a shot. Besides that, it's all serendipity,” he said.