Conversation: Anthony talks to Anton Hur

In early October last year I tweeted a photo of a page from Lee Seong-bok’s book of poetic aphorisms Indeterminate Inflorescence with the caption “I can’t imagine being a writer and not reading this book.” Several prominent writers ended up retweeting the photo. The book’s translator, Anton Hur, had also cotranslated the official BTS book and RM of BTS had shared his enthusiasm for Lee Seong-bok, and once BTS ARMY got a hold of that and related tweets, Sublunary editions sold out multiple printings of the book before its release date. I had already been a fan of Anton Hur’s translation work, especially his frequent collaborations with the writer Bora Chung, and his advocacy on behalf of translators. He frequently shows kindness and generosity to emerging writers and translators. His willingness to answer my questions about Indeterminate Inflorescence, translation, and the writing life is just one example.

—Anthony Garrett for atmospheric

Indeterminate Inflorescence by Lee Seong-bok, translated by Anton Hur (Sublunary Editions, 2023)

You have had several translations published recently and many more announced, you were at the National Book Awards for your translation of Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny a few months ago, your own novel is about to be published. First of all, congratulations. Second, how are you?

Thank you! I’m doing all right. And yes, I’ve become pretty busy in the past couple of years with many more books to work on and increased travel and have had to change the way I work pretty dramatically. I’m grateful for everything that’s been going on, but it’s been a lot of learning about stress management and operating at a level that I never would’ve imagined I’d be doing when I started in literary translation. I remember being at a BCLT Summer School event where Daniel Hahn was working on a manuscript during a presentation and marveling how much work he must have for him to be utilizing every tiny bit of time that he has. I once asked him when he has time to translate and he said in trains and airplanes. I thought he was joking, but that’s my life now. I call it Daniel Hahning.

That’s phenomenal. I once asked my thesis advisor how he found the time to write and he pulled out a receipt he had written on at a stop light on his way to meet me. I don’t recommend that, but where is the strangest place you have Daniel Hahned?

Oh, I’m very basic—buses, subways, airplanes, bus stations, airports, I’ve done all of that. I met Danny at a café in Boston, a city in which he has never lived, and he told me he had translated enough words in that specific café over the years to fill an entire book. Seoul is way too filled with different and great cafés for me to ever show favor to one place like that, but it did give me pause at how prolific you have to be as a translator. One time, I café-hopped until my computer battery ran out, then I worked on my phone until the battery ran out, then I went home and worked on my iPad while my other devices charged and then that device ran out. I remember thinking that was weird, but now it’s just normal. Writers can make money by selling foreign rights and other subsidiary stuff, you don’t have to do extra work—if you sell the same novel in five territories, that’s like selling five books. Without having done extra work! If a translator wants to sell five books, they have to translate five books. We just made a foreign sale on my novel and I was amazed at how I didn’t do any work and this money just appeared out of thin air. So as long as I translate, I’ve got to keep constantly working.

In describing the influence Indeterminate Inflorescence has had on you, you have called it “your MFA,” saying that it taught you both how to write and how to be. It does frequently read like a wisdom text. What was your relationship to writing before encountering it, and how did that change afterward? How does it continue to influence your writing? What has it taught you as a translator? And how has it affected you as a person?

I was rather blocked when it came to writing. I knew I wanted to write but it was very frustrating because I would produce pages and pages and some of it was good and some of it was bad and I couldn’t figure out how to have more of the good and less of the bad. It all seemed so nebulous and mysterious to me. I’d heard of automatic writing and whatnot, I think from my favorite Margaret Atwood novel Lady Oracle, but the extemporaneous approach didn’t strike me as serious or, I don’t know, literary or something. Lee Seong-bok seemed to provide a really exciting alternative to that but describing precisely the process in which the language produces the work, not myself. I should also give credit to Lee Child, who essentially has the same methodology as Lee Seong-bok and whose articles on how to write I also read and was inspired by.

I still write and even translate very much the way Lee Seong-bok gently suggests in Indeterminate Inflorescence, I try to let the language do the heavy lifting and I get out of my own way. I don’t imagine the language as coming from my brain but from the space right above my head. Jon Fosse jokes that his work comes from aliens speaking to him, and that’s what it feels like to me. You just have to be sensitive enough to hear it, and smart or well-read enough to recognize it as literature after you write it all down. It’s a method that really does bring writing and translating together, as I’ve said in my Bread Loaf 2022 lecture that’s floating around the Internet somewhere.

As a person, I don’t know. I guess it lets me put myself off the hook for certain things and not torture myself for not producing as much as I should be? Because the other thing about Indeterminate Inflorescence is that it has made me wildly productive. I am never, ever, ever blocked. It’s made me realize how enormous a beast my language is, or maybe it’s more like those networked mushrooms in forests, or like a musical instrument that I will never be able to get all the music out of in my lifetime. Realizing this has made me a much less anxious person.

I love the way you describe it here. It’s a place I feel most myself precisely as self disappears. In addition to reading Indeterminate Inflorescence, what if any advice would you offer a writer struggling to access that mode? 

The master jazz musician Charlie Parker said, 'You've got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.'" I read about this neuroscience study where they determined that you need to be very practiced in something and then somehow disable the executive functions of the frontal cortex to enter a flow state of creativity. My theory is that many artists resort to drugs and alcohol to disable their executive functions, or their judgmental thinking, for precisely this reason—or did I read that somewhere? Anyway, it’s a very very common idea among artists. Obviously, I do not want people becoming alcoholics for their art, but do find a way to stop judging yourself or your work as you go along and let go. Some people benefit from the white noise of cafés, there are YouTube videos of ambient café noises that you can have on as you work. You just have to find a way that works for you. When I feel disengaged, I try to find something in the work that my mind will notice. It can be something very, very minor, like the way a certain phrase is very alliterative or the way the keys feel against my fingertips, what knots I see in the source texts. That serves as a portal back into the work and into an immersive flow state.

I’ve read through Indeterminate Inflorescence a few times now and open it regularly, sometimes looking for a specific idea or description, sometimes seeing what catches my attention. Different shades strike me each time, but I always come away with thoughts about what makes for more poetic writing and the sense, both about writing and life, that I shouldn't try so hard. In one breath Lee Seong-bok writes, “When you create a metaphor using a for b, you have to make sure you profit from using a. Otherwise, you’re just treading water,” and in another, “Poetry is something no one can do anything about.” I feel while reading as if, through your translation, he sits across from me, gently admonishing. Do less better. What would you say to a reader about the seemingly paradoxical ideas across the book and within individual aphorisms?

I know people hate this word but I really do feel like Lee’s lectures are meant to be therapeutic. Something I was really annoyed about was the fact that English doesn’t have a more explicitly formal register, because Lee in Korean is speaking in a very kindly, gentle, and almost deferential tone. It sounds like he knows we are all very anxious about our writing and being literary and succeeding in our ventures, whatever success may look like to you, so when he says something prescriptive like profit from a signifier else you’re just treading water, he means it in a therapeutic way, that you’re probably forcing something and that’s why the metaphor is dead. In a way, that’s what he’s also saying with the second aphorism you mention, that it’s poetry that makes the decision that it’s poetry, not you, so you should let go of this need to “create” whatever and relax a little. I really don’t think the aphorisms are meant to be riddles or paradoxes or read ironically. They’re quite direct and clear. Any failure of clarity is on the translator, not Lee Seong-bok.

Aphorism, in some respects, differs from fiction, poetry, and the other forms of nonfiction you have translated. While the paradox, play, and generosity of the aphorisms in Indeterminate Inflorescence create a sense of openness and possibility, and though you clearly identify with and appreciate the book, does translating a book that makes particular claims change your orientation toward it? Are there any places in the book you disagree with Lee?

So—a translation is never a “translation” per se but more of a “reading” that a very special reader called the “translator” happens to have. Every subtlety of change in orientation is tracked through the translation itself, so in order to answer that, you would need a critic capable of reading both Korean and English to do a close reading. Otherwise, from what I can remember, I don’t think I really disagree with Lee on anything in particular. You have to realize what a passion project this was and how many of my own rules I had to break to bring it into publication. I wouldn’t have gone through everything I’d gone through for this book if I found it particularly flawed. It is just such a miracle of a book and just amazing that it exists at all.

The book is replete with the type of metaphors it encourages writers to make. Did any present particular challenge in translating them from Korean to English?

It was really the tone that was very, very tricky, making him sound as reassuring and kind and humorous as he sounds in Korean. I have no idea if I managed to achieve that—probably not? Sometimes, you have to sacrifice tone for clarity, especially if you’re working with such a pithy form as aphorisms, but damn that was difficult work. I am very fond of English and its lovely onomatopoeia, but it really has something of a limited spectrum when it comes to register compared to Korean. 

You shared that Knopf is set to publish your translation of Lee Seong-bok’s That Summer’s End. Could you describe the collection a little? In comparison to Indeterminate Inflorescence, what should we expect?

It’s absolutely gorgeous. Talk about profitable metaphors. It’s very Seon Buddhist. Korean Buddhism tends to be quite cerebral and contemplative, and there’s a lot of that in the poetry. There are a lot of generative absences and deceptively simple imagery. A really fun thing has been trying to get away with the most outrageously sparse translations, just knocking out words from the lines and letting the absence of those words and the  shape of the space they leave behind speak for the words themselves.

I really wanted a top-notch poetry editor for this book and the toppest notch I know is Todd Portnowitz, with whom I worked with on Djuna’s Counterweight for Pantheon. He’s just so talented and sweet and great to work with, and the entire team at Knopf are legends. Our first outing will be through the New England Review under the guest editorship of poet-translator Soje, who is himself an idol in the poetry translation world, so it’s very encouraging for me to have his edits and his blessing. And none of this would’ve been possible without Joshua Rothes at Sublunary Editions making such a huge success of Indeterminate Inflorescence when even the goddamn Literary Translation Institute of Korea twice refused to fund this project. Also big thanks to you, Anthony Garrett, and RM and ARMY for making Lee Seong-bok go viral! The true miracle of this book is how it brought all of us folks together. It just shows you how powerfully communal literature is, for an activity that is at the same time deeply private and personal.

I can’t wait to read it. And I can’t thank you enough for the book, your other work, or your generous responses here. They all mean a great deal to me. Your novel Toward Eternity will come out in July. Your most recent collaboration with Bora Chung was released at the end of January. Any other work, your own or by anyone else, you’d like to draw attention to?

Thank you for your support and for this opportunity to talk about my work! I am currently entering the promotion cycle for Park Seolyeon’s A Magical Girl Retires in what is her international debut from HarperVia. It’s coming out in April and it’s about a young woman in precarious economic circumstances who discovers she’s a magical girl. It’s a subtle indictment of the systemic violence women endure in Korea and also a testament of their resilience and ingenuity. Also, I thought it would be fun to do a work like this, for a younger audience. But mostly, I really like this author and I would translate anything by her. She’s incredibly versatile, no two books are the same in style or even genre. As for books by other people, I’m quite excited about the longlist for the Dublin Literary Award, which I’m on the jury for this year, and we’re announcing the shortlist on March 26th! It’s going to be wonderful.