Cordite 35.1: Oz-Ko (Hoju-Hangul) features forty new works by contemporary Australian (Hoju) poets translated into the Korean language (Hangul). These translations have been provided by 김재현 (Kim Gaihyun) and 김성현 (Kim Sunghyun), both of whom I was lucky enough to meet during the Cordite tour of Seoul in May 2011. Here’s a few words about each of them …
김재현 (Kim Gaihyun) is currently studying rhetoric and writing and Seoul’s Yonsei University. She has received training in translation (mostly short fiction) from the Korea Language Translation Institute. She teaches Korean to Malaysian students, and has lived and worked in Kuala Lumpur. She travelled to Sydney in 2009, and especially loved visiting all of the local markets, and eating fish and chips on Coogee Beach.
김성현 (Kim Sunghyun) was born in the southern province of Korea but has lived for most of his life in Seoul. He holds a BA from Myongji University, and an MA from Sogang University where he is writing his dissertation on melancholy and time in T.S Eliot’s poetry. He has published two books of poetry, Metropolis 1 (2008) and Metropolis 2 (2010) and in the future plans to not only translate his own poems into Korean, but also to write them in English.
Our thanks to the KLTI for recommending these two bright young translators to us, and of course to Gaihyun and Sunghyun themselves, without whom we could never have dreamt of producing a bi-lingual issue of Cordite in the first place. In the third stage of Oz-Ko we’ll be introducing you to two more translators and forty new poems – this time from contemporary Korean poets. Stay tuned for that.
