Anton Hur: “The plan was always to write, not translate”

How did you end up working on Lee Seong-bok’s book Indeterminate Inflorescence, a translation of his poetry lectures that draw inspiration from Seon Buddhism?

Lee Seong-bok is one of Korea’s most popular and well-respected living poets. He is a practitioner of Seon Buddhism, a form of Mahayana Buddhism practised in Korea. Korean Buddhism is very intellectual, pared down, minimalist. In Korean Buddhism, you have a system called Hwadu. It is a form of enquiry where you contemplate upon a topic or a question, which becomes a kind of meditation. Lee Seong-bok’s poetry is informed by his Seon Buddhist practice. He looks at how paradox functions in poetry, the traps that language sets up for us, the misdirections it leads us to, and attempts to transcend those misdirections.

Would you call this a distrust of language itself?

No, see that’s the odd thing! He trusts language a lot. In Indeterminate Inflorescence, he goes so far as to say that language is what writes poetry – not you! His thought process is like this: your brain doesn’t write poetry; your hand does, so try to keep your brain out of your hand’s business. He says that you can edit or think as much as you want about the poem, but do it only after language has written it. Getting out of the way is the wisest thing to do.

Does this mean that Lee Seong-bok views the poet as a sort of conduit?

Yes, exactly! He thinks of himself as a vessel for language.

Are you too a practitioner of Seon Buddhism? How did you get drawn to this book?

No, I don’t have a religion. There is a very dramatic story behind how I got involved with this particular translation. The book is not a huge best seller in Korea. I discovered it at a bookstore. It is a book of aphorisms that have been taken from Lee Seong-bok’s lectures on poetics. When I explain what the book is about in just a sentence, most people don’t get it because it is hard to classify this book or pin it down. I would say that it is a book of poems about writing poetry because the aphorisms are poems in themselves. They were put together by students who attended his creative writing lectures. I loved them so much. It is a very liberating book. I was writing my novel Toward Eternity at the time, and was feeling blocked.

Reading Indeterminate Inflorescence freed up my writing. It made me trust language. I realized that, in the act of writing, I didn’t need to lean on myself. I could let language take the writing, the narrative, where it needed to go. That’s how Toward Eternity got written. And I wanted to translate the aphorisms because it is my firm belief that the best Korean literature should be translated so that it can travel outside of Korea and benefit a lot more readers.

How was your experience of finding a publisher for the aphorisms?

The Literature Translation Institute (LTI) of Korea denied translation funding for this book twice. But I got a really encouraging response when I presented a sample before other translators as part of a workshop hosted by the British Centre for Literary Translation. There was an explosion of interest. They said, “Wow, this is incredible but it’s only 20 pages. Do you have more?” This whole experience was so affirming. I told myself, “My translation is really good. Perhaps LTI Korea is ignorant about what a good translation is.” So, I went ahead and submitted my translation on the Sublunary Editions portal. They accepted it overnight. I mean that literally. I submitted, went to bed, and woke up to an acceptance.

I loved working with Joshua Rothes at Sublunary Editions. It is a really great independent press. Thanks to tweets from RM (South Korean rapper, songwriter and producer) of BTS (South Korean boy band), who loves Lee Seong-book’s aphorisms, and the BTS Army (an online community of BTS fans), there was tremendous interest in the book online. It sold a lot of copies before the release, and went into multiple reprints. It also got nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Poor LTI Korea! They don’t know how to judge a good translation! The book will be out in the United Kingdom later this year with Allen Lane.

In Toward Eternity, your new sci-fi novel, we see artificial intelligence being trained to read poetry. You studied Victorian poetry at graduate school, and were reading Lee Seong-bok’s aphorisms while writing the novel. How did all these things come together?

Toward Eternity is a Frankensteinian book. Whatever the language asked of me in the moment, I gave it. In the book, you get to meet Nomfundo. I do have a friend with that name. I love her, and I have always liked her name so I asked if I could use it for one of my characters. And she said yes! Nomfundo has a lovely daughter named Mali. I asked her, “May I use your daughter’s name as well?” She said, “Yes, go ahead!” These two people I know happen to be South African, so I told myself, “I guess the book is now set in South Africa.” That, by the way, is the only reason why Toward Eternity is set in South Africa. I just trusted the language to know what it wants. I would be in the moment and analyse only later. To be honest, a lot of the ideas and events in the book were selected by my subconscious.

This is surprising because the novel has historical details about how the world’s first human-to-human heart transplant operation took place in South Africa, and that South Africa was the first country in the world to constitutionally outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation. How do you look back at the serendipitous choice of the setting? It doesn’t seem random. It seems to have been lurking in your consciousness for a while.

(Laughs) These details did not require any research because I have a lot of really good friends who are from South Africa. I haven’t been there but I have learnt about South Africa from them. Because of the division between North Korea and South Korea, I have been interested in what South Africa has managed to do. I remember the 1990s when, during the apartheid, it seemed to everyone around the world that South Africa was going to descend into chaos and civil war. Thanks to the efforts of a lot of people, including Nelson Mandela, they managed to keep the country intact, give rights to everyone, and have a one-state solution. That’s the dream! We should have had that too but haven’t because of the powers that be. To see South Africa have this is extremely moving for me as a Korean person. Of course, South Africa has its own problems and not just this utopia vibe. I guess another reason for the setting is that Cape Town is so beautiful. I have seen a lot of pictures. It also has this beautiful collection of micro-climates, so I put in a lot of tree names to get that across. The idea was to portray it is a sort of Eden because the novel explores humanity’s fall.

Did the theme of immortality, which you explore in the novel, come from your engagement with Seon Buddhism since you were reading Lee Seong-bok’s aphorisms?

The way that I wrote Toward Eternity is exactly how Lee Seong-bok describes the act of writing in Indeterminate Inflorescence. It may be a Seon idea that literature is not created by a person but by language itself; the person who thinks of himself as a tool-wielder becomes the tool for language to do its work. It has been a very generative, very useful idea for me though I am not a practitioner of Seon Buddhism. My father is a practitioner.

You had tweeted about your father in 2020 when monks and representatives from the Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism conducted a ritual prostration protest supporting the Anti-discrimination Act that protects queer people, foreigners, and other minorities. You wrote, “This is the sect my father belongs to. Their teachings are part of why I grew up in a loving home with a father — a cishet male Korean born in 1947, living in Korea — who immediately accepted me for who I am, encouraging me to live a life as true to my “real self” as possible.) How did Seon Buddhism enable your father to accept you?

Well, it is difficult to say whether my father responded the way he did because of Seon Buddhism or whether he is a compassionate person and therefore Seon Buddhist practice happened to suit him the best. He was not raised Buddhist. He was raised in some form of evangelical Christianity. I was raised Catholic because my mother’s family is all Catholic. I am technically a Catholic but not really! That said, the Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism — which I think is the biggest faction of Buddhism in Korea — is politically and officially aligned with queer rights. Catholicism in Korea is unique. They are very progressive, and also fairly tolerant with respect to homosexuality and queer rights.

While Toward Eternity is being sold as a work of speculative fiction, it is also a love story involving two gay men — one Korean, and the other Thai. What was it like for you to craft this narrative? As a young Korean boy, did you get to read stories like that?

I think we all end up reading gay stories one way or another. Queer literature is everywhere, even in the classics or especially in the classics! It didn’t really feel like I was crafting this story for the sake of representation. It was nothing very deliberate like that. I just had this very abstract idea that if we could replace all of our cancer cells with nanites then we could cure cancer. And if the nanites took over and the entire body transitioned into an android, what would happen? The person who receives this therapy would be functionally immortal. What would happen if you were to become immortal? Would that be a good thing or a bad thing? Would it be a side effect or a feature of this therapy? I determined that it would be a side effect. If I were to receive this therapy, it would mean that I would survive my partner by centuries. That doesn’t sound like a great prospect to me. I used that idea. The character in the book who makes the choice to get the therapy does it because it will let him have at least a few extra years with his partner. For him, those extra years are worth it despite the hell he is living through after the partner is gone. Because I was putting myself in the character’s shoes, a lot of my own story became part of the book. My husband is Thai.

What kind of research went into the book, especially around cancer?

Almost none, to be honest, as far as cancer goes. But I had to look up the names of some roads in Cape Town because there is a car chase in the book. I was surprised to find the name Victoria Road, and it became a great fit because Victorian poetry is part of the book.

When you ventured into writing fiction, did that decision come from sensing a lack of the kind of stories that you wanted to translate or from an urge to create something from scratch where you wouldn’t have to keep referring to someone else’s text?

Well, the plan was always to write, not translate. I have been a professional translator since I was a little boy. To be more precise, since I was 12, I was translating from English to Korean and Korean to English. When we lived overseas, people paid me to translate and interpret for them, so it became my job. I was good at it, and I liked it. But the goal to write my own books had always been there, so I thought that it would help to know a bit about publishing. I have lived in (South) Korea for 30 years. I said to myself, “Well, I don’t live in London. I don’t live in New York, so how do I get into publishing?” I then figured out how to become a literary translator which, I must say, took a lot of effort.

Surprisingly, my work became a runaway success. I had no idea that literary translation would bring me to Bhutan, for example. (laughs) Being at the Drukyul’s Literature and Arts Festival here in Thimphu is a very random thing to have happened to me. Of course, it’s a wonderful thing too! So, yes, becoming a literary translator was sort of my way into becoming a writer. But one could also look at it the other way round. I always wanted to write, and that led me into becoming a translator. It is difficult to imagine myself giving up literary translation. Even if I do become a really famous writer, I would still be translating.

What were you translating at the age of 12?

Everyone needs translation or interpretation. It is an essential skill, and one of the oldest professions in the world. When we lived overseas, we had Korean friends who were not very fluent in English. I used to accompany them to doctor’s appointments and also look carefully at the bills they received and tell them what was written and explain how to pay them. They needed someone who could translate well into Korean, and I was paid for this. To this day, I do not translate or interpret for free because I am in the habit of getting paid.

That sounds like a good habit. You said that you lived overseas. Where was this?

I was born in Sweden, and lived there for a year. I have lived in Hong Kong when it was British, and then in Thailand and Ethiopia. But I lived mostly in (South) Korea as a child. We would go to these other countries for brief stints, usually about two or three years.

You have travelled and seen a lot of the world. How does it feel to be in Bhutan?

I think that they have wisely adopted a policy where they don’t want the kind of tourism that is destructive; for example, they don’t want residents to be removed in order to bring in more Airbnb units. They want to protect their culture and their ecology. This might sound a bit reductive but I think that Bhutan is the way it is because it is closer to heaven. All the temples are very high up! Actually, the entire country is like a temple in itself. It is a bit isolated. The whole tenor of the country encourages you to value attention and non-material pursuits. The global capitalist world has a lot to learn from Bhutan and Bhutanese culture.

When do Indian readers get to meet and listen to you in person?

I would really like to visit India but I have to be invited (laughs). I am keeping my calendar open for the Jaipur Literature Festival 2025, and I am willing to go on record.

Chintan Girish Modi is a freelance writer, journalist and reviewer.