Yu-jin Lee - Translator of the Month

How did you end up being a translator of Norwegian literature?

The Nordic fairy tales I read as a child, and the Nordic music I listened to as a teenager, shaped my future. I was born under a military regime and spent my elementary school years in a dictatorship where not even children were free, and where the only freedom and pleasure one could get in such indescribably awful daily life was reading a book. In short, I went into mental exile to Mrs Pepperpot’s little house, Moominvalley and Junibacken. As a child, the Nordic countries were perhaps my spiritual anchor.

As a teenager, I listened to Nordic folk and rock music from the 60s and 70s, and gradually developed a dream about the Nordic countries. I decided to study Nordic languages at a university in Seoul in the early 90s, when these languages were entirely unknown to South Koreans. I also thought it was fascinating that so few people studied them.

When I studied Norwegian, Danish and Swedish at university, I often attempted to translate short Nordic literary texts on my own, and it was then that I experienced the joy of translating for the first time. When I read the Norwegian literary masterpieces, including A Doll’s House, in Korean, I decided to translate Norwegian literary texts that had not been introduced in South Korea, where there was little interest in them. My first translation of Norwegian literature was Garmann’s Summer by Stian Hole, one of my favourite Norwegian authors. That was in 2007.

Is there anything more you would like to share – such as good advice, wishes, words of encouragement, greetings, warnings, reflections, reading tips, dreams, requests, or something else entirely?

We translators are homo viator (wandering humans), who are always crossing the borders between national languages. And we are probably intellectuals on the front lines of humanism, in the battle against inhuman anti-intellectualism. Today the world’s love of books seems to be in decline, but let us keep hope alive and translate as best we can!

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Learn more about Yu-jin on Books from Norway.

Those of you who understand Norwegian can read his interview in full here.

See also other translators interviewed in the Translator of the Month series.