 I'm Annie Fisher, the Vice President of the American Literary Translators Association. I'm excited to open this video commemorating the short list and winner of the 2020 Lucian Strike Asian Translation Prize. 2020 marks the 11th year for the Lucian Strike Prize, which recognizes the importance of Asian translation for international literature and promotes the translation of Asian works into English. Strike was an internationally acclaimed translator of Japanese and Chinese Zen poetry, a renowned Zen poet himself, and a former professor of English at Northern Illinois University. Welcome everyone, we are excited to have you here to celebrate with us. The judges for the 2020 Lucian Strike Asian Translation Prize are Noh Anultai, John Balcom, and E.J. Ko, who selected the short list and winner, who will receive a $6,000 prize. We will be hearing from Noh Anultai with the blurbs for the short listed titles, and then we will go to E.J. Ko for the announcement of the winner of the 2020 Lucian Strike Asian Translation Prize, followed by a brief conversation and reading with the winner. Please feel free to follow along the awards brochure found in the description, and we encourage you to purchase these titles from the bookshop.org page also found in the description. When you do, you support local bookstores. Engage with us in the comments wherever you're watching, and tag us at littranslate on Twitter and use the hashtag Aalto43. And now I'll turn over to our judges. And the short listed titles for this year's Lucian Strike Prize for Asian Literature and Translation are First up, we have Hysteria by Kim Yeodum, translated from the Korean by Jake Levine, Sotun So and Heji Choi, and available from Action Books. These poems against rationality, lyricism, and polite society resist established Korean literary culture in the tradition of Korean feminist poetics, even as they reckon with both political and personal revolutions. Next up, we have Noh Poetry by Cho Chan-Si, translated from the Chinese by Yunte Huang, and available from Polymorph Editions. In these poems, there's a playfulness with convention, both literary and orthographical, and with the reader's expectations for the logical and the linear. The bilingual edition allows us to appreciate how Chan-Si lays out words across the page, uses geometrical shapes, and examines the shape of Chinese ideograms. Through Huang's skill, Noh Poetry has not also meant Noh Translation. And finally, we have Pioneers of Modern Japanese Poetry, which features poems by Muro Saisei, Kaneko Mitsuhara, Miyoshi Tatsuji, and Nagase Kiyoko. These were translated from the Japanese by Takako Lento, and the collection is available from Cornell University Press. The collection offers a substantial selection of work from these four poets, who are seminal in the development of modern poetry in Japan, and it succeeds in rendering the range of voices distinctly. The collection is further enhanced with a general introduction, while each poet's work is staged with a preface on his or her life and career. Congratulations to all of those who made the shortlist from me, John Balcom, and E.J. Cole, and to everyone who submitted and made the price possible. We thank you. We'll see you next year. This year's winner of the Lucian Strike Translation Prize is Hysteria by Kim Idem, translated by Jake Levine, Sol Solon, and Hedji Choi, published by Action Books, and I'd like to invite the winners to turn on their cameras. This is amazing. So I'm just going to open up and dive right in, but I'd love to talk a bit about how this book came out right before the need to movement in Korea. We'd also talked a bit about the Gangnam murder and continuing a tradition of Korean feminism. Please do share. This book came out right before the popular discourse on feminism really kicked into high gear in Korea. I think before maybe like 2015, 2016, like the word feminism would have been barely recognizable in national discourse, but during the mid-2010s, around that time, a lot of things happened that kick-started feminism's return to Korea with events such as the Me Too movement and the infamous murder in Gangnam where this lady was murdered in a public restroom in the middle of the day in like a very populated area where it should have been safe, but it wasn't. And the murder repeated many times the police that he was waiting for a woman to come by because women like ignored him all the time. And Korean authorities denied that it was a hate crime and the reaction to that kind of like denial and the disillusion of safety was so big that people like women from all over Korea responded like really heavily to that and it made national news. And from then on, I think like the floodgates had opened to really welcome feminism back into popular national discourse. And Hysteria was published like a little bit before that as like this kind of like sentiment was brewing. And I think it is an indicator of that kind of current happening around that time. There's also a lot of, I was just thinking about this, there's a lot of situations in the book, there's tons of situations in the book that are like everyday circumstances that women have to go through like for instance, riding the subway and being touched inappropriately. I remember reading the book and this was when I came back to Korea after going to high school in America and I had known about feminism but it was very much from like an American perspective and like all the literature that I had read about feminism was in English and then I came to Korea and like encountered these ideas and I read this book and I was extremely surprised by how differently feminism came to like seem to me when it was applied to a life that I could recognize as like much more closer to my reality. And for me personally that was very meaningful. Thank you. That was wonderfully said and done. I have a second question for you guys, I know it's quite a bit but I'm so drawn to how the poems they accordion through the lines that compress with the motion and others that expand across poems with multitudinous voices. Can you speak to the performance aspect that a reader encounters in these poems? So Edom, Edom's first book in English was translated by Jiyun Lee, Dami Tway, and Johannes Warnsley. And so like Kimi has two books but with two books of poetry with six different translators and so it kind of fits in my introduction and the introduction that we wrote together and there's a famous painter Jung Jung Ja in Korea who kind of like paints herself into all these different situations of women that she saw when she was traveling and she kind of paints the same like self-portrait of herself as like the African woman in the savannah and like self-portrait of herself as like on stage doing cats on Broadway. And I'm like this for Edom in her poetry also she embodies all these different personas in her poetry and so I think Johannes said when the first book came out like it makes sense to have multiple translators for some poets because they have multiple voices you know her voice is a voice of the many. Yeah it's really incredible to witness all those different facets just in that one book and across translations and Hedji did you want to speak a little bit about the challenges you guys faced as translators? Yeah in most other cases of translation what I typically have trouble with is translating ambiguity so if there's something that in Korean could mean multiple things then should I try to retain all of those possibilities in the English is that possible or should I like resolve it to what I think is the most interesting or significant or perhaps likely meaning that was in the Korean. But with hysteria I think is a little bit different because what was challenging was not translating the ambiguity but translating chaos like it's a book about hysteria how do you translate hysteria so that it's legible and like is that even the goal and I think in translation there's always like inadvertent chaos that's introduced as well and so like how do you keep that separate should you keep that separate from like the original intended chaos that's in the book. I think that's it for today but congratulations again to each of you and right now Sohn will read a little bit from the collection. Thank you EJ. Thank you. Wow. Country whore. There are a lot of Jinju Kisei but I've been told our family didn't have any. The Jinju Kisei who lived under the skirts of Mount Chiri have the longest history but our family only had chased women no Kisei. When father reads from the family register he lists nobles and scholars no peasants slaves or merchants one afternoon we watched the Jinju Kyobang Shaman dance in the Chokseongmu Pavilion. I met the eyes of a woman performing a sword dance. She was wearing socks and traditionally traditional and brightly colored cloth covered her hands. How did we not have any Kisei in our family but we didn't have a government slave on to plug the kaya gun with a fluffed heart when the moon rose by the window a grandmother who killed herself because she didn't like attending to drinking parties a beautiful slave girl mother and uncle who crossed rivers to pedal colorful silk or a peasant grandfather who used his sword out of contempt and scorn. That's so disappointing. How do we have an ancestor who saved the country every time he faced an insurrection but not a single daughter who was sold off to be a Kisei? It's depressing. So where did the Kisei in my mind come from? Tonight by the river I want to sell inspiration. What to do with this decadence? My decadence would sell my soul for a single line of a poem. Which star is that Jin stuck to? My adult entertainment sword dancing every night I'm no different than a physical horse strapped to the indenturement of a private loan. I'm a Kisei, but I'm not a girl sold off for a sick mother. I'm a voluntarily obscene and debauched emotional whore. I wake up with the feeling of having done it so I puke and drink and do it again. I shake my ruffled hair like a person coming to save the mood of a party. In a mess I write something. I walk to the south side of the Jinju River. Tonight is a using festival. Drunk people at the night market talk at me. National flags painted on paper lamps float above. They fall into the river and get tangled up. Lights float on the filthy breaths of people who spill out of the country market. They give life to the night. The shoveled and sleepy I pull out my pen and bite. Unaware ink is dripping from my lips. I sit by the river side and write something. I sob. I'm obsessed with the lines I write. I'm a mad woman who finally believes she is bound to poetry. The devil appears. He pulls down his pants in front of my eyes. I'll give you a line if you give me a suck. Is he really the devil? Even if he is, I will suck and suck and suck and suck and suck. I sleep and wake and walk outside. Without desperation, without shame, I bite a big pen and suck until poetry comes. I'm an emotion slut. When I say I'm a poet, it feels like I'm confessing I'm a whore. No one in our family sold themselves, Father said. We never had blood like you. I stroke my pen and shake violently. I feel like an old filthy whore on a full moon night when the country festival is booming. I'm dancing a sword in each hand.