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| Commendation Award winner Giulia Macri |
After taking a Korean course at Yonsei University, she took the Interpretation and Translation Course for six months at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.
She has always had an interest in translation. So after learning English at school, she first picked up translation as a hobby, translating magazine articles from English to Italian or the other way around.
When she came to Korea, she took on a Korean-Italian translation job, but it wasn't until she began studying at the LTI that she found her dream as a literature translator, hoping to introduce Korean literature to an Italian audience.
Macri translated the short story, "The Forty-Four Lives of a Wedding Dress," by novelist Chung Se-rang.
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She said that she fell in love with Chung's style of touching on "heavy topics in a very humorous way," when she first came across her work. She added that her recent wedding, in August, influenced her to choose the novel.
"Chung Se-rang seems to be only an observer here, and I really liked the overall tone. She tackles the struggles that marriage can bring to women and talks about the institution of marriage and its contradictions through the 44 characters introduced in the short story," she said.
"I thought this piece was very Korean ― a window on Korean women's idea of marriage, but at the same time extremely universal. I think everyone will find at least one episode in this short story that they can empathize with."
Although Chung's style of writing is rather straightforward, Macri said that delivering the same flow and subtle sarcasm hidden in the text was the hardest part of translating this novel.
"I wanted to achieve just as punchy a translation as the original text, something that reads as smooth as butter. And when I say that she is 'easy to read,' I don't mean that her prose is bland ― on the contrary, her prose is spectacular," she said.
"I don't know how she does it. It looks so simple and yet you can see that she chooses each and every word with extreme care. I really wanted to carry that into the translation," she said.
As an aspiring literature translator, Macri hopes to make her translations as seamless as the original text.
"For me, a good translation is one that doesn't read as a translation at all. I understood this especially while reading Anton Hur's translation of 'Love in the Big City' by Park Sang-young," she said.
"When I translate, I am very concerned with the readability and the tone of the story. I want the characters to pop off the pages and I want each of them to have their own voice. I hope one day to publish a translation that does so," Macri said.
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