Kim Ideum's 'Hysteria' Wins Both National Translation and Strix Awards

Jake Levin, Seo So-eun, Choi Hye-ji Joint Translation
"An Interesting and Surprising Work Composed of Irrational Witherings"

Jake Levin, Seo So-eun, and Choi Hye-ji, who jointly translated Kim I-deum's poetry collection Hysteria, simultaneously won the National Translation Award and the Lucien Strick Translation Prize presented by the American Literary Translators Association. This is the first time in the history of the American Literary Translators Association's literary awards that a single work has received both honors.

On the 15th (local time), the American Literary Translators Association selected and awarded the three translators. The National Translation Award is a prestigious American literary translation prize given by the association, now in its 22nd year. The Lucien Strick Translation Prize is a special award given to those who translate Asian poetry. It was established in 2010 in honor of Lucien Strick, an American poet and Buddhist literature translator. Previous Korean poetry collections to receive this award include Kim Hye-soon's Trash of the World, Unite (2012) and Autobiography of Death (2019), both translated by Choi Don-mi, a Korean-American poet and translator.

Hysteria, published by Kim I-deum in 2014, was released in the United States by Action Books last year through a joint translation effort. The judging panel described the work during an online conference as "an intriguing and astonishing collection composed of deliberately excessive and irrational poems." They added, "It resists nationalism, lyricism, and social norms, continuing the lineage of Korean women's poetics."

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