LTI Korea 
DLKL 
SIWF 
Emerging literary translators often come up and tell me how much they want to be like me. They mean well, and more power to them, but I do find myself thinking: Are you sure about that?
At the beginning of Chuseok in 2023, my husband and I landed in Taipei for a vacation, whereupon I promptly fell asleep for twenty hours straight. Because I was exhausted. Right before we left for Taiwan, I had managed to hand in my translations for both A Magical Girl Retires and I Want to Die but I Still Want to Eat Tteokbokki, do a TV interview for a book I had written in Korean about my life as a translator, and attend a regular literary workshop session. I remember lying in the dark in Seoul just before we left, trying to get my work-addled brain to sleep and thinking, I cannot keep living like this, I will die.
I knew then I had to change the way I worked in 2024, because somehow, I had nine full-length manuscripts due that calendar year, with at least one book translation due every month from December 2023 through June. I also had teaching, traveling, and prize-judging commitments, was somehow publishing a novel I had written, and was going on tour in the US and UK, as well as Australia and Singapore.
I don’t want anyone to get the impression that I’m a workaholic or that I love to work. I’m actually very lazy. That’s why, early in my career, I took the trouble to calculate the minimum amount of work I would have to do to live modestly in the city of my choice.
For the sake of illustration, let’s update those numbers for 2025. The median household income in Seoul was around 57 million won in 2024. An LTI Korea translation grant is around 12 million won for a full-length novel of average length, which means a literary translator has to complete about five books a year to survive in Seoul. If one has an earning partner, their earnings can be deducted from the 57 million goal, drastically lowering the full-timer threshold (if not eliminating it altogether). But since my husband was in grad school when I began my career, as the breadwinner I took it upon myself to earn the median Seoul household income myself until he graduated with his PhD.
Every time I considered a project or a gig, I did the math to see if it would be financially worth doing. Ever wonder why even though so many translators publish in literary magazines, I rarely do? That’s because I figured out that putting together a magazine submission took almost the same effort as putting together a book proposal, and selling a book brings in way more money than publishing in a magazine. The point is, I’ve always worked with very concrete numbers, mostly because, again, I’m congenitally lazy and don’t like to work anymore than I have to.
This system fell apart in 2022 when I was double-longlisted for the International Booker Prize and work started pouring in. This doesn’t happen for every translator who loses a Booker, but in my case, everything I had on submission suddenly got sold—including my own novel—and the tide of work rose rapidly. My first-ever author, Jeon Sam-hye, has a saying: Row when the tide is high. Who knew when I would have the time, energy, and opportunity to work at this level again? So I threw myself upon the oars and rowed. I pitched like our house was on fire, taught and lectured at the best translation and literary programs in the English-speaking world, and took so many publishers’ meetings that I made a game of guessing which book the meeting was for while I waited in the Zoom room.
But this level of work was unsustainable. I had to recalibrate, if only to survive the gauntlet that would be 2024. It helped immensely that my literary agent, who had initially only handled the sales and contract negotiations for my own writing, also began handling my translation contracts. I hired a tax accountant (I can no longer imagine functioning without one). I began keeping a bullet journal in addition to the diary I’d kept since childhood, so I could organize my thoughts instead of falling into a feedback loop of panic, anxiety, and exhaustion.
The tide of opportunities continued to rise—it’s still high to this day—but I got better at identifying which requests would be a waste of time and which were more meaningful. I made a concerted effort to work smarter, not harder, said yes to fewer things, and tried to be more mindful of how I reacted to setbacks. Best of all, I discovered an internal rhythm of language that I found I could tap into at will, a rhythm that I could ride to create the language I needed for that day, be it for translation or for writing. I learned to respect and listen to that rhythm. I’m riding it right now as I write this.
So for those translators who say they want to be like me —boys, be unambitious. Be lazy. Do the math, make less noise, and listen carefully. And work smart. Not hard.
Writer 필자 소개
Anton Hur
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