Meet the 2021 Mentees: Serin Lee (Korean Prose)

Serin Lee was born in Seoul, and spent her time growing up between South Korea and the United States. While she attended Saturday language school in the States, it would be truer to say her love for Korean developed with the variety shows and writers she encountered while attending high school in Seoul. Serin is currently based in Chicago, and is a fourth-year undergraduate studying English and Creative Writing at the University of Chicago.

Serin first dipped her feet into the world of translation in 2019, when she participated in a prose translation workshop led by Annie Janusch in the University’s Creative Writing department. Since then, she has been delighted to continue studying contemporary discourse surrounding translation in classes taught by Edgar Garcia, Jennifer Scappettone, and Nathan Hoks, which have opened her eyes to works such as After Lorca by Jack Spicer, The Obliterations by Matt Hart, and Mouth: Eats Color by Sawako Nakayasu, who selected Serin to read alongside her as the University’s New Voices in Poetry winner last March. Serin is currently drafting her dual BA projects: a comparative analysis of My Life (Lyn Hejinian) and My Winnipeg (2007)’s reworkings of the autobiographical genre, and a poetry collection that focuses on image-text relations and experimental translation.

Spurred by a desire to bring more contemporary Korean literature to light, Serin is excited to approach a translation of Han Kang’s short story collection Fire Salamander (2012) as an ALTA mentee. Though Han’s name has shot up into prominence in recent years, with international recognition for works like The Vegetarian, Human Acts, and The White Book, Han has also spent a considerable portion of her career publishing poetry and short stories—a form that holds special significance in Korean literature. Serin has long admired Han’s ability to weave into language the lattices of trauma and beauty that undergird the everyday, and she looks forward to re-presenting Han’s images in a way that preserves their at once disjunctive and granular detail.

Serin is grateful to ALTA for the opportunity to work with mentor Janet Hong this year, and she hopes that the program’s cross-lingual community will broaden her own conceptions of translation’s craft and place in the present moment.