Our runner-up for the title of most widely read article of 2025—also courtesy of Assistant Interview Editor Sarah Gear—is our interview with Anton Hur from the Spring issue. A Korean-English translator who debuted in our pages nine years ago, Hur’s work includes Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Sehee, I Decided to Live as Me by Kim Suhyun, and Beyond the Story: 10-Year History of BTS (number one in the NYT’s 2023 bestseller list). Hur is a literary force with much to learn from, this enlightening interview takes us through his writing, thoughts on language, AI, activism, and his role as a judge for the International Booker prize.
Gear points to Hur’s blog as a boon full of advice for emerging translators, such as how to draft successful pitches to publishers, amongst other notes. In this interview, for one, Hur acknowledges the frustrations of the current publishing industry that is, to no one’s surprise, “racist and sexist and homophobic and xenophobic.” This is a gap that can be addressed by hiring more translators of color and those working from their heritage languages—Hur’s success is a testament against native-speaker elitism in the translation space.
In 2025, Hur has translated the likes of Bora Chung, Le Young-do, Sung-il Kim, Kim Choyeop and Park Seolyeon. With ‘at least five’ titles slated for 2026, Hur’s writing is the gift that keeps on giving. That includes, of course, his own exceptional novel, Toward Eternity.
The discussion of this novel offers profound takeaways. The plot explores the larger role of language and poetry through an AI machine named Panit, who learns how to understand poetry. Toward Eternity, as described by Gear, “explores the nature of what it is to be human and, I would argue, the intrinsic importance of literature—a reflection of Hur’s academic background in Victorian poetry, his experience of translation, and his belief in the power of language.”
Modern questions on AI and language are masterfully explored; one standout observation is the idea that anything by AI is made in our image. As a man-made creation, its creations in-turn reflect our own capacity. This is by no means a celebration of its use, rather, this is a comforting reminder that our potential mimics and exceeds anything AI can do ‘creatively.’ Language is one of Hur’s central interests, and it is thoroughly dissected in conjunction to his work.
Language to me is an interesting parasite that I have managed to create a kind of symbiosis with. It will exist long after everything that is Anton Hur has disappeared from the universe. There’s a scene in my book where a dying character recites every single poem she has ever known, over and over again until she dies, and she describes her belief that every time she reads or recites a poem, it changes that poem forever as it exists in the fundamental structure of our cosmos. That’s my belief, a belief I keep where other people keep Jesus or the Flying Spaghetti Monster or whatever. Literary translation, to me, is an act of reading, much more so than an act of writing, and it is a way of mutating and perpetuating a language parasite into a new ecosystem, a new realm. I serve these parasites, as these gods bestow me with translation grants, award nominations, literary prestige, money to buy a house, nice dinners for my husband and all that. I am a religious zealot of the cult of the language parasite, and like most cult leaders, I am fleecing the acolytes for my personal gain. The fleecing just looks a lot like literary translation.
Gear follows-up on this take; if ‘AI’ is built on the ‘biases of its builders,’ how does this apply to translation? Hur offers a simple truth: the human interiority embedded in his work is precisely that—human. Translation is drawn from the depth of creativity: “Everything—from what I choose to translate to how I calibrate the narrative distance to what tone and register I give to the characters or the narrator—is imbued with my own sense of being and the way I use language and put memories and readings together. I’m the filter that connects it all into a pleasing aesthetic.”
Hur is full of revelations backed by experience. Literary translation is presented as an act of reading before writing, and beyond that, an act of reading so closely it evolves into an art form. Hur builds these blocks further—“Writing is like a very easy form of translating. With writing, the language can go wherever it wants to go, but translation can’t meander too far from the source.”
Hur holds language in the highest esteem. Rightly so, for when we all turn to dust, poetry is our final imprint on the universe. This interview is flush with nourishing thoughts, translators and readers alike will undoubtedly enjoy it.
[. . .] when I asked myself what we would discover in us when everything that we consider human—our bodies, our very species itself, the ecosystem that we can’t live separately from—is gone, what we will leave behind is our poetry and our language, because these are things that kind of have a life beyond us and are a part of the fabric of the universe in a way that our survival is not.
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