Award-winning translator Anton Hur can add another achievement to his vita: successful novelist. Toward Eternity is an ambitious, rewarding, and dazzling meditation on the intersections of biology and technology, mortality and eternity, and collective and individual memory, as well as the meaning and necessity of art, and love.
Hur is a gifted conductor, worldbuilding across shifting eras and multiple narrators, and regardless of—or perhaps due to—the scientific considerations, the narration centers on the essence of humanity. He is as lyrical a novelist as he is a translator, and the exhilarating forward momentum of the story is in delicious conflict with the desire to savor each beautifully penned chapter.
Hur and I engaged in an epistolary conversation about translation, poetry, humanity, and of course, eternity, in this increasingly fraught political and cultural moment.
Mandana Chaffa (MC): Toward Eternity has been categorized as speculative fiction, but the scope of the novel transcends the limitations of genre silos. What were you imagining when you first started writing it, and how did it alter during the process?
Anton Hur (AH): I’ve always written science fiction and speculative fiction—horror, fantasy, near-future narratives, the uncanny—so I pretty much knew that whatever I wrote would end up in that vein. This isn’t revolutionary by any means, as Emily St. John Mandel, David Mitchell, Jeff VanderMeer, Mariana Enríquez, Sayaka Murata, and our very own Bora Chung have long made literary science fiction a recognized and popular subgenre, to the point where authors who did not start off in speculative fiction, like Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ian McEwan, have now moved in. I think of Toward Eternity as continuing in this newer tradition. I don’t think I tried to transcend genre silos; I think the genre kind of transcended itself, and those of us entering it now are being transcended with it.
MC: The human condition—and whether humanity, such as we name it, will exist in the future—is one of the rich veins of Toward Eternity, and it’s a strength of the novel that you’re always angling the narrative both personally and (literally) universally. Without such tethering, given the breadth of time and subject matter, this could be solely a philosophical treatise, yet the internal lives of the characters as well as the regenerating notebook makes it an intimate experience. Would you talk about how and why you structured the narratives as you did?
AH: The book actually had a lot more action throughout that we ended up cutting. I say “we” because it was a collective decision between me, my agent, and my editor. There was a whole chapter set on the space station that was structured like a police procedural. It was me basically feeling a bit bored and wanting to see people run around a bit. I think my agent and editor could feel this was the case, and if they could feel it, readers would as well, so they very gently nudged me to take out those parts and bring out the emotion of the characters more. For the record, they always made it clear that the final decision would be mine to make and that they wanted me to be happy with the novel when it came out. But I loved taking a sledgehammer and bashing away at the manuscript, because you never really get to do that in a translation. At best, you might move around a paragraph, but even then you need permission from, like, five different people. But when it’s my own novel, I can do whatever I want. I’ve always enjoyed the collaborative process of translation, and I was happy to discover that novel-writing can be just as collaborative. I told a childhood friend of mine about my novel and she suggested one of the characters should have children. I thanked her in my acknowledgments. My editor also suggested some parts I might expand on, and the parts she suggested I write are now my favorite parts of the novel. Even my editor’s son gave me crucial input on a plot point that ended up saving me from a gigantic narrative morass, and I thank him in the acknowledgments as well.
As for the epistolary notebook structure, I think instinctively I wanted something more intimate and interior, and it happened to be the easiest way to do it. I liked the idea of the book being passed on from character to character, each continuing the story of their new shared humanity. I could’ve written it in interconnected short stories, or what is called a composite novel, or just a third-person-omniscient Victorian voice-of-God-or-George-Eliot sort of novel, which is one of my favorite forms, but this seemed to be the one that made the most sense at the time.
MC: One of the characters, Mali, sets the linguistic stakes of the novel—and of our existence—in the early pages: “Are scientists the poets of the natural world? Or are poets scientists of the imagined world?” The complexity of language, and its limitations, is woven throughout the novel, yet conversely, the existence of this world you’ve created defies the assertion of those limitations. Tell us about the role of poetry in your life. What poetry do you have on your shelves, in any language, that you return to? More specifically, might we also talk about nineteenth-century British and American poetry and the role it plays in this book?
AH: Much of this novel, like my entire translation career, is born out of a profound laziness. I became a translator because I’d been doing translation work since I was very little, and as I was growing up, I did not want to bother learning a new skill, so I simply expanded my client list and coasted on my bilingualism. Similarly, when you write a novel, you need to do research, and I did not want to do that at the time, so I relied on what I knew, which was Victorian poetry, with a smattering of American and eighteenth- and twentieth- century verse (I wrote my master’s thesis on Christina Rossetti, and the English program at Seoul National University kind of requires you to choose a specialization, even for their MA). I justified this laziness by reasoning that the Victorian era was when science fiction really began to flourish in the anglosphere, and we all love steampunk—even Will Smith made a steampunk movie—and, you know, my brain is really great at coming up with lazy excuses, and the novel is the result.
I absolutely adore poetry, and I’ve translated Ocean Vuong into Korean for Moonji Publishing and will translate Lee Seong-bok’s poems into English for Knopf. I’m really not known for working with poetry, which I find amusing because poetry is actually my specialization. There are so many great poets—recent favorites are Alice Oswald, Omar Sakr, Ocean Vuong, Kim Un, and all the million translations of Sappho. I am planning on writing a novel about Wordsworth somewhere down the line, for which I would actually have to do research, but hopefully fun research.
MC: I’ve always appreciated the intersection of math and poetry, a beautiful, odd companionship between art and science. There’s such geometry to this collection, with the connecting narratives, multiple personae, and of course the circularity and overlap of time. Could you tell us about your science background? Given your prolific literary output, I’m half-expecting to learn you have also translated science pamphlets.
AH: Oh, I absolutely have translated science pamphlets! I was also copyeditor of a science and technology policy journal in Korea for a couple of years. Those were some interesting papers, I can tell you that. Technology is endlessly, endlessly fascinating, and I would’ve loved to have become a scientist, because the idea of devoting your life to discovering and comprehending scientific truth seems sacred to me, and very exciting. I double-majored in psychology as an undergrad, but it was really a neuroscience program because I loaded up on subjects like behavioral genetics, fear conditioning, neuroeconomics, and so on, and didn’t take any of the more popular clinical and social psychology courses. Not that I’m looking down at those fields— they just interested me less at the time. I was keen on becoming some kind of scientist for a while, and the neuroscience labs at Korea University happened to be right next to the College of Law. I also worked in tech very briefly, as a full-stack web developer, after taking half a year of coding boot camp. So I did end up picking up a new skill after all. But it’s funny to think that, for my entire adult life—and I am middle-aged now—I have essentially only had two jobs, translator and coder. That’s still pretty lazy.
MC: A passionate ode to language, a sensitive exploration of the nature of identity, and a thoughtful reflection of the perils of scientific progress, Toward Eternity is also a complex political deliberation. The threat of external oversight over what it is to be human, let alone who and what gatekeeps and controls language, is sharply seeded in this fictional society, and resembles our own travails, whether government-based or in academia or even publishing. How much have your own experiences across industries and countries influenced this aspect of the novel? Do your location and the communities in which you engage alter your human expression?
AH: My husband’s field is technology and its impact on society, so we have discussions about this all the time. Many of the other points you mention are probably related to the fact that I was raised as a third-culture kid, which means I had a non-immigrant, expatriate childhood. People are very pressed with the definition of “expat” these days and misunderstand it as some kind of racist euphemism for “immigrant,” but an expat is someone who lives in a foreign country with the ability to return to their country of origin, whereas an immigrant is someone who moves to another country to become a part of their citizenry. My family had no interest in or intention of becoming Swedish, British, Ethiopian, American, or Thai, so we were simply expats in those countries, not immigrants. Being a third-culture kid means inhabiting a third-culture or internationalist space where people from all over the world can gather and meet everyone else midway. It’s part of why my novel takes place all over the world—all over the universe, really—and why I love literature and poetry and art, because the arts are the true third culture where we can all meet and be in communion with one another across space and time.
MC: I’ve long admired your advocacy and generosity for the art and its practitioners by supporting translators’ rights, providing guidance, and, of course, being part of the Smoking Tigers. Is this a golden age of translation? I know we’ve been talking about eternity, but what do you hope to see more of in the present?
AH: I got a bizarre message recently from a Korean translators collective who said they were launching and had no wish to compete with Smoking Tigers. It was an odd thing to say to me. The whole reason we set up Smoking Tigers was to collaborate with each other, and our policy has always been to encourage the rise of a thousand translator collectives, but perhaps because we have been so spectacularly successful as individual translators, people have this notion of Smoking Tigers as being the Bene Gesserit or something. We’re just very close friends who happen to be in the same industry and occasionally workshop together. It’s not that special— anyone can make a collective! We just happen to be one of the earliest, that’s all. I’m often told that I’m an advocate for translators, which is very kind of people to say, but my advocacy is very self-serving. I mean, I am literally a literary translator myself, so if I’m advocating for literary translators, doesn’t that mean I’m essentially advocating for myself? Even when I see a great sample someone else did in a workshop and try to connect that translator to an editor I think would be interested in it, that’s because I believe that only by making an effort to publish the best translations can the ecosystem—and myself—truly thrive. There are so many great translators out there with wonderful projects, and I want to see them published, and yet publishing is so inefficient in finding these gems. If I can step into the breach, I try to, for the sake of the ecosystem and, by extension, myself. It’s all about me in the end; I don’t think much beyond that.
MC: You’re a remarkably prolific translator. Did the work on your novel go as quickly as it seems your translations do?
AH: I’m not sure if I’m particularly prolific, to be honest. I think my apparent productivity is a distorted effect of having always had projects ready to go and then being double-longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize just as my translation of Baek Sehee’s I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki was becoming an international bestseller, after which everything I was pitching at the time suddenly got sold. Bora Chung and I are still riding that wave. It’s a good thing we didn’t actually win, because I’m told the winner, Geetanjali Shree, is so in demand that she basically lives on airplanes at this point, and her translator, Daisy Rockwell, apparently has not one but two agents. Now that’s prolific!
MC: Your broad range of literary tastes includes books that would otherwise be unavailable to us, such as Indeterminate Inflorescence, another difficult-to-categorize book. How do you select your projects at this juncture of your career?
AH: As a lifelong professional interpreter and translator, being able to handle any client in any area of business has always been a point of pride for me, so I naturally brought this attitude to literary translation. I didn’t care if the work I was interested in was fiction, poetry, nonfiction, not a bestseller in Korea, self-published, genre, or any of the other limitations and demarcations that struck me as arbitrary. You can’t survive in the professional interpreting world if you’re particular like that—you have to be able to pick things up quickly, which was a useful skill I learned in law school, where they give you an incredible amount of reading for coursework, much more than what I had to do for grad school in English. I knew I had the translation part down pat, it was just a matter of finding the right publisher and reading audience. And I’m grateful that I managed to do so for works like Indeterminate Inflorescence, which found wonderful advocates like you in translation. The success of these obscure books truly made me realize that I cannot do this alone and that I have never accomplished a single thing on my own in my entire life.
MC: Have you seen Battlestar Galactica? As an immigrant to this country, I was struck deeply by the Cylons—the humanoids—and how they belong or don’t, how they are the Other, not Us. Regardless of citizenship, I’ll always be the Other, and that informs both my place in society and, more so, my own sense of self. You examine this topic so richly in Toward Eternity. It’s a reminder that speculative fiction is awfully effective at excavating the flawed underpinnings of society: what makes us human, biologically and emotionally, and how tenuous that definition is, let alone what may be done to those who don’t fit within such narrow definitions.
AH: I do love Battlestar Galactica, all versions of it, but definitely the new version the most. You know how they say you should never mock someone with an accent because it means they took the time and effort to learn that language? Meanwhile, the French, for example, tend to be nakedly xenophobic against those who try to learn their language, an attitude I find utterly repulsive. This is just one example of how the West weaponizes language discourse to Other and exclude and dehumanize migrants and other members of the Global Majority that they exploit for their own profit. A robot can speak perfect French; it’s not some kind of grand, humanizing achievement to master it as a language. It’s the effort we take to make space for each other that makes us human, it’s something we have to give to each other. And that is something I made a central theme of my novel.
MC: I was taken with your decision to structure the final chapter, “Eternity,” as the shortest, and with the most open space visually; the relative sparsity of words felt like a dwelling in possibility. Within that space, the displacement of fact or knowledge, for lack of a better phrase, might be the beginning of something new. I also wondered how this unknown future is leading into another past, as it were, the same way that going back into our distant past, this universe’s distant past, might lead us to a more evolved time than what we imagine.
AH: That’s a really great point that I haven’t thought about before. I read somewhere—god knows where at this point—that the universe is expanding, but eventually it will contract again, and then another big bang will recreate the universe anew. So this idea of the universe’s time being circular appeals to me a lot. Some say the universe may lose too much energy for the contraction to happen and we’ll basically be this listless, inert space indefinitely, and a very excellent SF novel explores this possibility, but I won’t mention its title because I don’t want to spoil its ending. I had the ending for my own book quite early on in the process and was writing toward it almost the whole time I worked on the novel. Every ending is a new beginning in a way, and I hope Toward Eternity takes that idea and many other ideas to its natural conclusion.
MC: “The words may die . . . but not the song.” Despite internecine wars, environmental disasters of the highest order, and more, there’s a lovely hopefulness at the end of Toward Eternity: art survives. Poetry survives. Our human “mutations” and imperfections are the source of our creativity and individuality. What we choose to name ourselves—like the Eves—what we think for ourselves, and yes, our mortality, is the essence of humanity, and I dare say, joy. As Eve Delta—the Eve of Change, perhaps?—said: “Sometimes, I feel that these poems, while they come from the past . . . somehow, they also come from the future.” Which leads me to my next question: What’s in your “near” future?
AH: I had this idea that if love is indeed the only thing that survives, what would that look like? And what that looks like is the ending of this novel, where love has survived the people who created that love, and all of humanity itself. We like to think of ourselves as captains of our own ships, but ships don’t cross oceans, it’s the oceans that allow or disallow ships to traverse them. Similarly, we don’t create the future, near or far. We try to navigate our way through it the best we can, like a tiny, microscopic boat on a vast ocean that covers more than half the planet. I have no idea of even what’s in my near future. The future always throws me the oddest of curveballs. The fact that I was born at all, the childhood I had living around the world, my accident in the Korean army, my translation career, meeting my husband for the first time, and now my writing career. The only one of these things that I deliberately planned and worked for is that last one, and even then, so much of it hinged on chance. Life is just one big black swan event after another, and I can never predict what will come down the line.
MC: I read in a recent New York Times interview with the futurist Ray Kurzweil that he believes the Singularity—the point at which we might be able to merge with AI and, in Kurzweil’s view, achieve immortality—is only about two decades away. I know I don’t want to live forever—Christina’s comment that “I am tired and writing is exhausting me” hit close to home—though I wouldn’t mind a fresh four-terabyte hard drive implanted in my brain. Do you want to be immortal?
AH: I think any rational person can very easily see how horrible being immortal would become very quickly. I got the idea for Toward Eternity when I thought up this imaginary cancer therapy that had the side effect of making people immortal, and when I tried to think about what that would mean, the first thing that came to mind was the prospect of living without my husband for centuries, and that just seemed flat-out horrible, unless it meant I would have a little extra time with him, just a few more years. But what would life afterward be like then? I wanted to find out, for some reason. This story did not come about from a desire to be immortal, which strikes me as an embarrassingly egotistical desire. Anyone who wants to live forever must surely be the most fatuous person alive. Why on Earth would anyone want to live forever? Immortality just seems like such a tedious proposition to me.
But yes, I would also like a 4TB drive installed in my brain.
Anton Hur was born in Stockholm and currently resides in Seoul. He studied law and psychology at Korea University and specialized in Victorian poetry at the Seoul National University Graduate School English program under Dr. Nancy Jiwon Cho. He won a PEN Translates grant for his translation of The Underground Village by Kang Kyeong-ae and a PEN/Heim grant for Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny, the latter of which was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize. His translation of Sang Young Park’s Love in the Big City was longlisted for the same prize in the same year. His translation of Violets was longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Awards. His other translations include Kyung-Sook Shin’s The Court Dancer and I Went to See My Father, Hwang Sok-yong’s The Prisoner, and Baek Sehee’s I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki. He has taught at the British Centre for Literary Translation, the Ewha University Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation, and the Bread Loaf Translators Conference. Anton is the author of Toward Eternity (HarperVia, 2024) and is represented by Safae El-Ouahabi at RCW.
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