The lecture will center around the process of co-translating We Do Not Part, the latest novel by the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Han Kang. The novel deals largely with the long-buried history of the Jeju Uprising, a wave of resistance to state violence, namely the state-sanctioned massacres that began on April 3, 1948, and continued through May 1949 in locations throughout Korea but primarily on Jeju Island. Key topics of the lecture will include the process of co-translating the novel, the collaboration among the translators and the writer, researching buried histories, translating trauma, and the connectedness of the themes in this novel to the author’s previous works, as well as the connectedness of the Jeju Uprising to past and present incidents of state violence and resistance. The talk will conclude with a Q&A, drawing questions from the audience.

Paige Aniyah Morris is a writer and translator from Jersey City, New Jersey, USA. She holds BAs in Literary Arts and Ethnic Studies from Brown University, an MFA in English-Creative Writing from Rutgers University, and is a PhD student in Comparative Culture at Sungkyunkwan University. The winner of awards from the Fulbright Program, the American Literary Translators Association, the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, the Daesan Foundation, and more, she has translated several works of Korean literature across various genres with a focus on speculative fiction and stories from the social margins. Along with e. yaewon, she is the co-translator of Han Kang’s WE DO NOT PART.  

Introduction by Hyoungee Kong, Assistant Professor of Art History, NYU Shanghai.

Q&A Session Moderator: Allen Young, Area Head of World Languages, Clinical Assistant Professor of Spanish, NYU Shanghai.