[Pick] “The power of K literature”… Poet Kim So-yeon's 'One-character Dictionary' Awarded for Japanese Translation

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Poet Kim So-yeon (55)'s 'One Character Dictionary' (2018, Mind Walk) was selected as the winner of the Japanese Translation Award.

The Japanese Translation Award Committee announced on its website on the 17th that it had selected the Japanese version of Poet Kim So-yeon's 'One-character Dictionary' ('一文字の辭典') as the 8th Japanese translation award.

The Japanese translation award is given to outstanding foreign literary works translated into Japanese, and Korean literature was selected as the grand prize in 2015 (1st time) for Park Min-gyu's 'Castella', and in 2018 (4th) Kim Young-ha's 'The Murderer'. This is the third time after 'Memories'.

In particular, unlike Park Min-gyu's 'Castella' and Kim Young-ha's 'Memoir of a Murderer', this award is not in the genre of 'novel', which first won the Japanese Translation Grand Prize. 

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The 'One-letter Dictionary' is

a dictionary-type book that poetically defines the meanings of 310 single-letter words

from

For example,

the dictionary definition of the word

or to be alive 2) life or life', but in this book, poet Kim So-yeon poetically defines the word 'life' over 10 pages. 

This rather unusual form was first attempted by her poet's earlier work 'Mind Dictionary' (2008, Mind Walk).

In 'Mind Dictionary', under the theme of 'words of the mind counted through emotion and intuition', words related to the mind were collected and dictionaries were grouped by unraveling their meaning. you got it

The publisher, Maum Walk, announced the award through the official SNS account and congratulated Kim So-yeon's award, saying, "I hope that there will be many such beauty that cross borders and meet readers from all over the world."

Meanwhile, the Japanese translation target was Ukrainian writer Clarisse Respector (1925-1977)'s 'Starry Time' (A hora da estrela, 'Your Story About Me').