Anton Hur, the English translator of Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny, describes “the curse of knowledge” in translation, or the various ways an otherwise learned and well-meaning translator can inadvertently sabotage their own work, a common occurrence in a profession where the practitioners tend to be highly educated and often marginalized. Drawing from his own experiences as a professional literary translator, Anton talks about the helpful and harmful effect of educa-tion in translators, the factors of translators’ positions in so-ciety that lead to certain artifacts in the product, “the perfect bilingual problem”, and how translators can break the curse and the various false binaries that bind their practice in order to grow not just as translators but as readers and human be-ings. Anton explores the double-sided nature of knowledge, discipline, and theory as relevant to his own process of bringing Cursed Bunny into English, combining (or queer-ing) the two “genders” of translators—theorist and practi-tioner—to propose a learned but intuitive practice tailored to and by the specific translator.
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