Q&A With Anton Hur

I am delighted to be doing this Q&A with Anton Hur! I had the pleasure of reading his novel Toward Eternity back in the fall & fell in love with it! This is coming from someone who isn’t the biggest sci-fi reader. Anton has also translated many novels from South Korea into English! 

Q: Anton, would you please give a brief description of Toward Eternity? Where did the idea for the novel come from?

A: My novel is about a cancer therapy that has a side effect of immortality and how this leads to the end of humanity. It explores what endures, and what endures turns out to be poetry and love. I had the idea in a shower and was so bored that my boredom produced an idea for the therapy. Because it’s my instinct to turn my thoughts into novels, as I am more of a novelist than a poet or engineer or musician, this is the direction I went into.

Q: What drew you into translating and writing? Would you say that translating novels from Korean to English helped with writing your own novel?

A: I always wanted to be a novelist. Translation was more of an accidental career that I ended up liking a lot. I will always be a translator; I’ve only ever had one other job and that’s as a full-stack web developer. Translation helped my writing career in the sense that it took a lot of pressure off the writing and allowed the writing to flow. I got to trust the language a lot more because of translation, and that’s the most important thing for me as a writer. 

Q: Do you prefer writing your own stories or translating other books from Korean to English more? Which parts are your favorite and least favorites of both?

A: Well, writing is a lot easier than translating, so there’s that for writing. I can’t quite figure out why writing is privileged over translating when there are a lot more writers than translators. Aside from the act itself, it is so much easier being a writer than being a translator. So, it’s hard to really say which I prefer, because I do like a bit of pain and resistance, otherwise I would’ve quit translation a long time ago. I like that writing is easy and translation is hard, if that makes sense. 

Q: For your second novel, will it be like Toward Eternity or will the story be something else entirely? 

A: I think it’ll be lighter and funnier. I went so dark with my first novel and that is not my personality at all. I am a very irreverent, effervescent person, but the darkness is where my language took me, and I went with it. I’m 15,000 words into my next English novel and it’s beginning to go somewhere. I can tell, because I’ve run into a wall, and it’s when you’ve run into a wall when the real action begins. That’s when you begin to go somewhere. 

Q: What lessons do you hope readers learn after reading Toward Eternity?

A: Reading novels is not educational for me. I don’t read to be smart, I read to be sexy. So maybe I hope that for the reader? Not to be aroused, necessarily, but feeling better in their skin and in their minds, I guess? Toni Morrison said literature should be anti-therapy and far be it from me to go against anything she’s said, but sometimes therapy looks like anti-therapy. Sometimes, what we need looks very different from what we want. 

Q: Who would be your dream cast to play the characters in Toward Eternity once Hollywood gets the film rights? 

A: We had a great cast for the audiobook, and it would be cool if we could bring that exact cast to the screen. I know the rules of Hollywood financing make this impossible, unless the book itself becomes so popular that it doesn’t matter whether you have an A-list star or not. So, my dream would be for the book to become just that, a book so wonderfully successful that it could cast whoever we really wanted to cast instead of trying to shoehorn in Chris Pratt or whatever.

Q: What is your advice for anyone wanting to be an author or translator?

A: Follow the language and see where it takes you. Become an excavator of your own language. Give up control. Get out of your own way. This makes it sound easy; it really is not. It’s the hardest thing. Many writers have turned themselves into alcoholics in the attempt to get out of their own way. Find another way to do that. Getting published is not worth becoming an alcoholic.