What I do all these days, being the reason why barely anybody knows that I'm here, is working on a translation. It's a Korean short story by Seung-woo Lee. I have never heard of him before and I'm still not familiar with his other works, his background as a writer or his writing style. Research would have been a good idea, but for some reason I've decided to just go ahead and learn his words while reading and rendering this one.
The story is about a young man who quits his knife-delivery job to work for a guy whose elderly father needs company over night because he avoids the dark, therefore refuses to sleep and hence hires someone to help kill his boredom. In the course of the story the reader learns about the young man's real reasons for taking the job and the old man's real motive for his fears.
It's an arguably neat story, but to translate it is a very difficult task, I think. I'm having plenty of unanswered questions. Switches in tense and mad repetitions are my main concerns, just don't know how to handle them yet, but also culture-specific terminology and direct speech are obstacles at this point. Obstacles I have to make friends with as soon as possible.
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