'ANTHEM' Publishing Contract Payment

'ANTHEM' Publishing Contract Payment | ₩2,000,000 As part of my Korean translation and publication of Ayn Rand's ANTHEM (앤섬), I received ₩2,000,000 from Zezebooks, the book's Korean publisher. It felt strange that something I had begun out of intellectual curiosity, spending hours debating the meaning of individual words and rewriting the same sentences, had eventually acquired a monetary value. I decided to contribute the full amount to common&good, turning a personal literary project into a resource for our collective work. I couldn't help comparing the experience to my wages from Daiso. There, I was paid for the hours I worked, each shift with a clear beginning and end. Translating Anthem was different. There were no fixed hours, and sometimes an entire afternoon would pass with only a few sentences to show for it. Both experiences made me question how we assign economic value to labour, and why the relationship between effort, time, and financial reward is rarely straightforward. More importantly, the experience reinforced something I had come to believe through common&good: contributing to a cause need not be separate from pursuing one's own interests. Running, writing, working, and learning could all become different ways of generating resources to share. I had begun translating Anthem because I wanted to engage with ideas that challenged my own, never imagining that the project would eventually support something else I cared about. There was a certain irony I appreciated in that. A novel about the discovery of the individual had, in its own unexpected way, become part of a collective endeavour.