Sung-Il Lee studied English literature at the University of California at Davis (MA, 1973) and Texas Tech University (PhD, 1980), and taught at Yonsei University, his alma mater, where he is now professor emeritus. He has published a number of volumes of Korean poetry in English translation: The Wind and the Waves (1989), THE MOONLIT POND (Copper Canyon Press, 1998), THE BRUSH AND THE SWORD (Cross-Cultural Communications, 2009), ,em>Blue Stallion(2011), The Crane in the Clouds (2013), The Vertex (2014), NOSTALGIA (Cross-Cultural Communications, 2017), SHEDDING OF THE PETALS (Cross-Cultural Communications, 2019), and DO YOU KNOW THAT FARAWAY LAND? (Cross-Cultural Communications, 2020). His dual-language edition of Beowulf containing his Modern English verse translation of the poem, (2017), is now at the Bodleian Library.