Ancient Algorithms

In Ancient Algorithms, Katrine Øgaard Jensen mistranslates, rewrites, and remixes her award-winning translations of Danish Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s poetry based on a series of self-imposed rules and rituals in collaboration with poets Sawako Nakayasu, Aditi Machado, CAConrad, Baba Badji, Paul Cunningham, and Ursula Andkjær Olsen herself. Envisioned as a shared debut, this collection of collaborative poems is equal parts exercise and exorcism, a haunting of literary influences that repositions translation as the very act of writing—exploring what it means for something to be an original, a translation, a poem.

Katrine Øgaard Jensen is a Danish poet and translator based in New York. She is a recipient of several fellowships and awards, including the National Translation Award in Poetry, the Kenyon Review’s Peter Taylor Fellowship, and the Danish Arts Foundation’s Young Artistic Elite Fellowship. Her translations include Third-Millennium Heart (Action Books 2017), Outgoing Vessel (Action Books 2021), and My Jewel Box (Action Books 2022) by Ursula Andkjær Olsen, as well as To The Most Beautiful by Mette Moestrup (co-im-press 2024). Since 2016, she has taught Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Columbia University, where she served as Acting Director of Literary Translation at Columbia (LTAC) from 2019-2020.