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Ancient Algorithms
An utterly singular project from National Translation Award winner, Katrine Øgaard Jensen.
Equal parts exercise and exorcism, Ancient Algorithms recasts translation as an endlessly generative art form unto itself. Poet-translator Katrine Øgaard Jensen mistranslates, rewrites, and remixes her award-winning translations of 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.
PRAISE FOR ANCIENT ALGORITHMS
“Katrine Øgaard Jensen and her collaborators engage in transritual and transcreation as acts of writing—transwriting. Their varied triggers and processes are spectacular. Ancient Algorithms reveals immense possibilities of language and poetry to become fearless and unbordered.”
—Don Mee Choi, author of Mirror Nation
“The collaborators in this volume embrace the deformation zone of translation, exploring the transformations that take place in translation, and in the process pay the strongest possible homage to Ursula Andkjær Olsen's classic trilogy. These experiments in volatility may change the way you see not just translation, but writing itself.”
—Johannes Göransson, author of Summer
“Where does influence end and invention begin? Does that “cosmic apparatus” we call a poem function more like a puppet show or, say, VR goggles? When does a poem become so intricately formal that it escapes the tug of ego to attain its own ecstatic logic? In Ancient Algorithms, Katrine Øgaard Jensen creates a maelstrom of wonder and writes from the threshold of that otherworld where order and charisma collapse into one another like once-forbidden lovers.”
—Gregory Pardlo, author of Spectral Evidence
“From the untranslatable poetic (neural) network of a semi-private, collaborative abyss, Katrine Øgaard Jensen’s Ancient Algorithms presents a sensual dyadic union of corporeal binaries and cognitive rhythms, where each fusion of body and word refracts into prismic autonomous realities. From the mucus membrane of prompted parameters and rules to image generators and self-governed translations, Jensen’s experiment astonishes with joyospheric lexical colors, taking us to a place where language transcends “twisted chromosomes” of lyrics to become an embodied, highly emotional, noetic space. Her work, like uranium elves, is both wise and quirky and gorgeous and self-looping. Thus, it extends beyond organic data models and their “alchemical will” while revealing lucent truths, more than capable of erecting a new paradise.”
—Vi Khi Nao, author of War is Not My Mother
Equal parts exercise and exorcism, Ancient Algorithms recasts translation as an endlessly generative art form unto itself. Poet-translator Katrine Øgaard Jensen mistranslates, rewrites, and remixes her award-winning translations of 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.
PRAISE FOR ANCIENT ALGORITHMS
“Katrine Øgaard Jensen and her collaborators engage in transritual and transcreation as acts of writing—transwriting. Their varied triggers and processes are spectacular. Ancient Algorithms reveals immense possibilities of language and poetry to become fearless and unbordered.”
—Don Mee Choi, author of Mirror Nation
“The collaborators in this volume embrace the deformation zone of translation, exploring the transformations that take place in translation, and in the process pay the strongest possible homage to Ursula Andkjær Olsen's classic trilogy. These experiments in volatility may change the way you see not just translation, but writing itself.”
—Johannes Göransson, author of Summer
“Where does influence end and invention begin? Does that “cosmic apparatus” we call a poem function more like a puppet show or, say, VR goggles? When does a poem become so intricately formal that it escapes the tug of ego to attain its own ecstatic logic? In Ancient Algorithms, Katrine Øgaard Jensen creates a maelstrom of wonder and writes from the threshold of that otherworld where order and charisma collapse into one another like once-forbidden lovers.”
—Gregory Pardlo, author of Spectral Evidence
“From the untranslatable poetic (neural) network of a semi-private, collaborative abyss, Katrine Øgaard Jensen’s Ancient Algorithms presents a sensual dyadic union of corporeal binaries and cognitive rhythms, where each fusion of body and word refracts into prismic autonomous realities. From the mucus membrane of prompted parameters and rules to image generators and self-governed translations, Jensen’s experiment astonishes with joyospheric lexical colors, taking us to a place where language transcends “twisted chromosomes” of lyrics to become an embodied, highly emotional, noetic space. Her work, like uranium elves, is both wise and quirky and gorgeous and self-looping. Thus, it extends beyond organic data models and their “alchemical will” while revealing lucent truths, more than capable of erecting a new paradise.”
—Vi Khi Nao, author of War is Not My Mother
120 pages, Paperback
First published September 30, 2025
12 people want to read
About the author
Katrine Øgaard Jensen
5 books24 followersKatrine Øgaard Jensen is a poet and translator of Danish literature. She is the author of Ancient Algorithms (Sarabande Books, 2025), a collaborative book of poems with Baba Badji, CAConrad, Paul Cunningham, Aditi Machado, Sawako Nakayasu, and Ursula Andkjær Olsen. A recipient of several fellowships and awards—including the National Translation Award in Poetry, the Kenyon Review’s Peter Taylor Fellowship, the Danish Arts Foundation’s Young Artistic Elite Fellowship, and Kjeld Elfelt’s Memorial Grant from the Danish Translators’ Association—her translations include Third-Millennium Heart (Action Books, 2017), Outgoing Vessel (Action Books, 2021), and My Jewel Box (Action Books, 2022), all by Ursula Andkjær Olsen, as well as To The Most Beautiful by Mette Moestrup (co•im•press, 2024). Previously, she taught Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Columbia University, where she also served as Acting Director of Literary Translation at Columbia (LTAC). Jensen currently serves as Executive Director of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA).
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November 9, 2025
Read this on the plane from Tucson to Chicago- this is the 21st century Oulipo!!!
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