Katy Henriksen Interviews Katrine Øgaard Jensen on the Writerly Balancing Act

Creative Independent hosts a conversation between journalist Katy Henriksen and Katrine Øgaard Jensen. Leading the discussion, Henriksen asks, "You’re a writer, journalist, translator, poet, and editor. Why do you work in all these forms and how do they inform each other?" They go on to discuss the process involved in translating Ursula Andkjær Olsen's poetry collection Third-Millennium Heart. From there: 

My different roles inform my work in different ways. Definitely my background in journalism informs my own writing, but also my translation, because translation actually requires a lot of research. For Third Millennium Heart I ended up doing a lot more research than I thought I’d need to, because the book is such an onion. It has so many layers, and it’s all about things being inside and outside of one another. I ended up spending hours in these internet rabbit holes trying to figure out what it was that the poet I was translating was talking about. Journalism definitely has helped me a lot in terms of understanding a text and getting into the depths of whatever a writer intended with the text. In terms of my own writing, I love doing research and discovering little weird scientific facts or discovering new worlds.

I have a lot of weird books at home that inspire me. There’s one called Islands in the Sky: Bold New Ideas for Colonizing Space, which informs my poetry a lot. It opens my mind in different ways. It’s just one example of many books that I enjoy perusing when I’m trying to get new ideas. It’s not all particularly scientific, but some of it is. I have one book on angelic language that’s by some pseudoscientist. It’s called The Complete Enochian Dictionary and it’s some scientists who believed they had found the language of angels. I like delving into research of real worlds and also imaginary worlds when I do my writing.

Without a bunch of scholarly annotations, people may not realize how much work goes into your translations. I’m wondering how that extensive research is folded into your final product?

When I first read Third Millennium Heart, I thought, “Oh, no big deal.” I thought it was an easier work to translate than it actually was when I really delved into the text. At first I just translated it in a pretty straightforward way, but then halfway through the book I realized that there’s a lot more to this text than what I first thought, because there are some phrases that are odd, and places with very subtle differences in the Danish language that made me look it up, and then I realized it was a reference to something. Then I had to go back and find all these places where the language sounded a little bit off, and realized it was because it was referencing Kierkegaard or Nietzsche or Hegel. There’re also tons of references to the bible and a lot of scientific body language.

Read on at Creative Independent.