Alumna and Professor Katrine Øgaard Jensen '17 Publishes 'Outgoing Vessel'
Alumna and Adjunct Professor Katrine Øgaard Jensen '17 recently published her latest translation of Ursula Andkjær Olsen's poetry, Outgoing Vessel, from the Danish through Action Books.
Outgoing Vessel is a book-length mirror poem which won the Danish Critics Prize for Literature in 2015. It reads as a sequel to Olsen's previous book-length poem, Third Millennium Heart (Broken Dimanche Press/Action Books 2017), also translated from the Danish by Jensen. The poem explores grief, feminist poetics, technoscience, and more in a poetic voice that the Harvard Review has called "sparse, guttural truth...an unsparing, lucid worldview."
Jensen's translation of Third Millennium Heart was met with great praise and was the winner of the American Literary Translators Association's 2018 National Translation Award. Judges Sawako Nakayasu, Kareem James Abu-Zeid, and Jennifer Feeley said of the book, "Danish poet Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s compelling work travels through dark chambers of desire, power, and creation, conjuring up a feminist space where culture and nature wage war with one another, where psychology and anatomy merge to create a uniquely modern mytho-poetics. Katrine Øgaard Jensen’s masterful translation has a strong rhythm all its own, and captures the book’s jarring quality in a remarkably smooth rendering. By the end of this insidious text, the reader is just as “namedrunk” as the book’s enigmatic lyrical subject, and discovers that their own “heartspace,” too, has been torn open, dissected, and beautifully recreated."
Read an excerpt from Outgoing Vessel below, courtesy of World Literature Today.
*
so many dead
their eyeballs are filling this vessel
grave
vessel
grave
vessel
the earth is a slow fire
re: counting the dead:
I have a strategy in place
I HAVE A STRATEGY IN PLACE
*
longing moves in all directions
like a spherical light scattered around me
I brush my hair in its circle
to be more concise:
human longing scatters like a
BIG BANG around this
around the human
out in the wet grass
hair
it’s this BIG BANG that must be returned in its original condition,
an infinitely solid sphere;
must be moulded into a hard, smooth material
and placed in the hole below the heart
where it must remain
Katrine Øgaard Jensen (b. 1988) is a poet and translator from the Danish. She is a recipient of several fellowships and awards, including the 2018 National Translation Award in Poetry for her translation of Ursula Andkjær Olsen's book-length poem, Third-Millennium Heart (Broken Dimanche Press/Action Books 2017). She teaches creative writing and literary translation at Columbia University, where she served as Acting Director of LTAC (Literary Translation at Columbia) from 2019-2020, and is currently the LTAC Coordinator.