i worship in technicolorwith my despairbody chairbuddythis is what i dolook upa sphere of lightgrief bodydust and a wish:my hand inside the ventriloquistrelease the dummylook upopalbody celestitebody tourmalinebody topazlike a crystalline joyosphere shimmering insideits own electric equilibriumparticles moving world inside the lightwindchains sunwreaths coalbondsi place the lighti place the world inside the light and look
Rule: Now rewrite from the perspective of the woman in the chair of Peter Blume’s 1932 painting Light of the World.
Katrine Øgaard Jensen
Author’s Note:
A mistranslation of Ursula Andkjær Olsen, after Sawako Nakayasu, via Peter Blume. From Ancient Algorithms (Sarabande Books, 2025).
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“Rule: Now rewrite from the perspective of the woman in the chair of Peter Blume’s 1932 painting Light of the World.” from ANCIENT ALGORITHMS: by Katrine Øgaard Jensen.
Published by Sarabande Books on September 30, 2025.
Copyright © 2025 by Katrine Øgaard Jensen.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Katrine Øgaard Jensen is a poet and translator of Danish literature. She is the 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, and has been a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Ancient Algorithms, her collaborative poetry debut of mistranslations with contributors Sawako Nakayasu, Aditi Machado, Baba Badji, CAConrad, Paul Cunningham, and Ursula Andkjær Olsen, was published by Sarabande Books in September 2025. Jensen’s 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). She currently serves as Executive Director of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA).
Equal parts exercise and exorcism, Ancient Algorithms recasts translation as an endlessly generative art form unto itself.
"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
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