Bossed in Translation

For the season finale, we sit down with Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg, an up-and-coming American translator of Scandinavian fiction and non-fiction. After falling in love with Danish literature at school, she swapped Long Island for Copenhagen — and hasn’t looked back.

From deciphering Danish idioms to navigating Copenhagen's literary "hothouse," Sherilyn shares her translation journey. You'll hear about learning a language that can sound like "French underwater", translating books that blur poetry and prose, and why AI can't match the human touch for capturing nuance.

Whether you’re a bookworm or a language lover, this episode is a delightful deep dive into the art and joy of bringing Danish stories to the world.

Links:

Sherilyn’s official website

Waist Deep by Linea Maja Ernst

After the Sun by Jonas Eika

Deficit by Emma Holten

The Employees by Olga Ravn

My Work by Olga Ravn

Visit www.archipelagoaudio.com for more information.

Transcript

Sherilyn Hellberg: Each individual word carries so much weight. Or can. Like, we're saying the word "nå" — so much can be under that. It's like the tip of an iceberg, and like every word can be like that in Danish. And then as soon as you kind of like, you know, take the top off the iceberg or like, you know, you try to peel the peach, it's just like very messy. 

James Clasper: Welcome back to Archipelago, the podcast about arts, culture, and ideas in Denmark. I'm James Clasper.

A few episodes back, we explored the Human Library, where the "books" you can borrow are actually people, each with their own story to tell. Well, today we're flipping that concept and talking about actual books. Real, physical books filled with Danish words and Danish stories that are being translated into English for readers around the world.

My guest is Sherilyn Hellberg, an American writer and translator who fell in love, somewhat improbably, with Danish literature. Growing up on Long Island, she could hardly have predicted that she'd end up living in Copenhagen, translating contemporary Danish fiction and non-fiction for English-speaking audiences.

In our conversation, we explore what it's like to learn one of the world's most difficult languages, the creative challenges of literary translation, the greenhouse effect of Denmark's small literary scene, and why AI might not be coming for literary translators anytime soon.

But I began by asking Sherilyn how she describes herself professionally.

Sherilyn Hellberg: I teach creative writing at the University of Copenhagen here in Denmark. I'm a writer and a translator outside of that. I translate mostly literary fiction, some contemporary Danish literature, occasionally Norwegian, and I even more occasionally, Swedish. Both nonfiction and fiction. I write and translate both. I tend to be most drawn to experimental queer, sort of formally experimental, contemporary literature.

James Clasper: Tell me where you grew up because I'm guessing it wasn't Denmark.

Sherilyn Hellberg: No, it wasn't. Though, actually, my last name is Swedish. So I have some like great, great, great grandparents somewhere that came to New York in, I think like around the turn of the 19th century. But I grew up on Long Island, about a half hour outside of New York City in an Italian American suburb.

James Clasper: How does someone who grows up in an Italian-American community or town in Long Island end up with, well, firstly with an interest in Danish literature? I mean, tell me what your household was like. You know, was it a literary household? Did you have something that kind of led you into Danish literature at home? Or, what's the origin story?

Sherilyn Hellberg: Yeah. I mean, so I definitely did not grow up in a literary household. And yeah, in general, not a very literary place. I was pretty much the only person in the town I grew up in who wasn't Italian, Irish, or some mix of those. My mom was French, and my dad was half Swedish and half German and French. And I think for my mom, especially, that her Frenchness was something she was very proud of. So that's actually kind of how it started, in a way that I took French all through school. When I got to college, I studied English and French, and then comparative literature. And then when I went to grad school, I needed another language, and I thought that Danish would be really cool to learn. I had read a lot of Kierkegaard, which actually in Danish is pronounced "Kierke-gaw". And yeah, I decided somewhat on a whim that I would start taking Danish classes. And then I very quickly became kind of obsessed with the place and the culture and the language and the literature. I also spent a year into learning Danish, met my now partner. And then it just kind of went from there.

James Clasper: So was there a particular book or author that got its teeth into you? It started as a whim, as you say, but was there something that made you think, actually, no, this is, this is really something.

Sherilyn Hellberg: Yeah. I mean, so I actually started learning Danish, like I said, I mean in part on a whim, but also because I really loved Kierkegaard, a sort of like Scandinavian existential philosopher. And I came to Denmark the first summer after graduate school to take Danish classes. And to see all the Kierkegaard sites, his grave, which is in Copenhagen. But actually somebody that I met while I was in Copenhagen gave me this like slim little volume of a novel by a Danish writer called Bjørn Rasmussen, called The Skin Is The Elastic Covering That Encases the Entire Body. And it was at that point my Danish was not great. But I was like able to kind of get my way through it and it was completely wild, unlike anything I had ever read. It was just really sort of like visceral and the form was really strange and experimental. It was just felt like it was kind of bursting with ideas and feeling, and then it was like this tiny little volume.

And it hadn't been translated at that point, not much contemporary Danish literature at this point. So this would've been 2015, 2014, had really been translated. It just felt kind of like discovering this little treasure trove of contemporary Danish literature, mostly written by these like young writers in their twenties and thirties at this point.

And when I went back to California, where I was doing my PhD, I just kind of ended up immersing myself in all of these writers. I also discovered through a Danish writer called Olga Ravn, an older Danish writer called Tove Ditlevsen, who is writing in the, yeah, through the 20th century. And that ended up actually becoming the subject of my doctoral dissertation, instead of Kierkegaard. So I think that was what, yeah, really brought me in. So, I mean, first Bjørn Rasmussen and then sort all go down. And then once I had read Tove Ditlevsen, and it was just, it was, it was all over. There was no going back.

James Clasper: I mean, obviously you had to learn the language, so what was that like? I mean, it's not the easiest of languages to learn. So where were you doing that? Was that through the PhD program, or did you have to do it separately, and how easy has it been?

Sherilyn Hellberg: So I started learning it at, I did my PhD at University of California, Berkeley, which is one of the few universities in the United States that has a Scandinavian program. And I didn't know that when I started, but it turned out that they offered Danish classes and that they have a small department. So I started taking formal language classes there. And then I went to Denmark for a summer to take immersive classes. And at that point, I knew some German as well. So picking up Danish to read, that came pretty quickly, but Danish pronunciation and speaking Danish is so hard. It's like one of the most difficult languages. I remember a friend of mine hearing me on the phone with my partner saying that it sounded like I was speaking French underwater. I really like that because there is a kind of softness to Danish, but also really guttural. I mean, some people say it sounds like talking with a potato in your mouth. And then the other thing is you really have to, when you're speaking Danish, because it's sort of such a small language, the population of Denmark is relatively small, the way that you say each word is so precise and the expressions that you use, it really, the language relies so much on idiom. Like, these concrete sayings or phrases that you just have to know. So another friend of mine has compared it to sort of like if you would only be understood if you were speaking with a really thick Long Island accent or a really thick Yorkshire accent. So you really have to perfect it. And if it's anything short of that, people will just switch to English with you because everyone also speaks English here, or most people do.

James Clasper: Yeah. Is there a good example of an idiom that just kind of helps you blend in, as it were?

Sherilyn Hellberg: I have a 2-year-old who's just started speaking, and the word that he says all the time, which I appreciate so much, is "Nå." Which is N and then Å. And that can mean about 50 different things depending on the context. So I mean, it translates to like, well, but it could mean like, oh, or oh man, or well, or like, hmm, isn't that interesting? Like, it can be a bit like snappy. It could be like, yeah, a bit sarcastic. It can just be completely neutral. And it's just like a two-letter word. So I think really mastering the "nå" would help one blend in.

James Clasper: We've gotta continue the story here because it's one thing to kind of be really into the literature, and then another to decide to start translating it. How did that happen? At what point did you think, A, I want to do this, and B, I can do it because I have the facility with the language to be able to do it?

Sherilyn Hellberg: Yeah. I mean, I'd always been interested in translating and I did, before I had gone to grad school, I volunteered at the UN a few summers, where I was doing some translations between English and French, which I thought was really interesting. Yeah, basically, when I found these books by authors like Bjørn Rasmussen and Olga Ravn that weren't translated, I thought they were so interesting. And I just, I really wanted to share it with the other people in my graduate program, with other people. So I kind of, I mean, far before my Danish was good enough, started translating a novel by Olga Ravn called Celestine. And in a way that was also part of what helped me get so into the language. So I was like using translation at first, at least, to kind of like wrap my head around the language to understand it better, to get a feel of the culture and the place.

And I think at that point, I found myself when I got back to California after that first summer really missing Copenhagen. And yeah, to me sort of translating was just like getting to be in this like little pocket of Danish culture and like going back to Copenhagen, and then I think like the more and more I did it, the more that I found that I enjoyed translating and that there is like a kind of creative aspect to it, which was also really nice at the same time as I was like working on like an academic journal article or writing my dissertation that it could just be like switching gears completely.

James Clasper: Yeah. Let's talk about that creativity. So tell me what literary translation involves. It's not just, you know, a direct copy of the dictionary to dictionary. It is much more than that, isn't it?

Sherilyn Hellberg: Yes. I mean, definitely. I think some people, there's another Danish to English translator called Katrine Øgaard Jensen, and she says that translation is creative writing. I mean, no qualifications, it is. And I think that that's true because you need to kind of create things from scratch in a way. You can't just sort of like translate it word by word. There are so many different moving parts. I mean, there's the language, there's like the sentence structure, there's the feel, there's the sense of like the cultural references, things that may or may not be picked up by the reader, that may or may not need context. There's like the rhythm, the way that it sounds. Danish has, like we were talking about before, such particular sounds to it. And a lot of at least the writers that I work with, really play with that, like the tangibleness, the feeling of the words themselves, how they sound.

So there's a lot of different aspects, I think, too, that you kind of have to like juggle at the same time. Like, of course I use like the dictionary sometimes to look up words, but I think that it often ends up being like, that's only a starting point very often. Or like the literal translation, yeah, is only ever really a starting point.

James Clasper: That's some examples. Examples that you can give of the kind of the Danish meaning, or even, you know, rhythm because it would work better in English?

Sherilyn Hellberg: Yeah, I mean, and I think I actually do that. I find myself, so I've been translating for seven or eight years now, and I find myself actually doing it more and more, that like, I think at first it, yeah, you feel like you kind of like have to be really faithful to the original work and the translation. But I think that, yeah, the more time that I spend translating, the more I see that you actually can have a more faithful translation by sometimes shifting things around. So I translated a book earlier this year called Waist Deep, by Linea Maja Ernst. A novel about a group of university friends who all get together. They're in their thirties now. And it's really kind of like about all these different millennial problems and conundrums. And I found myself, yeah, really needing, I worked pretty closely with the author, and just like needing to change almost all of the dialogue in like a really fundamental way.

So I don't know if any of the dialogue was sort of like word-for-word translated because, as a book, it's really trying to capture, yeah, the kinds of conversations. Maybe something like Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends would be like a yeah. Point of comparison to this book where it's like really it's trying to tap into real conversations that are happening or that one would have with their friends or things that you're thinking about. So in that case, it was important that the dialogue especially resonated or would resonate with an American or a British reader. So, for example, there was a line that would literally, it's like, so it's like, Sylvia, who's like the main character of the novel is with her girlfriend, who's like not part of this university friend group. She's feeling a bit insecure and like what she says to sort of comfort her, as they're like on their way to the summer house. Is that like yeah, "du er sammen med mig", which is like, "you're with me", "you're together with me", and I think that like "you're together with me" is a kind of boring sentence. It ended up becoming, "I've got you".

Which is like really different and much more like colloquial and like something you'd actually say and like, "don't worry about it. I've got you". Like, "I'm here for you". So it's like it's not really literal in a way, but it has like the same feeling or the same message to it. And then I think, I mean, it depends on the book so much. I think I found myself with this book in particular going further than I ever have, from the original. I think something that's like, yeah, if I was translating something by Tove Ditlevsen, who was writing in the fifties, sixties, seventies. I would be much more cautious about making those kinds of changes. Especially because like, it can sound a bit cheesy, I think, if you're like trying to replicate slang from the seventies.

James Clasper: Is it more that there's just a bigger corpus of words in English to choose from? So you have a kind of a... to change analogy, kind of a broader palette to paint with?

Sherilyn Hellberg: Yeah. I mean, that's definitely the case. Yeah. And I found, so with this translation, I worked really closely with Linea, and she was very encouraging to kind of like use all of the great words that English has to offer. I think English has a lot more sort of Latinate and Greek words than Danish. And just more words. So we used a lot of these. I remember like, yeah, I think one of Linea’s favorite lines in the book was, they're looking out on this beautiful Danish landscape. And in Danish the line is something like, "det ville være for meget godt". So like “it would be too much good”, or “there would be too much of the good”. And then we ended up translating it to “it was all too Arcadian”. So using a word like “Arcadian”, there's nothing like that in Danish, or at least not that would feel kind of strained using it in Danish. But in the context of the translation, it was like the perfect word, and really captured it. So I think that you find that English sometimes has like a single word for something that you need many words to describe in Danish, or that you would like, need to like, make a whole sentence about, and then maybe you have one word in English that describes it, but the opposite happens all the time too.

James Clasper: Well, yeah. I mean, are there moments when you just think, actually, I need to kind of cool my jets here and stick with something that is inherently Danish, rather than kind of taking it too far into American English?

Sherilyn Hellberg: Definitely. And I mean, that's one of the reasons I'm somewhat rare among translators in that I work really closely with the writers that I translate. I'm working on something right now where I've been like translating with the writer. So we meet up, we sit across the table from each other, I work on it. When I have questions I ask her, then we'll like every, you know, hour or so, like swap. And yeah, it is really collaborative in that way.

James Clasper: That’s unusual, is it?

Sherilyn Hellberg: It's very unusual. I mean, I know translators who won't involve the author at all, or will only wait till the book's actually been edited, maybe even typeset, before sharing it. So I mean, it really depends, but one of the reasons that I work so collaboratively is because I really like that phase in the process when the translation is kind of pulled away from me. So what I find that I often end up doing when I am doing a kind of first translation is that I really put it into my own language, my own vernacular, the kinds of discourses that I'm familiar with. I notice myself doing this, especially with nonfiction, because I have an academic background, but I really, like, put it into my own words. And then it's a process that, I mean, I love when the writer can be involved in kind of like pulling it away from me again or pulling it back towards the Danish.

So very often, I find that the first draft will be really far from the Danish. I'll change a lot of things. I just like make it the most understandable sentence in a way, and then that like next phase is like kind of about reintroducing that foreignness or like maybe there's something kind of experimental or really interesting that the writer is doing on the level of the sentence. How do I get that into the English so that I'm not just sort of like flattening it all out? But then it, yeah, it's a matter of like, yeah, when to do that. How far to take that, how strange to make it and how do you make it sort of interestingly strange without just being like alienating or reading like a bad translation.

James Clasper: I wanna ask about AI here because you know what we've been talking about for the past 10 minutes or so is basically... it's not the entire case, but it's a pretty strong case, which is to say, you know, it is not a word-for-word translation, and there's a real benefit in having, at some point in proceedings, a dialogue between the translator and the author. How much of a threat to literary translation, do you think AI is, or do you think there will always be, as you've, you know, unwittingly litigated for 10 minutes? You know, there will always be the more powerful use case for someone like you to come into the process and say, I can find nuances here that just, you know, even the smartest bot wouldn't.

Sherilyn Hellberg: Yeah, I mean, I find AI really unhelpful, to be honest, personally. I think, at least right now, there's not an immediate threat, especially not to literary translation. I've like experimented with it occasionally, like, tried out, like, how would it, how would this work? I mean, I think the biggest thing is that I don't trust it because it's often wrong, and more problematically, when I've like asked it things and then it gives me a wrong answer. It's very confident in its wrong answer. Which is not something that you want, like from a tool that you're like, when I use a dictionary, I rely on the dictionary.

James Clasper: Have you got an example of that sort of erroneous confidence?

Sherilyn Hellberg: I was translating a book that took place in the Danish Bronze Age, I wanna say. And there was an expression used that was something like “at slog mave”, which like literally would mean like “to hit your belly”. I hadn't encountered this phrase before, so I was like, oh, why don't I ask AI for help with this, like, as an experiment. And what it means, “at slog mave”, it means to like when you've just eaten a big meal, you know, you unbutton your pants, you relax. Like, ah. But the AI was like, oh, it's like you, you hit your belly in joy or glee. So it was just something that was like completely wrong. And then just like presents it as truth.

So I mean that, I think I would be really wary about using it for pretty much anything for that reason. And I think it's similar with the Google responses that AI now gives, which like, it's very hard not to look at or read those. But they do give you wrong answers sometimes. The other issue that I've found is, like I said before, I mostly work with, I mostly translate women and queer writers, things that have a bit of a feminist bent. And I found that the tone of AI is also like, doesn't really work great for those kinds of texts.

Especially, I recently translated Emma Holten's Deficit, which is a book about care work, sort of like an introduction to feminist economics. And this was like at the point where I was trying to experiment with AI, saying okay, how would this work? What would this do? What would it look like? And like the paragraph that I had it do for fun was like, could not have been farther off tone-wise. It was just like this, like mansplaining tone is the only way I can put it. Which I guess makes sense because AI is built off of like what exists in the existing discourse on the internet and media. But I find that, yeah, that tone aspect is just, it doesn't really work with the kinds of books that I work with. I've heard some people say like, you know, not for literature, but for, I don't know, a technical text or for a medical text or a legal text. But I'm just, I'm still like the wrong answers I find very concerning.

James Clasper: Yeah. Caveat translator, then.

Sherilyn Hellberg: Yeah.

James Clasper: You've talked with great passion and insight about the joy of translating Danish, but it's not easy. What's the hardest part of it?

Sherilyn Hellberg: Yeah, the writer Walter Benjamin has this essay called The Task with the Translator. That's completely amazing. But he has this like, incredible image that I love, that form and content in the original is like that between, I think it's a fruit and its skin. I always imagine like a peach where it's like really like to it. It's sort of like an integral part. The form and the content, they're distinct, but they're also just like completely attached. And then in the translation, the relationship between form and content, it's basically the translation, he calls like a rope with ample folds, and then there's like not really anything underneath. So it's like this billowing thing. And I think, yeah, when it comes to translating Danish, especially, or from Danish, realizing that there is that, like floppiness, or that you can't get that same feeling.

And I think, I mean, maybe I'm biased here, but Danish in particular, that kind of like fruit in the skin really feels to be so much the case. We were talking about how Danish has fewer words and I think one of the implications of that is that each individual word carries so much weight. Or can, like we're saying the word "nå," like so much can be under that. It's like the tip of an iceberg, and like every word can be like that in Danish. And then as soon as you kind of like, you know, take the top off the iceberg or like, you know, you try to peel the peach, it's just like very messy. So you have to like figure out what, what exactly do with that, what to make of it.

And I think that's the hardest part of the process is like finding that voice, or like figuring out what exactly the thing will be in English. I find that, yeah, when I'm starting a project, it's like every word, every sentence, every, you know, paragraph could be translated in an infinite number of ways. And it can be really difficult to pick what that is. And like all of those different versions kind of like live in your head at the same point. And then, I mean, this is another reason I really love working with the writers because that I translate, because I think it helps kind of like narrow in on what, what exactly is that voice? And then once I found it, it's like such an incredible thing because then it just like goes whoosh and like almost translates itself. But that kind of like grappling once you've yeah. Like dissected the fruit and then it can't really be a fruit anymore. It's like, what, what do I do with all of these like little bits and pieces? That's the trickiest part.

Another part which fortunately, yeah, I think especially when I was starting, is that so many of the writers that I translate, know English. Which means that they, I think in a lot of cases have an idea of how their voice should, or would or could sound in English. Which will inevitably be different from what I put on the paper because I'm a different person with a different set of experiences and a different, yeah, vernacular and this and that. So I think sometimes I've kind of like changed the way that I work so that like to prevent that big shock. But sometimes if a writer has only like seen the translation, like just sees the translation in its entirety. Be like, what did you do? What did you do to my book? This isn't my book. And I think that effect is like much worse when or can be if like they have an idea of how they could sound in English.

James Clasper: Like one of those home improvement shows where, you know, they go away for 48 hours and then they're in their dining room and living room are redesigned and decorated, and then they pull back the curtain and it's like, do you wanna have that impact on them, do you wanna let them into the process early enough so they can agree that the walls should be mauve or whatever.

Sherilyn Hellberg: Yeah, exactly. And I mean, I think also like the experience of being translated can be like quite shocking if you haven't done that before. So I mean, something that I now do pretty much every time I translate something is that I'll try to meet up with a writer and take three random sentences, translate each of those in three different ways. And then sit down with them and say, how do you, how do you feel about these different translations? And I think like one of the main reasons to do that is because like, if the person hasn't been translated before, sort of like unsettling or unhinging, this idea that there's just one translation or just one way it could be done, because like there is this moment, I find that I, I feel this way too when I'm reading something in Danish that before you've actually started translating, there's like this ideal translation that like exists in the sky, but like once you actually have to like, put words onto paper, it's like gets very messy and difficult and worse than the, like ideal in the sky.

James Clasper: I mean, to someone who has never read any Danish literature, this is a broad question, but how would you describe it? What have you found appealing about Danish fiction and contemporary Danish fiction?

Sherilyn Hellberg: Yeah. So what drew me to Danish literature in the first place was how intensely experimental and theoretical it is. Something that's a big difference between at least Danish literature and contemporary American literature is that there's not a really strict division in Denmark between poetry and prose. Whereas in the US if you want to do an MFA, or master's in creative writing. You have to choose at the beginning of that program whether you're going to write poetry or prose. And they like are two completely separate paths that don't interact. Whereas like in Danish literature, there's basically one MFA program, the Danish Academy of Creative Writing. I think a yearly cohort is six people. And it's a three-year program, so you have like less than 20 people enrolled at the school and at a time. And you don't choose, I mean everybody, I mean, they might lean more. There are poets and there are novelists. But it's much more common to experiment, or to move between those two genres. So you find prose that's written sort of like poetry and poetry that's very free, like free verse and conversational. So I think that really drew me to it as well.

And then the fact that it is so small, creates, I think, this kind of greenhouse effect. James, I mean, you'll know from having lived in Copenhagen for 10 years or more at this point, that like the way that trends move in Denmark in general is very different to a place like the UK or the US. You can always tell like in terms I'm thinking of like clothing, what's like on trend. I remember like a couple years ago, like when I first came to Denmark, everybody was wearing all black. There's just like head to toe, all black, black skinny jeans, black t-shirts. And then like, I don't know, five years later everybody was wearing like floral polyester dresses. And then it was the hair clips. 

James Clasper: Speak for yourself.

Sherilyn Hellberg: Yeah. I mean many were, let's say. But I think the culture is much more homogeneous. It's just smaller. And I think, yeah, it, something similar happens in the literary world where there are usually like a few trends happening at the same time. So back when I started translating, there were a lot of books about sort of childbirth and female sexuality, coming out. Also, about like eco critique or ecology. And I think it produces this kind of like really interesting hothouse effect because like when sort of everybody is reading and writing like the same thing, like bounds get pushed a bit further than I think they would otherwise.

And then something that's kind of related to that as well is that like the publishing apparatus is much more like diverse and low key, and informal compared to a place like the US. I remember when I published a translation of a short story by Jonas Eika with The New Yorker and just getting like, the feedback from, at that point the book was like, I think typeset, so it had been edited, it had been proofread, by the Riverhead publisher. And I just remember getting it back with the New Yorker's editors like handwritten comments, like, the page full of it because of like the New Yorker having such a distinct style and voice. And you would never find that kind of editorial invasion or invasiveness in Denmark. I think there's like a lot more trust given to the writers. And for that reason I think you can like be, I mean, messy or sloppy, but I don't mean that in a bad way because I think like a lot of really interesting things can come of that and you can explore ideas in such an interesting way when you don't have that, like really rigid, or like, you know, big publishing apparatus that you do in the US and the UK.

So Ida Marie Hede is a writer who I translate, who, yeah, for example, like, her work is super speculative. It's like the way that she writes, it's just like she goes like off on these sort of hypothetical tangents and it's like a bit all over the place, but it's so interesting and she's able to like do and get across so much that like you just couldn't if you're like, kind of like following the rules of like the New Yorker or the MFA program.

James Clasper: Yeah, yeah. Now that you've lived here, you know, for a number of years and made a life here, do you feel a greater sense of responsibility than you did at the beginning of your career to, you know, promote Danish literature. these writers? Is this something where you think actually, you know, it's been hiding its light under the bushel for a long time and you want to kind of play a role in getting this corpus of books out there?

Sherilyn Hellberg: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and I think that is sort of why I started translating in the same place, because I saw something in like this contemporary Danish literature that I just wasn't seeing elsewhere. And I think that, yeah, someone like Ide Marie Hede, for example, her writing her, both her way of writing the different kinds of ideas that she explores, are just so interesting and unlike anything that exists. And so I do, and yeah, it's definitely like the way that she writes, it's not, it's not like hygge, it's a very different kind of Danishness. That's in her writing or in someone like Jonas Eika’s writing, or there’s another writer I translate. For example, a book, that I'm working on right now with her is called Eve and Joan. And it's a sort of literary fan fiction imagining if Eve from the Bible and Joan of Arc were queer lovers and best friends. And it's like absolutely fantastic. I mean, I have thought sort of like, oh, is this like too blasphemous for American or British readership. But there's just something so cool about that exploration of what that would look like, what that could be, and what that can say about our story, that can say about how we think about like family structures and power structures. How to live. So I mean, it's like a really funny and like, I don't know, sort of tongue-in-cheek book. But I think it has some pretty serious implications as well. So a book like that is something that I think is really cool and important to bring out into the world.

James Clasper: And has your work provided a window to Denmark, a kind of privileged window, that a lot of people who move here from overseas don't necessarily get, do you think?

Sherilyn Hellberg: I mean, it's definitely helped with my Danish. My partner is a biologist. And I always very proud that I like, know lots of words for Danish like animals and plants because a lot of contemporary Danish literature, like has plant or animal names in it or, it's always very fun to like whip out my vocabulary, my literary vocabulary, which I don't think you get in the PD3 classes or like the sort of conventional Danish language classes. You're probably not learning how to say like, "blåregn", which is like the Danish word for wisteria like literally translates to “blue rain”. It's a very pretty word.

James Clasper: And has your work kind of changed how you read books in English?

Sherilyn Hellberg: Definitely. I mean, in how I write, too. I'm much more aware, I think of like the construction of a work of literature or the different component parts in a way that I wouldn't have been before. It also has really made me, I've like always in my free time, read a lot of contemporary American fiction, British as well, but English language, I mean, and I think I've like come to appreciate it for how distinct it is also, like what a distinct voice and kind of like wordiness, especially American contemporary literature has compared to Danish, which I would not describe as wordy. It's like very sparse.

But then there's also like a, when I read books by writers who are also translators, I always notice how precise their language is. So a writer translator that I really admire is Lauren Elkin. So she translates from French to English, has translated at least one book by Simone de Beauvoir, and many other books. And then she writes both fiction and nonfiction. And I recently read her novel Scaffolding, and I could like, you can really tell reading that book that this is a translator because like each word and each sentence is like so meticulously chosen. And yet there's like something a bit shimmery about the language, that I think comes from, you know. Being attuned to other languages and other ways in which, like I was saying before about translation is that like when you're translating, there's like a hundred different versions of every sentence that are living in your head at all times. And I think that for the writer translator, you can feel that as well that this person is somebody who's aware of the 100 different ways that this sentence could have been written. I think more than a writer who's not also a translator.

James Clasper: Could you ever go the other way and translate from English into Danish? Would you want to?

Sherilyn Hellberg: I would love to. I have tried one or two times before and it was not pretty. I think also the way that I translate, I am like a very, it's really like feelings-motivated for me, or it's sort of like, has so much to do with like. How does this sentence feel when I'm reading it in Danish? And how does the sentence feel when I'm writing it? And I think when it comes to reading Danish in English, that like, when I'm taking it in, that like sense of feeling is pretty much the same, but when it comes to actually producing it, it's just like, it's not the same. I don't have the same kind of grounding in Danish. And then I think the way that I write and the way that I think is so structured by the English language and by my own experience growing up in the US.

James Clasper: Let's wrap this up with a few final thoughts, then. Do you have a dream Danish author you'd love to translate?

Sherilyn Hellberg: I am very lucky in that I feel like I've gotten to translate in some form or another, like, almost all of my favorite writers. I think one of the benefits to Denmark being so small, as well as that, like I have very often just like written to someone and then, like, hey, I really like your book. Can I translate it? Or like, can I translate a few pages from it? And then, you know, they answer. I mean, that's really great. And I've gotten to translate a lot of my dream authors. I've actually, going to be translating a book, I believe, this spring, by Bjørn Rasmussen, who was the first contemporary Danish writer that I ever read. So I mean that will be a real dream. And then I have like a giant dream project, which is to translate this book that in Danish is called Jarmers Minde. Or like, literally something like memories of moaning or memories of complaining. I think it was translated in the 19th century as The Memoirs of Leonora Christina. And it's the account ... are you familiar with this book?

James Clasper: It was on the Danish citizenship test. Wasn't it written by one of the princesses?

Sherilyn Hellberg: Yes, so she was the daughter of King Christian IV.

James Clasper: That's the one.

Sherilyn Hellberg: And she was married to a man called Ulf or something like that, who betrayed Denmark to the Swedes. And she was like maybe involved, but then she was imprisoned in a tower for I think 20 years, basically like the rest of her life after that. And while she was imprisoned, she wrote one of the first major works of Danish literature. This is that book, and it's been translated, it was translated into English, yeah, a very long time ago. And it's like not a very readable translation. So I have a dream of doing a kind of modern or modernized translation of this book, but it's very long and very difficult and written in 17th-century Danish, which is somewhat outside of my current wheelhouse, but maybe someday.

James Clasper: That may not be the answer to the next question, which is for listeners who want to explore Danish literature, translated into English, of course, what would you recommend they start with?

Sherilyn Hellberg: Yes, that would probably not be my answer. But, I haven't actually translated any of these books, but, I think that Olga Ravn — she was one of the people who made me like really fall in love with contemporary Danish literature and both her short book, short like science fiction book called The Employees and a longer book about childbirth and postpartum depression, called My Work, are really fantastic. And then a bit further back, Tove Ditlevsen's Dependency or The Faces I think are both fantastic books. And then finally, if you want really great classic Danish literature, I would recommend Jens Peter Jacobsen's Niels Lyhne, which is translated by Tina Nunnally. This book was actually like a major influence, to like a bunch of European modernists, including Rilke and James Joyce. So The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is actually like heavily inspired by Niels Lyhne. So if you like, really love classic literature, I would recommend that.

James Clasper: Good tips, all of them. And I'll include links to them in the show notes. So, yeah, final question. Besides "nå," what's one of your favorite Danish words and why?

Sherilyn Hellberg: I think the why it sort of speaks for itself, but my favorite Danish word by far is “moderkage”. Do you know this word?

James Clasper: It means “placenta”, doesn't it?

Sherilyn Hellberg: It means “placent”a and literally it's “mother cake”.

James Clasper: “Mother cake.”

Sherilyn Hellberg: Yes. Which I love. I mean, it's just so Danish. It's so like, you know, to the point it's really visceral. It's like the way it's pronounced, "moder kage", it's like it's meaty. It's like a really fleshy word.

James Clasper: And it’s been in the oven for a while.

Sherilyn Hellberg: Yes, exactly. And it has so much more life to it compared to like the English or like Latin, whatever it is. Placenta.

James Clasper: Okay. Brilliant. Sheri, that's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for being a guest on Archipelago.

Sherilyn Hellberg: Thank you for having me.

You've been listening to Archipelago, produced and hosted by me, James Clasper, for Archipelago Audio. You'll find links to all the books Sheri mentioned in the show notes.

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing it with others, leave a nice review wherever you get your podcasts, and check out some of the older episodes — like the first episode of season two, which featured an interview with the Danish novelist Naja Marie Aidt, or the very first episode, with bestselling writer Svend Brinkmann.

That’s all for this season of Archipelago. Many thanks for listening, I'll see you next time.