Source — 2017 Man Booker International Prize Q&A: Misha Hoekstra
- Title: 2017 Man Booker International Prize Q&A—Misha Hoekstra
- Interviewer: Eric M. B. Becker
- Interviewee: Misha Hoekstra (English translator, from the Danish, of Dorthe Nors)
- Publication: Words Without Borders (Dispatches)
- Date: 2017
- URL: https://wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/2017-man-booker-international-prize-qa-misha-hoekstra-eric-m-b-becker
- Type: primary (translator's own words, interview format); neutral — promotional context (the Man Booker International longlisting of Nors's Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, tr. Hoekstra) but not itself making an untranslatability claim
- Accessed: 2026-08-31
Extract
Hoekstra describes what drew him to Nors's writing: "the way the voice jumps from high-flown lyricism in one line to pithy vernacular in the next." He notes Mirror, Shoulder, Signal is more conventional in form than her earlier work but that the same underlying sensibility — "the wry observation, the existential longing, the eye for beauty and ear for language" — carries through. He quotes a line from the novel voicing a view of translation itself (via the narrator Sonja): "Language is powerful, almost magic, and the smallest alteration can elevate a sentence or be its undoing" — Nors's/Sonja's observation, not Hoekstra's own meta-commentary on a specific choice he made.
Relevance and limits
Checked directly for this project's open question of whether Hoekstra has said anything, anywhere, connecting his translation practice for Nors to gender (a possible angle for the feminist/postcolonial page's von Flotow taxonomy, applied here to a male translator rendering a female author, the reverse pairing from the project's existing Lispector examples) or to the word hygge specifically (Nors/Hoekstra's short story "Hygge" is this project's one hygge translator-practice data point — see hygge.md).
Neither is present in this interview. Hoekstra does not discuss gender as a factor in translating Nors's voice, and does not mention "hygge," "hyggelig," or the "Hygge" story at all — the interview concerns Mirror, Shoulder, Signal specifically. This is a genuine, checked negative result, not an unexamined gap: a natural-seeming lead (the translator's own words, from a substantive literary interview around the time the "Hygge" printings were circulating) was checked directly and found not to bear on either question.
Gaps
- This interview is about a different Nors work (Mirror, Shoulder, Signal) than the "Hygge" story this project has on file — Hoekstra may have discussed "Hygge" specifically, or gender in translating Nors, elsewhere (e.g. in a piece specifically about the Wild Swims collection, which includes "Hygge"); not found this session.
- Full interview not reproduced in the Extract above (only the passages responsive to this project's mission were checked); a general skim did not turn up other mission-relevant claims (dictionary treatment, untranslatability, etc.).