An 18 year old
Palestinian immigrant growing up in Denmark, Yahya Hassan, publishes
last October his first book of poems. Thanks to a interview in the
Danish daily newspaper Politiken at
the start of November, subtlely titled I F***ing Hate My
Parents’ Generation,
sales of the book caught fire.
By Christmas, the book has sold 100 000 copies, which, as the German
journalist Jörg Lau correctly points out, is the equivalent of a
poetry debut selling one million in a country like Germany or the UK,
if you compare the size of the German or UK population with that of
Denmark. By April this year the German translation was out, published
by Ullstein, and translated by Annette Hellmut and Michel Schleh.
Unsurprisingly, there's no English language translation out yet; and
I'd be very surprised if any English language poet with any name
whatsoever would be willing to touch it. It's the kind of poetry that
could very quickly loose you a name:
''I
DON'T LOVE YOU, PARENTS, BUT I HATE YOU FOR YOUR BAD LUCK / I HATE
YOUR HEAD-SCARVES AND I HATE YOUR KORANS / AND YOUR ILLITERATE
PROPHETS / YOUR INDOCTRINATED PARENTS / I HATE THE LAND THAT WAS YOURS
AND THE LAND THAT BECAME OURS / THE LAND THAT WAS NEVER YOURS AND THE
LAND THAT WILL NEVER BE OURS / WHY DO YOU WHISPER INTO MY INFECTED
EARS / THAT I SHOULD OBSERVE THE TREES? / I WANTED TO HANG YOUR
HAPPINESS IN THOSE TREES.''
(I've
quoted here in my own translation from A. Hellmut's and M. Schleh's
German translation, as quoted in Die
Zeit newspaper of
16.04.2014. I refer to the German law of quotation (Zitatsrecht) for
my right to quote this poem.)
Those
capital letters are Hassan's, not mine: he only writes in capitals.
Jörg Lau didn't quote this
passage in capitals, but in a poetically conservative mixture of lower
and upper case, and that makes me suspicious: did Ullstein chicken
out of publishing a fully capitalised version, because they thought
that would be one can of beery-rage too much for the German audience?
I certainly won't be buying this book, but I will be making what for
me is an exceptional trip to a German book shop, to get an answer to
this capital question.
If
all of this sounds like bad satire, it isn't sadly. Stranger
than the book itself is, I find, the rapturous reception of the book
by the German establishment critics. Jörg Lau writes, for example,
'This
book has strains of a lyrical Bildungsroman, it reads like the story
of a self becoming itself, through the medium of poetry.' If
the type of Bildung
Yahya
Hassan went through means you come out writing poetry like this then
I wonder how we can cut back on that type of education in Europe.