On Translating Yahya Hassan

Yahya Hassan, YAHYA HASSAN, oh, what to say of a best-selling poet who dies at twenty-four? A poet whose popularity exceeded 120,000 copies (and still counting, three years after his death) of YAHYA HASSAN 1, the book from which these translations come.

While these poems still loom large, we no longer have the constant buzz that kept Hassan in the Danish news. As a public figure, he was outspoken and critical of both the Danish welfare system and his Islamic background. As a result of this, he was under constant pressure from across the political spectrum: he was assaulted in the street, sparked free-speech debates in parliament, and readings were canceled because of death threats that Hassan received.

Translating Hassan is living in ALL CAPS, juggling ambiguities and managing intense directness. The three poems here, “ANTENNA,” “THE BAG OF SKUNK AND THE GHETTO BANK,” and “RAMADAN,” show various angles of Hassan’s identity and his frustration with them. “RAMADAN” is a translation that is especially close to my heart. Wrangling this poem into English took every effort of a star-studded translation workshop, led by Katrine Øgaard Jensen along with Jessica Kirzane, Timea Sipos, Stine An, and Alex Karsavin.

A first poignant moment in the workshop was when Katrine gently pointed out my odd interpretation of the closing line in the first draft. What was once “AND THEN A JEWELER LATCHES ONTO YOUR ARM” had to be transformed to what is now “NOW A DRAGONFLY LANDS ON YOUR ARM.” Guldsmed means both dragonfly and goldsmith in Danish, and latches was just plain poetic license. The second challenge was in the opening line: “ROVPELS I FJÆSET I EN DYR BILS BAKSPEJL.” Any reader of Danish will recognize the difficulty here: there’s a ton of texture in this line; a scaffolded version would be something like, “ROBBER’S/PREDATORY PELT ON A FACE IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR OF THE EXPENSIVE/BEASTLY CAR.” In an overturning of our workshop leader’s suggestion, the group offered “BEARDED CREATURE IN THE REARVIEW OF THE WHIP” to maintain the tightness of the original as well as the image of a young, moneyed immigrant driving a fancy car.

The other two poems here offer a different challenge: drastic line breaks across an extended narrative. The first step in translating Hassan is leveraging these deliberate ambiguities while maintaining typographical clarity. Hassan wants to whip his reader around and shock them, but is never sloppy about it. This is common with other Danish writers like Rudolf Broby-Johansen, Michael Strunge, and Tine Høeg. While he may share similarities with a few others, we may never see another poet like Yahya Hassan.