Yahya Hassan: who needs a new poetry of hate?

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.

To those who we have not yet wikipedia 'ed

Christian Morgenstern (1871 - 1914) is a poet who I've as yet only read and heard accidentally, when his work has chanced my way. It appears that the poems can be split into the mischievously humorous and the ethereal, Christian mystical. Discount store shopping last night had given me enough of reality; I didn't want to push it by continuing with the epic realism of the David Foster Wallace novel I've got on the go. Instead, I went for the slim 1940 original (German) edition of Morgenstern's collected poems, whose title translates as Time and Timelessness.

The first Morgenstern I ever heard was ' The Architect ' in English translation, in 1999, during the London Waldorf Teacher Training Seminar, taught with gusto by Brien Masters, in the dress trousers with strong middle crease & the smart striped shirts he wore, with even the top button still done up. ('An architect who saw this thing / Stood there, one summer's evening / ….. / And built his castle's in the air.')

Anthroposophists like Morgenstern, partly cause they like conventional metres – Morgenstern's steady iambi – and end rhyme: far easier to get a class of 30 kids -  (teaching being the obvious vocation for an anthropop) - reciting Morgenstern or Wordsworth, then to get them declaiming Don Paterson en choral mass.

So no surprises that my next Morgensterny encounter was also at a anthroposophic institution, this time the Institute for Steiner-Waldorf Education in the Ruhr conurbation. In this poem 'Falling leaves' the mood had shifted from the moral quippery of 'The Architect' to an extollation of stoicism, which, after the 9th recitation in the theatre class wore thin:

   …. / strips clean the final branches. / You but, who with heavy heart / Who'd like to wail to wake the dead / Stay strong, stay strong and silent! '

My first emotions with the 1940 edition were of enjoyable incongruity. The poems are backed by a short note from Margareta Morgenstern in which she explains that while some of the pieces published are taken from previous collections, the majority are published for the first time. Here in the middle of a still strong totalitarian state, Nazi Germany, people were going out to buy poems of romance & whimsy. The fraktur type face is also a welcome distraction to those who aren't used to reading it at normal speed. While you're deciphering whether a B, W or S is meant, you're forced to slow down, allowing a-modern images to float by you. Not anti-modern, or pre-modern, but rather in determined ignorance of modernity. Like these ones in the poem Autumn Evening (p.22 of the 1940 edition):

' The stove snuffles like a dog in a dream.
    The breeze passes like a mood from the room . .

That breeze that's come from distant stars
    That's eavesdropped by my soul with love. '
   
And after a few poems like these, equally memorable     or forgettable depending on your attitude to a-modern whimsy, you stumble upon this what follows (p. 18 of the 1940 edition); it gives you the creeps, & somehow, with hindsight, you thought you saw it coming:

' To Germany
As seen from Norway

There you sleep far from my sight  . .
While I lie sleepless in the night
Yet dream up still to the clear stars
That which does make my soul delight.

You great wolf, for whom I rhyme,
You highest good of the love I give,
Whichever way my thoughts are turning
I'll remain your flesh and blood.

And if I should, with heart and head
into eternity dissolve
noone in that air, those pains
will understand me like you did. '

Well, why not. In a poem written c. 1912, why shouldn't Morgenstern make such nationalistic statements? Perhaps M. can remain in the ranks of the unsullied dead, one who we've had as yet no reason to wikipedia.