More Danish than Eggs and Bacon

Af : Johannes Møllehave

Benny Andersen´s latest volume of poems was published at the same time in Danish and English. The book is a selection of Andersen´s poems about Danes, Danish mentality, and Danish humour, a theme running through the whole of his work.

Benny Andersen is known for many things in Denmark: plays for radio, plays for children, plays for television, films, memoirs, stories, poems and ditties known to almost every Dane because they are sung on radio and television and have become part of the nation. In fact, such common property is he that everyone in the country can sing a morning song and an evening song by him. And that is fame indeed!

Good now night
The morning song starts with the line: "Se, hvilken morgenstund" (Behold this morning hour). The evening song starts: "Go´ nu nat og gå nu lige hjem" (Good now night, and go now home and straight)
    The morning song is perfectly simple to translate into any conceivable language - in fact, it has even been done into Chinese! The first verse in Danish ends by saying that the coffee will soon be ready. In Chinese it is tea that´s on the way!
    The evening song, which everyone knows - even when they have had a drink or two - is more difficult to render into another language. This is because of the linguistic similarity in Danish between the words "go(d)" (good) and "gå" (go). We say go´nat, but not "go-nunat." However, it has become part of the language as a result of Benny Andersen´s song.
    "Gå nu lige hjem" is a play on three phenomena. You might not be able to go all that straight when you have had a drop too much, and you might get hurt; 2) you can also go off somewhere where you don´t live; 3) and finally when something is a success, we can say in Danish the equivalent of "it went straight home".

Danish song tradition
The first lines of the morning and evening songs lead directly into Benny Andersen´s linguistic universe. On the one hand, there are the many overtones to a turn of phrase such as "go straight home". And on the other there is his relationship to Danish song tradion
    A number of hymns begin like this song with the word BEHOLD.
    Here are a few from the treasury of Danish hymns:
Behold, now Jesus steps (hymn by Thomas Kingo 1689)
Behold, the sun doth rise (hymn by Jakob Knudsen 1891)
Behold, the meadow resounds with sunlight (Morning song by Holger Drachmann 1897)
Behold a summer´s day (summer song by Jeppe Aakjær 1905)
    Benny Andersen also borrows a line from Jeppe Aakjær in the poem about the Danish smile which I have chosen as an English example. It is the line: I BEAR MY SMILE.
    In Jeppe Aakjær´s poem from 1906, which Danes know because it is sung so often, we find the line:
"Jeg bærer med smil min byrde" (I bear my burden with a smile).
    In Benny Andersen´s poem about the Danish smile, this turns into: Jeg bærer med smil mit smil. (I bear my smile with a smile)
    Benny Andersen adds: "My crescent yoke".
    This latter is incomprehensible unless you know what he is referring to. We Danes know, but those reading it in translation don´t. The humour is lost if you don´t know what the original poem says. A yoke is a curved bar you carry on your shoulders. In the old peasant society - and once 80% of Danes were peasants - you walked with a yoke across your shoulders.
    It looks remarkably like a smile that can´t be straightened out again. Heavy and made of iron. The Danish expression used by Benny Andersen is "mit halvmåne-åg", literally "my half-moon yoke": "my crescent yoke". And a crescent moon looks like a smile.
    Then, the Danish smile in this poem is further compared with a car bumper. Just think of the Danish expression for one of the big American cars from the 1950s: "a dollar grin" - which does not quite correspond to the slightly wan Danish smile betokening a somewhat skew insecurity.

Andersen likes the Danes
But there is no doubt that Benny Andersen likes the Danes. He can also say of us: "Behind a shell of friendliness there is a shell of friendliess/And the smile covers up a shell, a void."
    Now that Benny Andersen´s poetry has happily finally appeared in English in the sensitive translation by his wife Cynthia Andersen, it is of course a pity that there are things that have had to be left out. There are allusions in his poetry to Hans Christian Andersen, Søren Kierkegaard, Grundtvig and all the treasury of Danish children´s songs and nursery rhymes. (When Grundtvig writes of "far higher mountains", Benny Andersen echoes it with "far flatter fields", Denmark being a flat country.) Perhaps the poem deserving to be the most famous of all Benny Andersen´s poems is one of his early ones:
"The only way out I can think of/ when everything´s ground to a halt:/is to start once again with the children, /for they are of earth the true salt/ Our faith in the children professing/ we e´er of their wisdom can talk:/ they show us the timely requirement/of crawling before we can walk" (From Den musikalske ål (1960) (The Musical Eel))

Children´s books
The theme of solidarity with children is one that runs right through Benny Andersen´s poetry. Indeed, he goes further, recognising that the child is father to the man, as is reflected in the title of one of his books: Barnet der blev ældre og ældre (The Child Who Became Older and Older). Consequently, he has written a large number of children´s books. And for that same reason one of the poems included in the selection in English runs:
    "That is what´s hard to understand:/YOU can learn from the future man./Call to mind the creative zest/ you as a child yourself possessed"

A Danish cosmopolitan
That a play on language or a reference to a well-known old Danish poem is lost in a translation matters little. Benny Andersen is what he becomes through this translation: a Danish cosmopolitan - a cosmopolitan Dane, accustomed more to brooks and streams than to oceans, more at home with drops of water than with great rivers and waterfalls, and first and foremost at home with the humour that both calls forth the tears and wipes them away.
    Hans Christian Andersen had no children. Benny Andersen could have been one of them; they are closely related as writers.


Johannes Møllehave´s published works includes essays, memoirs, children´s books and books on Hans Christian Andersen, and he has been a clergyman for more than twenty years.


Denne artikel blev første gang bragt i Danish Literary Magazine nr.9, 1996

Oversat af W. Glyn Jones