Pia Juul, who died in 2020 at the age of 58, was quite a prominent poet in Denmark. However, as far as I can tell, only one of her novels has been translated into English and none of her poetry!
This is one of her more iconic poems. The translation is something I worked out fairly quickly, so I take responsibility for any mistakes or deficiencies others may find.
Much of Pia Juul’s writing combines a humorous tone with serious or unsettling subject matter. In this poem, she touches on a classic problem: in love, you can do what you want, but you can’t want what you want.
The lines:
>Can you perhaps pick
flowers where none grow?
Are most likely a reference to the iconic Danish folk song “It was a Saturday evening” (“Det var en lørdag aften”), about unrequited love, in which the last two verses go as follows:
>Where can you pick roses-
Where no roses grow?
Where can you find love -
Where love does not live?
>I wanted to pick roses
I will pick no more
I loved you so deeply
I will never love again
I don’t think the translation was especially difficult, but one line I found somewhat problematic was:
>Then you cry happiness / så råber man lykken
“Lykken” already carries a subtly different meaning than “happiness” (and more literally means “the happiness,” though that would sound clunky in English). For this purpose, “happiness” works well enough.
The difficulty is that “lykken” functions as the object of the verb “råber” but nothing indicates that the word lykken itself is being shouted. So the line becomes something like:
>Then you yell the happiness
In both Danish and English, this isn’t something you can literally do, it is of course a poetic invention, but it sounds much more natural in Danish.
I settled on the phrasing “cry happiness” because I remembered the title of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Using “cry” with an object that one wouldn’t normally cry feels more natural in English, and the poem does actually mirrors the Danish title of The Boy Who Cried Wolf "Drengen som råbte ulv".
I do interpret the meaning in the poem as more like yelling/screaming rather than warning. So it's probably a stretch to make the connection from the poem to the fable as meaning that the cry of "Lykke" was really a false alarm. But who knows, it seems to work either way.