09-29-2024
Over within the Paris Overview, Srikanth Reddy discusses some poems by Hannah Arendt. A brand new assortment of Arendt’s poems will seem quickly translated by Samantha Hill and Genese Grill. Reddy writes:
Unemotional, anti-Romantic, and doggedly insistent on expunging unruly emotions from collective life, Arendt could appear to own the least lyrical of temperaments, however a brand new quantity of her poetry reveals that the creator of sobering works like The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Situation was writing ardent and intimate verse in her off-hours. We’re happy to characteristic Samantha Rose Hill’s new translation, with Genese Grill, of an untitled poem from Arendt’s manuscripts in our Fall 2024 situation.
Now housed in Arendt’s archive on the Library of Congress, the poem is dated to September 1947, six years after the thinker’s arrival in the US. Although she had by then settled on New York’s Higher West Facet, Arendt displays upon what she’d left behind on her life’s journey on this wistful poem:
This was the farewell:
Many associates got here with us
And whoever didn’t come was now not a buddy.
The bracing conclusion of Arendt’s opening stanza lands with the affect of a sensible realist’s rebuke to a sentimental idiot: Friendship is companionship; subsequently, whoever just isn’t a companion can’t be thought of a buddy. (There’s one thing syllogistic to the thinker’s adoption of tercets for this poem’s kind.) In her introduction to What Stays: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt, which might be revealed later in December, Hill chronicles how Arendt’s pocket book of poems accompanied her via a succession of farewells: when she fled Germany after her launch from the Gestapo jail in Alexanderplatz within the spring of 1933; when she left her second life in Paris to report back to the internment camp at Gurs seven years later; and when she escaped on foot and by bicycle to Lisbon, the place she boarded the SS Guineefor Ellis Island on Might 22, 1941. “This was the prepare: / Measuring the nation in flight,” Arendt writes, “and slowing because it handed via many cities.”
