Snapshots in Verse: On Hannah Arendt’s Long-Lost Poems

Lit Hub is excited to feature another entry in a new series from Poets.org: “enjambments,” a monthly interview series with new and established poets. This month, they spoke to Samantha Rose Hill and Genese Grill.

Samantha Rose Hill is the editor and translator of What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt (Liveright Publishing, 2024) and the author of the biography Hannah Arendt (Reaktion Books, 2021). She is currently working on her next book, titled Loneliness, for Yale University Press. Hill is a visiting scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, and associate faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.

Genese Grill is a translator and scholar of Germanic literature. She worked with Hill on the editing and translation of What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt and is the author of several books, including The World as Metaphor in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities: Possibility as Reality (Camden House, 2012). Grill, who is the translator of four books by Musil, is currently writing the first English-language biography of the author for Yale University Press.

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Poets.org: What inspired you to embark upon this translation project, and how important was it during the process to be mindful that, for Hannah Arendt, to be a poet may have also meant being a historian or chronicler?

Genese Grill: I had just read Sam’s brilliant biography of Arendt [Hannah Arendt (Critical Lives)], so when I was asked to help her with polishing the translation of these poems, I was especially inspired by the way Sam explained Arendt’s view of poetry as a way of thinking that mirrored her philosophical openness. The realm of metaphor, sound, and rhythm as an irreducible aesthetic-ethical space that resisted simplistic polarizations and rigid totalizing systems.

I’m not sure that Arendt thought of her poems as part of a historical chronicle; I suspect they were more personal for her, a way of thinking through ideas and emotions and experiences for herself. However, insofar as her definition of the word idiot (based on the Greek etymology of idiōtēs, “private person,” “layman,” “ignorant person”) was of someone who didn’t look outside to be concerned with the rest of the world, the personal for her is always related to the surrounding world and to others.

As readers, we can’t help but now read the poems with her particular life and times in mind, but I think she was conversing not just with her particular historical moment, but with ages of poetic and philosophical discourse and with us, today.

Samantha Rose Hill: Historian and chronicler feel too rigid to me as categories for typifying the kind of work Hannah Arendt does. She did not think well of historians, who were given to deductive ways of thinking. And chronicler feels as though it belongs to that insouciant type of observer you might finding wandering Times Square in a rain coat.

Arendt was neither a historian nor a chronicler. As I wrote in my biography, she was also not a biographer, journalist, or philosopher. She was sui generis in her thinking and profoundly anti-ideological. She had the ability to make connections across vast bodies of work, drawing ideas and texts into conversation with one another in a way that made them appear commonsensical only once the relationship had been drawn.

If you forced me to describe her poems with one term, I’d say they were dialogical or conversational. To that I was attentive. The voice in the poem, as Arendt said. A poem is a live thing with blood, the least worldly of the human arts.

It was important for me to attend to the way Arendt used language to create linguistic images, in the hopes of capturing something fleeting. We might appeal to the word snapshot, which would be a bit more accurate, but I think it still fails.

A poem is already a work of translation. It is a translation of an inner experience. Any attempt to use language to give form to that most intimate part of ourselves—and so grant the world access to it, though, not us in all of our immediacy.

In that sense, the most important thing for me was to attend to the sound of the language—for Arendt, it was always about the language. And how we use language to tell stories that allow us to make meaning.

Poets.org: Since What Remains is arranged chronologically, how do the poems reflect Arendt’s personal and intellectual evolution, especially as they traverse the years of her exile?

GG: Again, the poems are certainly interesting to us as a historical and personal chronicle because of who she was and what she lived through, but I think it would be a mistake to read them solely as biographical or historical evidence. Of course, all works of literature reflect their particular times and concerns, and Arendt’s poems do work through the harrowing experiences of war and exile that she shared with friends and colleagues, as well as her feelings about her affair with [Martin] Heidegger, etc.

But I would again encourage a reading that noticed universal and timeless themes about the eternal human condition: There has always been cruelty and love, dark and light, tension between the personal and political, wandering in the cold, and a search for true home.

Can one trace intellectual and personal evolution in the poems? Certainly. But I will leave that up to the scholars who will now have a chance to analyze them. For me, the poems are all a testament to Arendt’s lifelong celebration of, and struggle toward, communication from one person to another, over time and space, without collapsing difference and complexity.

SRH: I chose to arrange the poems chronologically because Arendt arranged the first twenty-four poems chronologically when she left them to the Library of Congress. To arrange them thematically would have meant making a book in Arendt’s name that she never wrote.

She never wrote a book of poems. She left her poems in the archives—scattered around the world—and she knew they would be found, just as she had found Rahel Varnhagen’s letters in the Prussian State Archives [now, in the Leo Baeck Institute Archives at the Center for Jewish History] before she was arrested by the Gestapo in 1933 and forced to flee Germany.

For me, her mood remains steady: melancholic, deeply self-reflective, a bit sentimental, and romantic. She was someone who profoundly loved life and had an fierce desire to understand it. Writing for her was part of the process of understanding. She would recline on her sofa, her Arbeitssofa, and engage in what she called an inner dialogue with herself.

When the words came, she would reach for her notebook or typewriter and take dictation from herself. In this way, I read the poems as an invitation to glimpse into her thinking process.

For Arendt, we go out and experience the world, and then we return home to the private realm of solitude where we engage in a conversation with ourselves, and tell ourselves a story about the experiences we’ve had. We turn the inner sense impression into objects that can appear in the world through language.

And for Arendt, poems were the densest form of language that we have. Jerry Kohn once said to me that we must understand the work of the poem for Arendt as existing between the invisible life of the mind and the public world of appearances.

Poets.org: Presenting the poems en face allows readers to engage with the original German alongside the English translations. Were there some instances during translation wherein the German conveyed layers of meaning, for example in poems such as “Dusk” [Dämmerung] in which Arendt used rhyming couplets, that were particularly challenging to capture in English?

GG: Translating poetry is notoriously a lesson in the impossibility of absolute translation. But the infuriating and fascinating attempt to do so mirrors the difficulty and importance of communication altogether. What is most unique and special about one individual’s mind or about one line of poetry is the most difficult and most important thing to translate; one strains to avoid reducing the subtle differences of a poem or a person in the effort to communicate.

Does one concentrate more on the form or the content? Privilege one idea or image at the expense of another? In version after version, line by line, word by word, we strove to get the best balance and often ended up abandoning literalness quite a bit in order to approach greater closeness to our interpretation of meaning and feeling.

Those who can read German may occasionally note these leaps and interpretations, but we carefully weighed each variance. Sam’s vast and deep knowledge of Arendt as a person and thinker guided all of our choices.

Also, of course, the different things that German and English can and cannot do. Adverbs or adjectives sometimes became nouns or verbs, rhymes were often abandoned or altered. Sometimes a metaphoric allusion we sensed might be there had to be minimized or lost, made more explicit in our version. On rare occasions, we had to digest whole lines and their multiple meanings and then rewrite them rather than merely translate them word by word or phrase by phrase, in a good faith attempt to get closer.

We tried to honor both the sound and the sense, but at best, poetic translation ends up being a sort of highly specialized game of telephone, with the poor and lucky reader on the receiving end. There is always much lost, but also something gained in the sort of deep reading and grappling that a good translation reflects.

SRH: It was very important to me and Jerry Kohn that the volume be en face. It was one of the first conversations Jerry and I ever had. As I write in the introduction, I believe, for Arendt, the poems were untranslatable. And so it is a way to honor the difficulties and ethical dilemmas of translation for a person who was forced to live her life in exile because of totalitarianism.

The early rhyming couplets were especially challenging, because she was imitating German prose. Genese and I had long conversations about what had to be prioritized. Those are judgment calls. Someone else might have chosen differently.

When I read Celan en face, for example, I always retranslate the English for myself and put the original, the translation, and my lines in conversation with one another. Just as there is no definitive biography, there is no definitive translation. And with poems this is even more difficult, it feels to me, because of the importance of form as a vehicle for meaning—a word for word rendering would fail on multiples levels.

Poets.org: In the footnote for “With One Thing” [Mit Einem Ding], you mention, “The only modification from the notebook is the lower casing of capital letters at the beginning of each line.” Can you speak about how you decided to treat lines of poetry that were capitalized in the original poems, as well as honoring Arendt’s choice to underline the words is and us?

GG: Arendt’s poems had not been edited by her for publication, and there was some inconsistency in her choices of capitalization of lines and titles. Some poems have the first word of each line capitalized and others don’t, and we kept her format in each case.

I believe Sam’s note here is about a different version of the poem that has different capitalization. We chose to keep to most of the choices made in her most final texts, but readers should understand that she did not have the chance herself to make a final proof. The translations honor the poems in the most final state in which they were found, as is.

SRH: In cases where there was more than one version of the poem, I decided to publish the last edited version. In a couple of cases where there were a few versions with substantial differences, the earlier text has been included in a footnote or endnote. I wanted to stay as near to Arendt’s text as possible.

Poets.org: What are you currently reading?

GG: Dagmar Barnouw’s Weimar Intellectuals and the Threat of Modernity, a book that traces the danger of rigid political ideology in the years leading up to the age of totalitarianism and the importance of a realm of aesthetic and ethical openness for both creative and political freedom.

I am also in the year 1938 in Robert Musil’s Briefe, 1901–1942 [Letters], which shows him and his Jewish wife fleeing Austria after the Anschluss with Germany. The book sings the same sad and complicated song as Barnouw’s, and both are related, I think, to Arendt’s poetic and philosophical work.

SRH: I’m always reading many things at once! Right now it is The Magic Mountain with my Substack reading group, and then for pleasure I’m in Jane Eyre, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, and Mina’s Matchbox by Yōko Ogawa. I’m also reading a very long report from the World Health Organization for the book I’m writing on loneliness, which I don’t think anyone else should have to read.

Poets.org: What are your favorite poems on Poets.org?

GG: Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress“; Emily Dickinson’s “One Need Not be a Chamber — to be Haunted“; and e.e. cummings “[since feeling is first].”

SRH: So many! It’s such a great resource. I’ve been fascinated by the marriage between Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon for a while and recently found myself reading and sharing “Otherwise” by Kenyon. Others include: “For What Binds Us” by Jane Hirshfield and William Butler Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”

You also have two of my favorite poems, “In the Waiting Room” by Elizabeth Bishop and “The Plain Sense of Things” by Wallace Stevens. I could make a very long list for you.

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“enjambments,” a monthly interview series produced by the Academy of American Poets, will highlight an emerging or established poet who has recently published a poetry collection. Each interview, along with poems from the poet’s new book, and a reading by the poet, will be published on Poets.org and shared in the Academy’s weekly newsletter.