Arendt and Translation: Thought, Language, Poetry
Jana Mader
“Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.”
(Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture)
Today, Hannah Arendt is known primarily as a political thinker; less well known is her great interest in and connection with poetry. After her first post-war visit to Berlin in 1950, Arendt writes in a letter to her husband Heinrich Blücher: “But: what still remains are the inhabitants of Berlin. Unchanged, wonderful, humane, full of humor, clever, very clever even. This was for the first time like coming home.”[1] In an interview with Günter Gaus in September 1964, Arendt elaborates on this visit, stressing the difference between her German language and that of others. In the same interview, she replies to the question of continuity after she fled Nazi Germany, first to France, then in 1941 to the United States: “Was ist geblieben? Geblieben ist die Muttersprache” (What was it that continued? My mother tongue continued). She adds: “I felt a distance towards French and English. In German I know a great number of poems by heart. They are constantly there — in the back of my mind[2] — the same can never be achieved for another language.”
Language in general (and poetic language in particular) plays a significant role in Arendt’s oeuvre: the importance of German as her mother tongue and its difference from English as her second language, the tensions between these two spheres, linguistically and also psychologically (the limited familiarity with the nuances of a language and the awareness thereof), and its overcoming through self-translating her own works into her first language as a process of working it through — “working through the words, the concepts and metaphors, the arguments, examples and explanations” (Weigel 2012, 72) — and last but not least her claim “to keep my distance” to the matter in hand (Arendt 1964). According to German scholar Sigrid Weigel, writing bilingually, “the language of poetry … forms the counterpart, thus providing her with the ability to remain at a distance — at a distance from the nation state and from conformism” (2012, 64). It becomes apparent that there is a clear parallel between Arendt’s language-related translation work and the translation of thought through poetry.” In her Denktagebuch,[3] Arendt discusses the correspondence between thinking and poetry explicitly:
What connects thinking and poetry (Dichtung) is metaphor. In philosophy one calls concept what in poetry (Dichtkunst) is called metaphor. Thinking creates its “concepts” out of the visible, in order to designate the invisible.[4]
In Life of the Mind, she dedicates two full chapters to metaphors and explains how they transfer experiences of the external world to the internal world, which is to say the mind. Through this process (“metapherein”) we create a connection between ourselves and the world.[5] Arendt refers to the American art historian Ernest Fenollosa, who declares that “the metaphor is the very substance of poetry; without it, there would have been no bridge whereby to cross from the minor truth of the seen to the major truth of the unseen.”[6]
Her whole life, Arendt expressed her great desire to understand the world as it is; this desire was linked to her interest in poetry — poems that she read in books or that she knew by heart. For her, poetic language is the bond, the connection, between the inner and the outer world: “The scenario of Arendt’s work, which was shaped by the counterparts of philosophy and politics, was superimposed twice: first by the tension between German and American intellectual culture, and second by the antagonism between poetry and conventional language full of idioms” (Weigel 2012, 65). The poetic form opened a space of reflection and play, and her theoretical writings can be equated with approaching political concepts through experience — a connection between inside and outside.
From 1924 to 1928, Arendt studied not just philosophy and theology but also Ancient Greek and Greek poetry in Marburg, Freiburg, and Heidelberg. In 1928, she received her doctorate, writing her dissertation on Saint Augustine with a focus on notions of love from Greek poetry to Latin confessions (see Arendt 1929). “I have always loved Greek poetry,” she said, but feels a special affinity — because of the language — with German poetry: Goethe, Heine, Rilke (quoted in (Starobinski 1971, 288).
Arendt’s first book (not counting her doctoral dissertation) is a biography of the late eighteenth-century hostess and letter writer Rahel Varnhagen, whose salon in Berlin was one of the hatcheries of German romanticism. Even though mostly neglected in Arendt’s canon, the Rahel biography is, according Julia Kristeva, “a veritable laboratory of Arendt’s political thought” (Kristeva 2003, 50). Arendt attests to her deep fondness for Varnhagen, calling her “my very closest woman friend, unfortunately dead a hundred years now” (Arendt 1997 [1957], 5). A special connection to the time period certainly exists as well — a connection typical for Arendt, since
it is unclear whether Arendt appreciated her literature professor’s work on Romanticism or whether his research on Varnhagen ever directly influenced hers. Nonetheless, the explored conjunctions suggest that the young Arendt’s writings and thought belonged to a much wider framework of cross-disciplinary debates than has been recognised. She was never only a follower of Heidegger or Jaspers, neither an exclusively philosophical author, but possessed a remarkable ability to combine a variety of perspectives and disciplinary languages (Keedus 2014, 319).
Arendt never embraced just one idea or school or field of study or intellectual framework, and the same is true of her stance on the Romantics. She took a serious interest in German Romanticism, studying under Friedrich Gundolf, the literature professor mentioned in the quote above, who was one of the most celebrated literary theorists of the time (Grunenberg 2006, 123), famous for his vehement criticism describing the era as “reactionary” and “purely destructive movement and thus devoid of any creativity” (Keedus 2014, 316).
But Arendt was not only an admirer of poetry; she also wrote poetry herself until the 1960s (a collection was published by Piper in 2015). 74 poems have been preserved, twenty-one of them written from 1923 to 1926, during her university years in Marburg; and fifty more between 1942 and 1961. Many of the poems refer to parts of her published work, to travels after the war, and to her friends. It is not known whether she thought of publishing her pieces, but she typed them and collected them in folders. For Arendt, poetry was “the most human and unworldly of the arts” and she wanted to be a part of it, even though she did not see herself as a poet. “We only expect truth from the poets, not from the philosophers from whom we expect thought,”[7] she wrote in her Denktagebuch in the mid 1950s.
Footnotes
[1] Letter, Hannah Arendt to Heinrich Blücher. 14 February 1950. Arendt Papers, Container I.
[2] In English in the original interview.
[3] Arendt’s Denktagebuch (1950–73) comprises twenty-eight journals that are less a diary (diary — German: Tagebuch) than experiments of thoughts, or results of her thinking (to think — German: denken); primarily in German but partly in English and Greek. See Arendt (2003) in “Works Cited.“
[4] DTB XXVI.30, 728. Translated by Wout Cornelissen.
[5] Cornelissen 2017, p. 77
[6] Fenollosa 1967, p. 25
[7] DTB I, 469.
Works Cited
Arendt, Hannah. 1929. Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin. Versuch einer philosophischen Interpretation. Berlin: J. Springer. English translation (1996): Love and Saint Augustine.
— — — 1964. “Was bleibt? Es bleibt die Muttersprache?” Interview with Günther Gaus. Recorded 16 September; broadcast on the ZDF TV program Zur Person on 26 October.
— — — 1997 [1957]. Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess. First Complete Edition. Edited and with an introduction by Liliane Weissberg. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Cornelissen, Wout (2017): Thinking in Metaphors. In: Artefacts of Thinking. Reading Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch. Edited by Roger Berkowitz and Ian Storey. Fordham University, p. 73–87.
Grunenberg, Antonia. 2006. Hannah Arendt und Martin Heidegger: Geschichte einer Liebe. Munich: Piper.
Keedus, Liisi. 2014. “Thinking beyond Philosophy: Hannah Arendt and the Weimar Hermeneutic Connections.“ Trames 18 (December): 307–25.
Kristeva, Julia. 2003. Hannah Arendt. Translated by Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press.
Starobinski, Jean. 1971. “The Style of Autobiography.“ In Literary Style: A Symposium. Edited by Seymour Chatman. New York: Oxford University Press.
Weigel, Sigrid. 2012. “Sounding Through — Poetic Difference — Self-Translation: Hannah Arendt’s Thoughts and Writings between Different Languages, Cultures, and Fields.“ In “Escape to Life”: German Intellectuals in New York — A Compendium on Exile after 1933, 55–79.Edited by Eckart Goebel and Sigird Weigel. Berlin: De Gruyter.
