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. * 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 […]

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