Many Friends Came With Us
09-29-2024Over in the Paris Review, Srikanth Reddy discusses some poems by Hannah Arendt. A new collection of Arendt’s poems will appear soon translated by Samantha Hill and Genese Grill. Reddy writes:
"For a while there in the late nineties, it seemed to me like every other book of poetry that I flipped open in the bookstore was prefaced by an austere epigraph from the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Plato, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Wittgenstein—for all their many differences—enjoy a special status as “poets’ philosophers” in the annals of literary history. Other lofty thinkers fly under poets’ collective radar; I have yet to come across a volume of verse prefaced by a quotation from David Hume. What makes some philosophers, and not others, into poets’ philosophers remains a mystery to me. But I’ve never really thought of Hannah Arendt as one of them.
Unemotional, anti-Romantic, and doggedly insistent on expunging unruly feelings from collective life, Arendt may seem to possess the least lyrical of temperaments, but a new volume of her poetry reveals that the author of sobering works like The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition was writing ardent and intimate verse in her off-hours. We’re pleased to feature Samantha Rose Hill’s new translation, with Genese Grill, of an untitled poem from Arendt’s manuscripts in our Fall 2024 issue.
Now housed in Arendt’s archive at the Library of Congress, the poem is dated to September 1947, six years after the philosopher’s arrival in the United States. Though she had by then settled on New York’s Upper West Side, Arendt reflects upon what she’d left behind on her life’s journey in this wistful poem:
Unemotional, anti-Romantic, and doggedly insistent on expunging unruly feelings from collective life, Arendt may seem to possess the least lyrical of temperaments, but a new volume of her poetry reveals that the author of sobering works like The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition was writing ardent and intimate verse in her off-hours. We’re pleased to feature Samantha Rose Hill’s new translation, with Genese Grill, of an untitled poem from Arendt’s manuscripts in our Fall 2024 issue.
Now housed in Arendt’s archive at the Library of Congress, the poem is dated to September 1947, six years after the philosopher’s arrival in the United States. Though she had by then settled on New York’s Upper West Side, Arendt reflects upon what she’d left behind on her life’s journey in this wistful poem:
This was the farewell:
Many friends came with us
And whoever did not come was no longer a friend.
Many friends came with us
And whoever did not come was no longer a friend.
The bracing conclusion of Arendt’s opening stanza lands with the impact of a practical realist’s rebuke to a sentimental fool: Friendship is companionship; therefore, whoever is not a companion cannot be considered a friend. (There’s something syllogistic to the philosopher’s adoption of tercets for this poem’s form.) In her introduction to What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt, which will be published later in December, Hill chronicles how Arendt’s notebook of poems accompanied her through a succession of farewells: when she fled Germany after her release from the Gestapo prison in Alexanderplatz in the spring of 1933; when she left her second life in Paris to report to the internment camp at Gurs seven years later; and when she escaped on foot and by bicycle to Lisbon, where she boarded the SS Guineefor Ellis Island on May 22, 1941. “This was the train: / Measuring the country in flight,” Arendt writes, “and slowing as it passed through many cities.”