Books Read: What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt (translated by Samantha Rose Hill and Genese Grill)

Who the fuck starts with the poetry? You’re looking at him.

I know. I fucked up. No one in their right mind would pick up Hannah Arendt’s poetry—poetry never formally published but rather sent to lovers and friends—before reading her famous works, books like The Human Condition and The Origins of Totalitarianism.¹ But Backlisted² decided to cover it, and because I do everything they tell me, I skipped the important stuff for this very slim book of interesting but not particularly memorable poetry.

I’m not a connoisseur of poetry. I may have said it here (or in the pages of Locus; it starts to blur after a while), but I avoided poetry as a kid, a teen, and a young and old adult. It’s only recently, primarily because of the aforementioned Backlisted, that I’ve started reading poetry and enjoying it (even if I still find it a bit befuddling). As such, my opinions of Arendt’s poetry should be sneered at, or just dismissed altogether.³

I didn’t hate the poems. I just felt you had to be there, which makes sense because they weren’t written for a wider audience. As I say above, they were written for friends and lovers (all men, from memory). And they were written for Arendt. As Samantha Rose Hill points out in the book’s Introduction, Arendt cared enough about her poems that she carried them:

over the Ore Mountains to Prague, then to Geneva… She took them to Paris… and they remained with her as she divorced her first husband, then met, fell in love with, and married her second husband… She held on to them for eight years in exile as she worked with Youth Aliyah to help Jewish youth escape to Palestine… [and so on, until Arendt and the poem reach their final resting place—New York City]

One poem did grab my attention; it could have been written yesterday. Here it is in full:

Oh, who cares

What we are and how we appear.

It doesn’t make a difference to them,

What we do or think.

The sky is in flames,

Heaven is on fire

Above us all,

Who don’t know the way.

1. Which, you know, feels sort of important given the “current moment”. I will, eventually, get to them. I hope.

2. This review isn’t really the place to discuss John Mitchinson’s decision to step back from Backlisted. All I’ll say is that I feel for the authors who were fucked over by Unbound and Boundless. But I’ll also never not love Backlisted.

3. This isn’t self-deprecation. I know my limits. Poetry is a weak spot.