In What Remains, Saman­tha Rose Hill col­lects poems from Han­nah Arendt’s jour­nals and let­ters, pre­sent­ing them both in the orig­i­nal Ger­man and Eng­lish trans­la­tion. These delight­ful poems pro­vide a win­dow into Arendt’s vibrant engage­ments with the world. They sit­u­ate her in the milieux of Ger­man poet­ry; Arendt’s influ­ences include poets like Rilke, Hold­er­lin, and Schiller. The col­lec­tion also pro­vides fas­ci­nat­ing glim­mers of the sig­nif­i­cance of poet­ry to mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry intel­lec­tu­als and readers.

The first sec­tion of What Remains con­tains poems Arendt wrote between 1923 and 1926; the sec­ond half poems she wrote between 1941 and 1961. Any poems writ­ten in the year between 1927 and 1941 have been lost as Arendt moved to escape Nazi per­se­cu­tion and was state­less for a peri­od. The ear­ly poems in this col­lec­tion are gen­er­al­ly juve­na­lia, a young Arendt writes about love and heart­break along­side quo­tid­i­an details of life and reflec­tions on mean­ing, death, and beau­ty. These poems are the­mat­i­cal­ly inter­est­ing as reflec­tive of the his­tor­i­cal moment and Arendt’s bur­geon­ing intel­lec­tu­al devel­op­ment. In some ear­ly poems, the real­i­ty of the Great War appears as when she writes:

No shad­ow hovers,

No form has weight.

And still I hear:

Too late, too late. 

Arendt echoes Gen­e­sis and Deuteron­o­my in this poem as well as Rilke’s Duino Ele­gies. Many of the ear­ly poems are brief and ellip­ti­cal, rely­ing on expect­ed imagery, but at times, philo­soph­i­cal con­cerns blaze through the lines. In one poem, Arendt writes, ​“Does any­one have a scale / That can mea­sure life’s suf­fer­ing?” and in anoth­er she con­sid­ers hap­pi­ness and offers, ​“For whom self-knowl­edge is bound­ary and right, / For whom self-nam­ing is the badge of inheritance.”

What Remains shines in the sec­ond half. The lat­er poems demon­strate a devel­op­ment of Arendt’s poet­ic ear along­side her broad­er polit­i­cal and philo­soph­i­cal con­cerns. Short­ly after World War II, she con­cludes one poem, ​“Blessed is he who has no home; he still sees it in his dreams.” 

Anoth­er poem, ​“Dis­tance is only unmea­sur­able,” is both philo­soph­i­cal­ly sear­ing and for­mal­ly com­mand­ing, demon­strat­ing con­fi­dence and assur­ance on the page of a writer in full pow­er. In addi­tion to the beau­ty of the lan­guage and the ideas that Arendt works through in the poems, she offers her own ars poet­i­ca: ​“poet­ic lan­guage / is a place, not a refuge.” Arendt’s occa­sion­al poems, for birth­days and observ­ing the death of friends and com­rades, sug­gest the sig­nif­i­cance of poet­ry among her cadre of friends and intellectuals.

With Genese Grill, Saman­tha Rose Hill, Arendt’s biog­ra­ph­er, offers won­der­ful trans­la­tions of these poems with foot­notes that explain where she found in the archives many poems and illu­mi­nate some of the con­text behind writ­ing them. This vol­ume is a trea­sure for fans of Arendt and poetry.