Hannah Arendt wrote the poem “Klage” (“Lament” or “Complaint”) in the winter of 1925-6, the season when she turned 20 and broke off a passionate relationship with her teacher, Martin Heidegger. It appears in What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt (Liveright, 2024), translated by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill.
Hill’s translations are eloquent as well as learned. She aims for reliability and does not attempt to replicate Arendt’s sing-song rhythms and rhymes. I have given myself a little more license in translating “Klage” as follows:
Complaint
Oh, the days they pass by uselessly
Like a never settled game,
The hours pressing ruthlessly,
Each play of pain the same.
Time, it slides over me, and then it slides away.
And I sing the old songs’ first lines—
Not whatever else they say.
And no child in a dream could move
In a more predetermined way.
No old one could more surely prove
That a life is long and gray.
But never will sorrow soothe away
Old dreams, nor the insight of youth.
Never will it make me give away
The bliss of lovely truth.
-- Hannah Arendt, 1925-6 (trans. Peter Levine)
This is a young person’s poem about a broken heart, concluding with an expression of indomitable spirit. The author was just a kid (and her teacher certainly shouldn’t have slept with her). The result could have been a cliché, a torch song, but Arendt’s tropes were original, and her craft was impeccable.
For instance, we read about a little girl dreaming that she is trudging along, and an old man knowing that life is gray, and then we encounter the phrase Alte Träume, junge Weisheit (old dreams and young wisdom). This is a surprising, chiastic twist.
Heidegger would soon give lectures that included an extended treatment of boredom. Perhaps he and Arendt had already discussed this topic before she wrote her poem (assuming that he didn’t get the idea from her verse). In short, for Heidegger, our experience of boredom discloses truths about time that are otherwise concealed. When we shift into or away from moods like boredom (or angst), we learn that what we imagine to be a self and a world are actually a single complex that unfolds in time (Levine 2023). Heidegger is all about acknowledging the vorgeschrieben Gang (predetermined way) of life but still claiming one’s own Glückes schöne Reinheit (beautiful purity of happiness). Even as Arendt felt depressed about breaking up with Heidegger, she explored and applied such ideas.
Later, the distinguished political theorist Hannah Arendt defended a distinction between the public and private spheres and guarded her private life, as she had every right to do. But her dignity should not mislead us that her private emotions were ever tame. Hill quotes a letter from Arendt to her husband: “And about the love of others who branded me as cold hearted, I always thought: If only you knew how dangerous love would be for me.” As someone who has read Arendt for nearly 40 years–but who only encountered her poetry recently (thanks to Hill)–I would say: I always knew this about her.
Source: P. Levine, “Boredom at the Border of Philosophy: Conceptual and Ethical Issues.” Frontiers in Sociology, July 2023 See also: Hannah Arendt and philosophy as a way of life; on the moral dangers of cliché (partly about Arendt); Hannah Arendt and thinking from the perspective of an agent; homage to Hannah Arendt at The New School; Philip, Hannah, and Heinrich: a Play; don’t confuse bias and judgment; etc.
