I wish I did not have that human wish,
The wish that today were a different day,
But the wish that pours forth in the song of a bird:
“May it be this same day, so may it be.”

No, a bird sings not to say but to be.
It grants a wish just by being heard.
I wish I didn’t want the day to stay
Or change. I should, like the bird, just be.

(Responding to Randall Jarrell’s “A Man Meets a Woman in the Street,” with Keats’ nightingale also in mind.)

(Cincinnati) In 1947, Hannah Arendt wrote a short poem, “Ich bin ja nur ein kleiner Punkt,” which Samantha Rose Hill accurately and ably translates as “I am just a little point / no more than a spot. …”

I took more liberty to make this translation, imitating Arendt’s strong rhyme-scheme:

I’m nothing but a little dot
No bigger than that black spot,
The beginning of a square.

When I want to expand from there
I start to daub spots everywhere.
My pencil lead (or ink is worse)
Casts on everything my curse.

But--I am nothing but a dot,
Not even a very well-made spot,
Radiant as the start of squares.

I think this is a poem about writing. The middle verse describes someone like Hannah Arendt in the midst of a project, spreading argumentative words in every direction, cursing (or perhaps bewitching) her surroundings with her ideas. But she had started with a single mark. Sometimes she identifies more with that humble first dot than with her whole, ambitious project.

The third stanza almost repeats the first, with the crucial difference that a single geometrical square has become plural, and her little dot (Punkt) “shines” or is “resplendent” (prunkt). It may be humble, but it has potential.

In the original:

Ich bin ja nur ein kleiner Punkt 
nicht grösser als der schwarze 
der dort auf dem Papiere 
als Anfang zum Quadrate.

Wenn ich mich sehr erweitern will,
beginn ich sehr zu klecksen, 
mit Stift und Feder, Blei und Tint 
die Umwelt zu behexen.

Doch bin ich nur ein kleiner Punkt 
nicht einmal gut geraten, 
der auf den Papieren prunkt 
als Anfang zu Quadraten.

---

German text from What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt (Liveright, 2024), translated by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill. See also: “Complaint,” by Hannah Arendt

This is beautiful, scolds the mind,
Seeing the mind wandering.
It ransacks its lexicon to find
Other words, pondering
Lovely, rare, or perhaps sublime
As sounds with which to hold the mind
That skitters anxiously through time
And which the things in view remind
Of other things undone, unfixed.
Disapproving, the mind regards
Itself distracted, not transfixed.
The whole it had glimpsed: now in shards.
The mind a problem for the mind,
A solid door has shut behind. 

See also: When the Lotus Bloomed; Intimations; a Hegelian meditation; the fetter; and Mindlessness: A Sonnet