{"id":34083,"date":"2025-05-22T10:15:13","date_gmt":"2025-05-22T14:15:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=34083"},"modified":"2025-05-22T10:15:16","modified_gmt":"2025-05-22T14:15:16","slug":"hannah-arendt-im-nothing-but-a-little-dot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=34083","title":{"rendered":"Hannah Arendt: I\u2019m Nothing but a Little Dot"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>(Cincinnati) In 1947, Hannah Arendt wrote a short poem, &#8220;<em>Ich bin ja nur ein kleiner Punkt,<\/em>&#8221; which Samantha Rose Hill accurately and ably translates as &#8220;I am just a little point \/ no more than a spot. &#8230;&#8221; <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I took more liberty to make this translation, imitating Arendt&#8217;s strong rhyme-scheme:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<pre class=\"wp-block-verse\">I\u2019m nothing but a little dot<br>No bigger than that black spot,<br>The beginning of a square.<br><br>When I want to expand from there<br>I start to daub spots everywhere.<br>My pencil lead (or ink is worse)<br>Casts on everything my curse.<br><br>But--I am nothing but a dot,<br>Not even a very well-made spot,<br>Radiant as the start of squares.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n<p>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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The third stanza almost repeats the first, with the crucial difference that a single geometrical square has become plural, and her little dot (<em>Punkt<\/em>) &#8220;shines&#8221; or is &#8220;resplendent&#8221; (<em>prunkt<\/em>). It may be humble, but it has potential.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the original:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<pre class=\"wp-block-verse\">Ich bin ja nur ein kleiner Punkt\u00a0<br>nicht gr\u00f6sser als der schwarze\u00a0<br>der dort auf dem Papiere\u00a0<br>als Anfang zum Quadrate.<br><br>Wenn ich mich sehr erweitern will,<br>beginn ich sehr zu klecksen,\u00a0<br>mit Stift und Feder, Blei und Tint\u00a0<br>die Umwelt zu behexen.<br><br>Doch bin ich nur ein kleiner Punkt\u00a0<br>nicht einmal gut geraten,\u00a0<br>der auf den Papieren prunkt\u00a0<br>als Anfang zu Quadraten.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p>German text from <em>What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt\u00a0<\/em>(Liveright, 2024), translated by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill. See also: <a href=\"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=33144\">\u201cComplaint,\u201d by Hannah Arendt<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(Cincinnati) In 1947, Hannah Arendt wrote a short poem, &#8220;Ich bin ja nur ein kleiner Punkt,&#8221; which Samantha Rose Hill accurately and ably translates as &#8220;I am just a little point \/ no more than a spot. &#8230;&#8221; I took more liberty to make this translation, imitating Arendt&#8217;s strong rhyme-scheme: I\u2019m nothing but a little [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-verse-and-worse"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34083"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34083\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34094,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34083\/revisions\/34094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}