Sounding Through – Poetic Difference –

Self-Translation: Hannah Arendt’s Thoughts

and Writings Between Different Languages,
Cultures, and Fields

Sigrid Weigel

I. The Sound of Arendt’s Writing

Every time I read Hannah Arendt, I get the impression of hearing her
voice speaking the words and phrases I read, like a performance. It is
not that I want to get rid of this effect; I very much appreciate the
mode of her speaking and presenting arguments. The only drawback of
this presence of her soundless voice is the fact that it compels me to follow
that mode of relatively slow reading which in ancient Greek was intro-
duced as ‘reading inwardly.’ This is regarded as a silent reading performed
on an inner stage,1 but – taking into account the metaphorical character
of all sayings about the ‘inner’ or ‘inward’ – actually occurs as a soundless
reading of any single word as if one was reading aloud. In order to find
out the reason for this phenomenon I listened again to several of her re-
corded radio speeches and to the few interviews that Hannah Arendt,
who hated to have her face represented and reproduced in the public
sphere, consented to give.2 After listening again to Arendt’s recorded
voice, I have come to the conclusion that it is the rhythm of her thoughts
that attracts my mind to such an extent that I can’t separate it from the
lucidity and rhetoric of her analyses.

1 See Svenbro, Jesper, Phrasikleia. Anthropologie des Lesens im Alten Griechenland, Mu-
nich 2005.
2 Namely the famous interview by Günter Gaus in 1964 in German and the (orig-
inally English) interview by Roger Errera for French TV in 1973. Both published
in German in: Arendt, Hannah, Ich will verstehen. Selbstauskünfte zu Leben und Werk,
ed. Ursula Ludz, Munich, Zurich 1996.
56 Sigrid Weigel

As soon as one’s attention is alerted to the voice, the rereading of

Arendt’s writings immediately yields new discoveries – this one, for
example, in one of the centerpieces of her theory, namely in the chapter
on Acting (Handeln) in her book The Human Condition (in German: Vita
activa oder Vom tätigen Leben):

In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique
personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world,
while their physical identities appear without any activity of their own in
the unique shape of the body and sound of the voice.3

Arendt thus considers the voice as belonging among the phenomena of

that involuntarily revealing and personal “Who-somebody-actually-is,”
which remains to a great extent veiled to oneself while appearing “so
clearly and unmistakably” to others. The fact that any person only
makes an appearance as “someone” or “somebody” in the realm of to-
getherness forms the centre of Arendt’s theory: it is the inter-est of inbet-
weenness, or the interspace between humans from which her concept of
the political emerges.
In what follows I will discuss this persistent reverberation of the
author’s voice as a symptom of the very characteristic sound of Arendt’s
political theory in order to examine the specific historical and epistemo-
logical conditions from which her unique thinking emerged. The sound
underlines not only the eminent role language plays in her thoughts – as
confirmed by her repeatedly expressed confession that even in exile she
remained close to her German mother tongue – I also refer to a particular
scenario from which her reflections emerge. This can be called tragic in
that it might be compared to the counter rhythmic structure of the
ancient theatre, based on a constellation of irreconcilable parts. In his
Essay on the Tragic (1978),4 Peter Szondi argued that the enlightened sub-
ject/person may be described as the heir of the antithetic character of
ancient tragedy in as much as the agon of ancient drama has turned into
an irresolvable tragic constellation to which the modern subject is
bound. Thus, it is this Szondian sense of the tragic to which I refer
when describing the tragic scenario of Arendt’s work, rather than to
the sentimental meaning it has acquired in ordinary language. It forced

3 Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (1958), Chicago 1998, 179.

4 Szondi, Peter, Versuch über das Tragische, Frankfurt/M. 1978. Engl. transl. Paul
Fleming, An Essay on the Tragic, Stanford 2002.
 Sounding Through – Poetic Difference – Self-Translation 57

her to develop her unique reflections on the concept of the political and
the human condition. She translated the latter herself as “menschliche Be-
dingtheit” when arguing: “Men are conditioned beings because every-
thing they come in contact with turns immediately into a condition of
their existence.”5
The main challenge her work presents is the incommensurateness
between philosophy and politics. It not only forms a leitmotif in her writ-
ings, but has also been elaborated theoretically by her reflections on acting
and thinking. Arendt regarded acting (Handeln) as the realm of “human
affairs,” based on the plurality of human being, their Miteinander that is
to say their being, speaking and acting together forming an inbetweenness
and space for the political. Thinking, as an activity (Tätigkeit) which takes
place in a distance from acting (Handeln), is described as a dialogue of
“two-in-one” or of a “Self” with the “Other of the Self.”6 Instead of
merely contemplating and developing theoretically sophisticated exami-
nations of the limits of philosophy and politics – and of other realms, sys-
tems, concepts and institutions, such as the legal system with respect to the
Nazi crimes – Arendt’s work took place in the very tension between
them, taking philosophy as resistance against existing politics and vice
versa. In other words she was working above the abyss, thus turning
the existing contradictory constellation into a life with and a work on
them. The traces of such work, which does not leave the person unin-
jured, are audible in the voice and discernable in the face of Hannah
Arendt, especially in the last decade of her life.
In one of her last addresses, the Sonning Price Speech of 1975, Arendt
reflects on the discontent of being a public figure and explains the etymology
of persona – a word deriving from the mask in antique theatre:

But in this mask, which was designed and determined by the play, there
existed a broad opening at the place of the mouth through which the indi-
vidual, undisguised voice of the actor could sound. It is from this sounding
through that the word persona derived: per-sonare, “to sound through.”7

5 Arendt, The Human Condition, 9.

6 See Arendt, Hannah, Denktagebuch 1950–1973, ed. Ursula Ludz/Ingeborg Nord-
mann, Munich, Zurich 2002, 246, 725 et al.
7 The speech is published as “Prologue” in: Arendt, Hannah, Responsibility and Judge-
ment, ed. Jerome Kohn, New York 2003. German transl. Ursula Ludz in: Hannah
Arendt. Text und Kritik 166/167.9 (2005): 3–11.
58 Sigrid Weigel

First appearing in a public speech, these reflections on the persona have had a
25-year-long latency, during which they slumbered in her notebook
(Denktagebuch). Reflections on the relationship between “Person – Ich –
Charakter”8 can be found in the second entry of her notebook and consist
of reflections, written mostly in German, which she started in June 1950
after having finished the manuscript for her first English book, i.e. the
book on totalitarianism partly written and originally published in English.
The Denktagebuch thus forms a German Parerga to the work of a German-
speaking English-writing author. Referring to the theatrical primal scene of
per-sonare one could describe the unique tone of Arendt’s political theory as
a sort of sounding through, namely a sounding of German through English,
a sounding of poetic language through theory, and a sounding of experiences
through political concepts. And these experiences were first and foremost
those of immigrants, Jewish refugees and stateless human being.

II. The Metamorphosis of an Author – From

Philosophy to Politics
In May 1968, while simultaneously supporting the students’ movement
with her conceptual critique of their slogans, regularly participating in
the heated discussions organized at the Theatre for Ideas in Manhattan,9
and expanding on the plan for her book On Violence (in German Macht
und Gewalt, both 1970), she wrote a remarkable entry in her Denktagebuch,
reflecting the crucial challenge of her whole commitment: “Any ‘political
philosophy’ must be preceded by a comprehension of the relationship
between philosophy and politics. It might be that ‘political philosophy’
is a Contradictio in adjecto.”10 Arendt’s work is stamped by the insight
and acknowledgment of this contradictio at the same time as it is by the
conviction of the necessity to act and think in spite of it, and in full
awareness of it. This, I want to argue, was forced upon her and made pos-
sible first and foremost by her emigration and the experience of entering
into a totally foreign political and intellectual culture. This both forced
and enabled her to turn the polar opposition of philosophy and politics

8 Arendt, Denktagebuch, 8.
9 “The discussion took place in the 21st Street loft where the Theatre for Ideas, a
gathering place for New York intellectuals since 1961, had its house.” Young-
Bruehl, Elizabeth, Hannah Arendt. For Love of the World, New Haven, London
1982, 413.
10 Arendt, Denktagebuch, 683.
 Sounding Through – Poetic Difference – Self-Translation 59

into a counter-striving productivity, akin to those two arrows pointing in

different directions and, though opposed to one another, nevertheless
propelling each other forward which Walter Benjamin depicted in his
so-called Theological-Political Fragment.
Arendt shared the overall experience of exile with many other refugees
and Jewish-German intellectuals in New York – many of whom were struck
by depression and standstill, falling into silence and an inability to act at all,
some of them busy with their mutation into the ‘perfect American,’ others
stuck in their home customs and language and in their enclosed circles of
German-speaking émigré friends, and yet others struggling to develop a
bilingual and bicultural life as was customary in the United States with its
long history of immigration. In the case of Hannah Arendt, however, the
escape from Nazi Germany took the shape of a genuine metamorphosis. Leav-
ing Germany in 1933 as a gifted, promising young philosopher she was un-
prepared and abruptly dropped into practical political work during her eight
years in France, when working for the Youth-Alijah. After arriving in New
York in 1941 she immediately turned herself into a writer of political analyses,
starting with committed commentaries on the Palestinian situation and the
question of a Jewish army, commentaries which may be interpreted as a
sort of compromise between the two preceding periods of her life. During
the subsequent years her commentaries proceeded step by step toward analyses
of politics and political concepts. Although arising from the current political
situation, they surpassed the actual problems in formulating fundamental
reflections on the conditions of human acting as such.
The way in which Arendt was politically educated by historic events
may be studied in her article, “We Refugees,” published in January 1943
in The Menorah Journal. There she not only reflects on the experience of
the refugees alienated from their “language, which means the naturalness
of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of
feelings” and the experience of being the “first non-religious Jews perse-
cuted.”11 Confronted with the historically new situation of the refugees
and the stateless in WWII who, “unprotected by any specific law or polit-
ical convention, are nothing but human beings,”12 she also reflects on the
collapse of both the existing historical and political concepts and the
“kind of human beings.” The need for a fundamental reconsideration

11 Arendt, Hannah, “We Refugees,” in: The Jew as Pariah. Jewish Identity and Politics
in the Modern Age, ed. Ron H. Feldman, New York 1978, 55–66, 59.
12 Arendt, “We Refugees,” 65.
60 Sigrid Weigel

of political thought deriving from this breach finds its point of departure
in the insight that “for the first time Jewish history is not separate but tied
up with that of all other nations”13 – that is to say that Jewish history has
turned into an epistemological viewpoint for developing general, universal
political concepts.
In short: In the case of Hannah Arendt the escape to life turned out to
take the form of an entrance into the language of politics, the latter occurring
in the form of the American idiom of English. However, this did not
happen without letting the German backstage of her mind play an active
role. It functioned as a resistance against getting assimilated to the order
of the real existing American policy and its conventional codes. I use
the word “backstage” here quite literally as a site of speech for the perfor-
mance of words and thoughts. This constellation forms one of the facets
of per-sonare, namely a sounding through of her awareness of language and
concepts through the voice of the author of political theory into whom
Arendt turned herself in the United States.
This metamorphosis took exactly one decade – from her arrival in
New York until 1951 when her first book was published in the U.S.,
namely The Origins of Totalitarianism14 – four years before the German ver-
sion. This she translated herself, although it might not be called a true
translation, as the author herself remarks in the foreword to the first
edition in 1955:

It is not a literal translation of the English text. Some of the chapters I had
originally written in German and later translated them into English. I am
now giving the original version where this was the case. However, there
were more instances here and there where in the process of re-working
the text into German changes, cuts and additions occurred, which,
however, are not worth pointing out.15

While single chapters were translated from original German texts, the
main part was written in English as the formation of this book reaches

13 Ibid., 66.
14 Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York 1951.
15 Arendt, Hannah, Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft (1955), Munich 1986,
13 (Arendt’s own transl.). As regards the complex genesis of the book see
Ludz, Ursula, “Hannah Arendt und ihr Totalitarismusbuch. Ein kurzer Bericht
über die schwierige Autor-Werk-Geschichte,” in: Antonia Grunenberg (ed.), To-
talitäre Herrschaft und republikanische Demokratie. Fünfzig Jahre The Origins of
Totalitarianism, Frankfurt/M. 2003, 81–92.
 Sounding Through – Poetic Difference – Self-Translation 61

back to her very first articles in the U.S. in 1942 from which her analysis
of anti-Semitism in “From the Dreyfus Affair to France today”16 turned
out to become the seed for the first part of the book.
In the course of the decade during which the author’s metamorphosis
took place, a German-American tension was superimposed upon the
underlying contradiction between philosophy and politics, a framework
within which Arendt ascribed a philosophical attitude to German culture
and a political one to American. The crucial contradictio of her thought and
writing thus appeared to the emigrant in the guise of cultural differences.
Arendt, far from thinking in pros and cons, reflected upon this constella-
tion as an epistemological chiasmus concerning the intellectual habitus.
In January 1949, after almost eight years of residency in the U.S., she
wrote to Karl Jaspers in Basel: “Sometimes I wonder which is more dif-
ficult: to instill an awareness of politics in the Germans or to convey to
Americans even the slightest inkling of what philosophy is all about.”17
This statement has to be evaluated as more than just the impression of
an immigrant using the common rhetoric of a cultural comparison which
opposes the old homeland to the new; rather, it is based on widespread
and intense experiences in writing, teaching, and political activities during
her first years in the U.S.18

III. The Sounding Through of Poetry

The sentence in the letter to Jaspers is an emblematic statement for
Arendt’s thought. It indicates her doubly-focused gaze that makes use of
the intellectual and political possibilities and disadvantages of both cul-
tures and both languages without resulting in a binary scenario. This

16 Arendt, Hannah: “From the Dreyfus Affair to France today,” in: Jewish Social Stu-
dies 4.3 (1942): 195–240.
17 Arendt, Hannah/Jaspers, Karl, Correspondence 1926–1969, ed. Lotte Köhler/Hans
Saner, transl. Robert Kimber/Rita Kimber, New York 1992, 129.
18 Immediately after her arrival in New York Arendt was intensely engaged in writ-
ing and in politics: After only a six months stay she started being busy with dif-
ferent activities: working for the monthly German-Jewish journal Aufbau,
teaching at Brooklyn College, delivering lectures, working as an executive direc-
tor of the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Corporation ( JCR) and, since 1946, as the
editor of the Schocken publishing house – all this besides writing countless articles
for various journals, like Jewish Social Studies, Contemporary Jewish Record, Menorah
Journal, Partisan Review, Commentary, Nation and Aufbau.
62 Sigrid Weigel

was guaranteed by the voices from the backstage of her mind (she talked
of her “Hinterkopf” and the “back of my mind” in the famous Gaus-
interview)19 which consisted mainly of poetry, and, for a long period, ex-
clusively of words and phrases from German poems with Goethe, Heine
and Rilke playing the leading parts. But later on, after long years of living
in the U.S. and maintaining close friendships and exchanges with several
writers and poets (W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Mary McCarthy, for exam-
ple) there are also words and phrases of poems by American or English
poets appearing from the backstage of her mind to act out and sound
through in Arendt’s speeches and articles.20
One of the earliest of these friendships grew from an encounter with
Randell Jarell, the poet, literary critic, novelist, and translator of German lit-
erature.21 This was in 1946 when Jarell was in charge of the book reviews
of the journal Nation, for which she wrote some reviews. Their friendship
started with an exchange of language or even just words. He grew accus-
tomed to translating or “polishing” her articles – what she called “vereng-
lischen” or “Englishing” – and she helped him with his translations of
German poetry, though apparently he knew less German than she did
English. Her collection of portraits, Men in Dark Times (1968),22 includes
a memory image written after his death in 1965. It is a description of
him introducing her to English/American poetry during his regular visits
at her home, which they called “American Poetry Weekend”:

He opened up for me a whole new world of sound and meter, and he

taught me the specific gravity of English words, whose specific relative
weight, as in all languages, is ultimately determined by poetic usage and
standards. Whatever I know of English poetry, and perhaps of the genius
of the language, I owe to him.23

19 See Arendt, Hannah, “Fernsehgespräch mit Günter Gaus” (1964), in: id., Ich will
verstehen. Selbstauskünfte zu Leben und Werk, ed. Ursula Ludz, Munich, Zurich
1996, 58.
20 See for example the lines of W.H. Auden in the Sonning Price Speech which
Arendt delivered in the last year of her life in April 1975 (cf. footnote 7).
21 Jarell was the author of the early campus novel Picture of an Institution (1954), a novel
which includes figures modelled on Arendt and her husband Heinrich Blücher.
22 A collection of profiles intended to illuminate the darkest times by means of the
“uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their
lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the
time span that was given them on earth,” as Arendt puts it in her preface to
Arendt, Hannah, Men in Dark Times, San Diego, New York, London 1983, IX.
23 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 264.
 Sounding Through – Poetic Difference – Self-Translation 63

Although in one of his letters Jarell says that nobody has ever said such
things about his poems as Hannah Arendt had,24 she, with her typical
modesty, explains that he was attracted to her house not just because of
her but due to “the simple fact that this was a place where German
was spoken.” To confirm this she cites a line of one of his poems:
“The country I like best of all is German,” a citation immediately to
be followed by Arendt’s commentary: “The ‘country,’ obviously, was
not Germany but German.”
This episode illustrates that her friendships to poets were based on a
kind of elective affinity. Long before living in exile and before writing
in a second language, Arendt considered the language to be her actual
country. Belonging to the first generation of women and Jews in Ger-
many with general access to universities, she was already forced to con-
stantly explain and consider her intellectual position before her exile.
Her teacher in Heidelberg, Karl Jaspers, with whom she finished her dis-
sertation on the concept of love in Augustine25 in 1928, permanently ad-
dressed her German Jewish position and its impact on philosophy. In
January 1933, five years after her Ph.D. and in the context of her critical
remarks to his reference to the dubious category of “deutsches Wesen” in
his book on Max Weber (1932), Arendt spends more effort than before
on explaining her viewpoint and position from which she speaks. Here,
on the one hand, she enunciates a clear distance to a German identity
in which he, Jaspers, saw her self-evidently involved. On the other
hand, she highlights the role of the German language for her as a Jew
grown up in German culture:

For me, Germany means my mother tongue, philosophy, and literature.

I can and must stand by all that. But I am obliged to keep my distance,
I can neither be for nor against when I read Max Weber’s wonderful sen-
tence where he says that to put Germany back on her feet he would form
an alliance with the devil himself. And it is this sentence, which seems to
me to reveal the critical point here.26

This letter, by a twenty-seven year old Jewish intellectual expressing her

distance to any German issue if it appears in a nationalist mode, shows that

24 Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, 191.

25 Arendt, Hannah, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin: Versuch einer philosophischen Interpre-
tation, Berlin 1929, engl. transl. Love and Saint Augustine, Chicago 1996.
26 Arendt/Jaspers, Correspondence, 16.
64 Sigrid Weigel

due to her awareness of her Jewish position Arendt resisted the demand of
assimilation already before the experience of Nazi-Germany and exile.
Instead she substituted a country of words for the nation – similarly to
many other German speaking Jews in modern Europe.27 More than
three decades later she makes a similar statement, though under totally dif-
ferent conditions. And here I refer to her famous answer she gave in the
interview with Günter Gaus:

I write in English, though I have never lost the distance. There is an enor-
mous difference between mother tongue and all other languages. In my case
I can explain this very clearly: In German I know quite a great deal of Ger-
man poems by heart. They are constantly there – in the back of my mind* –
the same can never be achieved for another language. Thus I take liberties
in German that I would never possibly take in English.28

What separates both statements is the specific attitude of distance: In 1933

she claims that “I am obliged to keep my distance,” and then in 1964 that
“I have never lost the distance.” Whereas in 1933, the attitude of distance
was addressed to the country as a nation, later, in 1964, it is addressed to a
total assimilation into the second language. In both situations it is the lan-
guage of poetry that forms the counterpart, thus providing her with the
ability to remain at a distance – at a distance from the nation state and
from conformism. Writing under bilingual conditions, the words of
poetry are there to per-sonare, to sound through the text of the refugee
who has become a leading as well as a controversial figure of political
theory.
The two statements are separated not only by three decades but by a
breach of civilization and a new epoch in the life of refugees like Arendt.
A striking feature of recognizing the correspondences between the two
citations is the fact that the danger of assimilation has apparently switched
levels in that the necessity of distance has shifted from a national issue to
that of language. In her further answers to Gaus, Arendt mentions people
who have managed to forget their mother tongue and to learn the
mimicry29 of American English:

27 Cf. Braese, Stefan, Eine europäische Sprache. Deutsche Sprachkultur von Juden 1760–
1930, Göttingen 2010.
28 Arendt, “Fernsehgespräch mit Günter Gaus,” 58. * in English in the original Ger-
man interview.
29 Already her 1943 article “We Refugees” includes a sarcastic critique on such
mimicry: “After a single year optimists are convinced they speak English as
 Sounding Through – Poetic Difference – Self-Translation 65

I am still speaking with a heavy accent, and often I don’t speak idiomatic.
They all are used to that. But it becomes a language riddled with clichés
because that kind of productivity that one has in one’s own language is
cut off when one forgot that language.30

This statement is reflective of the experience that when speaking a second

language one tends to use a less complex and more conventional idiom.
What she does not explain in the interview, and instead keeps to herself,
is that it is not just to a second language, but specifically to English she
needs to maintain a distance. She entrusted such critical comments solely
to her Denktagebuch, where, in April 1970, an entry can be found: “On
the difficulties I have with my English readers.” A main reason for her dis-
tance emerges in what she calls a “thesaurus-philosophy,” that is that “the
notion that words ‘express’ ideas which I supposedly have prior to having
the words.” Arendt, in contrast, doubts “that we would have any ‘ideas’
without language.”31 Here again, it is the echo of language from the back-
stage of her mind that rescues her thinking from sheer assimilation – this
time from being assimilated into an existing conventional terminology.
To summarize up to this point: The scenario of Arendt’s work,
which was shaped by the counterparts of philosophy and politics, was
superimposed twice: first by the tension between German and American
intellectual culture, and second by the antagonism between poetry and
conventional language full of idioms.

IV. Politics Controverting Philosophy

At this point I need to shift the perspective within her doubly-focused

gaze in order to recognize the other side of the difficulties connected
to the American language/culture. There we will encounter the role of
the political history of the United States as the embodiment of a concept
of politics Arendt considers to be a proper concept neither occupied by
nor mixed up with non-political concepts. The demarcation of the

well as their mother tongue; and after two years they swear solemnly that they
speak English better than any other language – their German is a language they
hardly remember.” And lost language means the loss of the “naturalness of reac-
tions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings.” Arendt,
“We Refugees,” 56.
30 Arendt, “Fernsehgespräch mit Günter Gaus,” 59.
31 Arendt, Denktagebuch, 770f.
66 Sigrid Weigel

political in her theory is built upon its distinction from both the realm of
Arbeit (labor/reproduction of life) and the sphere of Herstellen (work/
making, where humans struggle with nature, a sphere dominated by
tools and techniques), the two realms which in The Human Condition
she distinguishes from Handeln (acting). The fact that she developed her
political theory in close relation to the constitution and the founding
model of the United States is accompanied by her appraisal of America
as being a republic, a “government of law and not men,” and as a country
which does not call for the immigrants’ assimilation because in a country
populated solely by immigrants there is nothing into which to be assimi-
lated. Her statements, articles, and books written after her arrival to New
York are marked by the leitmotifs of the U.S. as being a country that is
explicitly not a nation state. She dismisses precisely that catalogue of cri-
teria that Ernest Renan critically discusses in his 1882 speech, “Qu’est-ce
qu’une nation?” when she explains:

This country is united neither by heritage nor by memory, nor [by lan-
guage], nor by origin from the same [soil]. There are no natives here.
[The Indians were the natives, the others] are citizens [and these citizens
are united only by on thing – however, this thing is very much: it is the
fact you can become a citizen of the United States] by simple consent to
the Constitution.32

Also her emphasis on the sheer consent to the constitution which charac-
terizes a citizen of the United States recalls Renan’s reference to a volun-
tary moment of the unity and his metaphor of the state being the result of
a daily plebiscite.33 This concerns the differences between the various
forms and concepts of nation states acuminating in the opposition
between the European model of a homogenous nation state based on
an origin, and the nation state formed by a constitution and considered
to be a voluntary unity, which mainly exists in immigration countries.
In this respect Arendt’s book On Revolution (1963)34 is her most
American book. Here she interprets the American revolution in the

32 TV-Interview with Roger Errera. Ursula Ludz transcribed the English interview
from the French broadcast and translated it into German; see Arendt, Ich will ver-
stehen, 115, here quoted after Ludz’ original manuscript transcript.
33 Renan, Ernest, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? Conférence faite en Sorbonne, le 11 mars
1882, Paris 1882, 35.
34 Arendt, Hannah, On Revolution, London 1963, German transl. Über die Revolution,
Munich 1965.
 Sounding Through – Poetic Difference – Self-Translation 67

18th century as a kind of model because it was dedicated exclusively to

the struggle for a constitution whereas she analyzes the breaking-in of
the social question, of pathos, and passions in the French revolution
as the moment of distortion and decline, namely a fall of acting from
political aims, that is to say as a sort of fall of man from politics. It
seems as if it was necessary for Arendt to protect this role of the American
constitution for her concept of the political. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl re-
garded Arendt’s emphatic reference to the founding fathers to be a “polit-
ical fable,” and Bernard Crick explained it as the gratitude that German-
Americans are wont to express.35 It is obvious that such a discussion of the
U.S. as a political model doesn’t acknowledge many aspects of American
reality – be it the heavy obstacles one has to overcome in order to earn the
U.S. citizenship, or the enormous constraints for assimilation which
Arendt herself mentioned in her critique of the social life in the U.S.
However, what the American experience taught Arendt with respect to
her political thinking was much more than a model of a state. This can
be observed in her correspondence with Jaspers.
In 1960 Jaspers expressed a fundamental critique of the Eichmann
trial scheduled to take place in Israel arguing that Eichmann’s crime lies
beyond what can adequately be reached by a legal procedure conducted
by a single state.36 And in an even more general argument concerning
the incommensurability between law and politics, he stated that the polit-
ical has a status that can’t be captured by legal concepts: “Das Politische
hat einen mit Rechtsbegriffen nicht einzufangenden Rang”37 (The polit-
ical has a dignity which cannot be caught by legal concepts).38 The state-
ment is accompanied by a remarkable comment in brackets: “(the attempt
to do so is Anglo-Saxon and a self-deception that masks a basic fact in the
functionings of political existence).”39 In her answer, Arendt confronts
this general philosophical statement with the specific and unusual histor-
ical conditions. The Eichmann trial is confronted with crimes that lie
beyond what has been thought yet, even beyond what is conceivable
or can be thought, and is thus also beyond any political supposition
that the state of Israel can act as a representative of the victims and

35 Sir Bernard Rowland Crick (1929–2008), famous British author of political

theory, as quoted in Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, 403.
36 Arendt/Jaspers, Briefwechsel, 449.
37 Arendt/Jaspers, Briefwechsel, 450.
38 Arendt/Jaspers; Correspondence, 413.
39 Ibid.
68 Sigrid Weigel

survivors of Nazi crimes, which cannot be left without being litigated, the
murders left without penalty. Additionally, in admitting that, in respect of
the law, she might be “angelsächsisch angesteckt” (which means ‘in-
fected,’ but can also mean ‘to be driven by passion’), she argues that noth-
ing but the law is available in order to judge and condemn that which can
not even be described adequately, neither through legal concepts nor
political categories. While arguing on the theoretical level that the contro-
versy concerns crimes that surpass any existing concepts, both in politics
and law, she simultaneously counters it on the level of concrete political
acting. The only concrete possibility for responding to a crime that exists
beyond any legal definition is a lawsuit under the heading of ‘crime
against humanity,’ as she emphasizes: “nicht: Verbrechen gegen die
Menschlichkeit, sondern die Menschheit.”40 Her reflections on the con-
cept of humanity and mankind go back to her article “We Refugees,”
where she had already analyzed the crucial caesura experienced by the
persecuted and Jews during the Second World War as an assault against
the concept of man, against “the kind of human being.” In her letter
to Jaspers she writes:

The concept of hostis humani generis – however one translates it, but not:
crime against humanness; but, rather, against humanity – is more or less
indispensable to the trial. The crucial point is that although the crime at
issue was committed primarily against the Jews, it is in no way limited to
the Jews or the Jewish question.41

This is just one example of the political lessons to be studied in her letters
to Jaspers, in which philosophy is controverted. In this dialogue, Jaspers
appears as a sort of embodiment of the voice of philosophy. When seek-
ing a controversial dialogue with philosophy, Arendt found one in her
former academic advisor. When they met again after the end of the
war, he became a friend to her when his house in Basel became her Euro-
pean refuge, located, as it was, in a place outside the territory of her lin-
guistic homeland. The rhetoric of her letters to Jaspers is quite remarkable,
written with intimacy yet without hesitating to contradict and criticize
she always remains within the limits of the concrete question at hand
and never touches his way of thinking as such – although there were en-
ough opportunities to do so. Thus, for example, she doesn’t comment on

40 Arendt/Jaspers, Briefwechsel, 459.

41 Arendt/Jaspers, Correspondence, 423.
 Sounding Through – Poetic Difference – Self-Translation 69

his problematic expression, “politisches Dasein,” which he used in the

above-mentioned controversy on the Eichmann trial. Instead she takes
a debate over concepts that had become obsolete and abstract by historical
experience as an opportunity to reflect on possibilities of politics after
migrating through the lesson of philosophy.
The lesson she taught herself with this controversy sharpened her spe-
cific theoretical approach. Situated at various intersections of historical
phenomena and central concepts of philosophy, policy, and anthropol-
ogy, it gained its epistemological precision from the examination of the
often hidden or forgotten origin and genesis of concepts. One of the pri-
mal scenes (in the Freudian sense) for this is the already-mentioned 1943
article, “We Refugees.” This article is remarkable not only in that one can
already discern the tone of Arendt’s political thought (although it was
written shortly after her arrival in New York and published in English),
but also for the fact that it is characterized by a sarcastic “threat of con-
formism.”42 The article is an early example of the per-sonare of personal
experience sounding through her lucid analysis and her conclusion
about the Jewish history getting for the first time “tied up with that of
all other nations.”43

V. Writing, Self-Translation and Working-Through

The characterization of Arendt’s written English in scholarship alternates

between two poles. While it is sometimes qualified as “awkward
English,”44 elsewhere it is appreciated precisely because of its idiosyncra-
sies, whether for her style or for her semantic and rhetorical peculiarities.
Instead of going further with such a debate about qualifications (that is in
any case seldom staged on a stable ground), in what follows I will develop
a reading of Arendt’s bilingualism beyond criteria like style or alleged

42 “The Threat of Conformism” is the title of an article by Arendt published in The

Commonweal, September 24, 1954, in: id., Essays in Understanding 1930–1954.
Formation, Exile, Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn, New York 2005, 423–427.
43 Arendt, “We Refugees,” 66.
44 In his analysis of The Human Condition, Arendt’s second book written in English,
the Canadian scholar Bauer has argued against the later evaluation in talking of a
low readability, of many incoherences, and ill-conceived concepts. Bauer, Ger-
hard Walter, Is There an Educational Problem With Reading Hannah Arendt’s ‘ The
Human Condition’ in English Only?, The University of British Columbia 2007.
70 Sigrid Weigel

linguistic failures. In order to get rid of such value judgment it is worth-

while to study the discourse of self-translation used by authors in a bilingual
and bicultural status, i.e. authors who are accustomed to translating their
own texts originally written in a second language into their mother tongue.
This practice is often mistakenly considered a kind of ‘back-translation.’
In an analysis of self-translations (by Klaus Mann, Stefan Heym, Rudolf
Arnheim and Hannah Arendt), Verena Jung, for example, has argued against
the common interpretation of self-translations as being simply “freer, less lit-
eral translation[s],” which liberate creative potential. Instead she discusses two
different tendencies. The first is a pragmatic, reader-oriented strategy wherein
authors refer back to the different cultural contexts and the presupposed in-
tertexts with which readers are familiar. Within this paradigm, she presents a
comparison of the English version (5th edition 1972) and the German first
edition (1955) of Arendt’s book on Totalitarianism, reading a passage from
the 12th chapter on “Totalitarianism in Power” and showing how Arendt
restructured her arguments in the German translation and put them in a
different order.45
Such observances of her different addressees are, in fact, to be found
frequently in Arendt’s work, albeit in a much more subtle manner than a
simple reordering of a paragraph. It is mainly to be found in places where
she refers to historical phenomena from far enough back that she couldn’t
expect her American audience to be familiar with them. For example, in
her article, “Franz Kafka: A Revaluation,” which appeared in 1944 “on
the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of his death” in Partisan Review,
Arendt reads The Castle as an interpretation of the situation of the Jews in
modernity, whereas the German version refers to a specific historical con-
stellation, namely to the simultaneous exclusion and privilege of Jews as
embodied in the figure of ‘court Jews.’ Such a privilege is valued like
the “Gnadengeschenk” (gift of mercy), which K. in Kafka’s novel con-
siders the legal residence to be, and which he therefore refuses; he
could solely accept it as his right, as Arendt’s reading of the novel puts it.46
The second tendency of self-translation as mentioned by Jung is more
relevant with respect to a theory of self-translation; however, it is also
more problematic. Here she assumes an “inner language version of the

45 Jung, Verena, “Writing Germany in Exile – the Bilingual Author as Cultural

Mediator: Klaus Mann, Stefan Heym, Rudolf Arnheim and Hannah Arendt,”
in: Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 25.5/6 (2004): 529–546.
46 Arendt, Hannah, “Franz Kafka,” in: Die verborgene Tradition, Frankfurt/M. 1976,
88–107.
 Sounding Through – Poetic Difference – Self-Translation 71

English original that preceded the writing process.”47 This category of an

‘inner German’ or an ‘inner text’ functions as a sort of pre-text for a book
written in the second language. Yet this assumption corresponds to the
idea of a pre-written, already linguistically-constituted signified that
Jung shares with a common linguistic approach to self-translation.48
This idea is not only extremely problematic with regard to language
theory, it will also provide another occasion for Arendt’s problem with
her English-speaking readers reflected in her above cited notes from the
Denktagebuch. If this idea presumes the existence of a meaning already
completed in a pre-written state, it at the same time legitimizes the goal
of reconstructing a so-called inner pre-text, in actuality intending to
make an inner invisible text visible and readable:49 Thus the so-called
inner German text, identical neither with the written English text nor
with the translated German version,50 in this way assumes the position
of the ‘true original’ through which the text originally written in English
becomes displaced into a second state, a sort of secondary original. Based
on the notion of a lasting and seemingly eternally fixed hierarchy of first
and second language, any text written in the second language thus be-
comes a sort of distorted original. It may, as it were, be healed when –
through the detour of a self-translation into the first language – it is
brought back to the true original that always already existed in a dormant
pre-verbal state, awakened through the analysis of the scholar.
In contrast to such a construction I would suggest to take the belated-
ness of the self-translation seriously and to use it as the point of departure
for an alternative theory of self-translation. Referring to the dream as a
“translation without an original” in psychoanalysis,51 one could consider

47 Jung, “Writing Germany,” 530.

48 See also Bauer’s (footnote 44) and Gössmann’s construction of an inner language:
Gössmann, Wilhelm, “Das literarische Schreiben als Zentrum von Schreiberfah-
rungen,” in: Wilhelm Gössmann/Christoph Hollender (ed.), Schreiben und Über-
setzen, Tübingen 1994, 11–29.
49 “An author who edits his own text during the translation process by using his pre-
text as a basis allows the pretext to surface during the translation process.” Jung,
“Writing Germany,” 532.
50 “Yet it is neither the English original nor the German translation in itself, but the
differences between them that enable us to attempt a reconstruction of the pos-
sible pre-text.” Jung, “Writing Germany,” 530.
51 As Jacques Lacan does in his return to Freud. Cf. Weber, Samuel, Return to Freud-
Jacques Lacan’s Dislocation of Psychoanalysis, transl. Michael Levine, Cambridge
1991, 2, 4.
72 Sigrid Weigel

writing in a second language as a translation without original – that is to

say as writing literally in an other language. There, the author can never be
completely sure of acting as the master in the house of meaning/language,
where the author can never be sure of actually saying what he/she wishes
to express. In contrast to the psychological insult to the self diagnosed by
Sigmund Freud in 1917, that the “ego is not the master in its own
house,”52 the uncertainty that comes with writing in a foreign language
is not caused by one’s own unconscious. It instead comes from a linguistic
unconscious, namely from a limited familiarity with the ambiguity, nuan-
ces, and the subtones and overtones of the foreign language. The self-
translation into the first language can thus be interpreted as a process
of working-through: working through the words, the concepts and
metaphors, the arguments, examples and explanations.
This process might well be described by analogy with the Freudian
procedure of “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through.”53
When remembrance in this case concerns the question of “what was it
what I wanted to express,” it receives its color from the current desire
of expression, as in the practice of psychoanalyses. The aim, however,
is not to reconstruct a previous text (or experience or affect) but to over-
write a text written in a foreign language with a text worked-through in
the first language. The result of this repeated working through that always
accompanies self-translation should by no means be confused with a sup-
posed pre-existing original – rather, it is a belated text that repeats, re-
works, and comments on the meaning of the original written in
English. Authors who, like Arendt, are accustomed to practicing self-
translation as a working-through after the first publication of a book writ-
ten in the second language, are able to profit from a kind of ongoing
rewriting in order to differentiate, explain and specify certain aspects
and meanings. The differences between the English original and the Ger-
man self-translation can thus be understood as symptoms of partially
unclear and unsolved questions within the first edition.

52 Cf. Freud, Sigmund, “A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis,” in: id., The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 17, ed. James
Strachey, London 1953–74, 135–144, 143.
53 Freud, Sigmund, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through,” in: id., The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 12, ed.
James Strachey, London 1953–74, 147–156.
 Sounding Through – Poetic Difference – Self-Translation 73

VI. Arendt’s Bilingual Writings

In Ursula Ludz’ bibliography of all of Arendt’s publications in both Ger-
man and English, one repeatedly comes across the note stating that both
versions differ considerably: “Deutsche und englische Fassung weichen
erheblich voneinander ab.”54 This actually is the case in many texts
which appeared during Arendt’s lifetime – whether she translated them
herself from German into English (as during the first years of her arrival
in New York) or from English into German (as is the case for the main
part of the book on totalitarianism (1950/1955), the Human Condition/
Vita Activa (1958/1960), On Revolution (1963/1965) and for many arti-
cles). It is also the case for the many texts that were translated by others
(often Charlotte Beradt55) and later revised by Arendt, as for example
the book On Violence (Macht und Gewalt, 1970) and many articles. The
specific bilingual character of Arendt’s work is still a largely obscure phe-
nomenon that has not yet attracted adequate attention.56 It means that any
dialogue or symposium on Arendt in which German and English readers
and scholars participate refer to two quite different works by the same
author – mostly without the participants being aware of it. In general
the ‘German Arendt’ is regarded as an intellectual whose philosophical
thoughts are shapped through metaphors and a poetic language whereas
the ‘American Arendt’ is a more political thinker. Since both images are
due to two different but equally limited readings of her work it is only
through an analysis of her bilingual writings that one can perceive the
‘full Arendt.’ And this is much more than just an addition of both her
German and her English work; it rather results from a constant exchange

54 “Bibliographic survey of all German and English publications,” in: Arendt, Ich
will verstehen, 255–332.
55 Charlotte Beradt is the author of Das dritte Reich des Traums, Frankfurt/M. 1981.
56 See my article “Dichtung als Voraussetzung der Philosophie. Hannah Arendts
Denktagebuch,” in: Text und Kritik 166/167 (“Hannah Arendt”) (2005): 125–
137. (English translation: “Poetics as a Presupposition of Philosophy: Hannah
Arendt’s Denktagebuch,” in: Telos 146 (Spring 2009): 97–110.) In the same vol-
ume of Text und Kritik, B. Hahn discusses Arendt’s bilingual work, see Hahn,
Barbara, “Wie aber schreibt Hannah Arendt?” in: Text und Kritik 166/167.9
(2005): 102–113. And after the completion of this article appeared a small
book by M. L. Knott including a comparison of some passages of The Human
Condition and Vita activa: Knott, Marie Luise, Verlernen. Denkwege bei Hannah
Arendt, Berlin 2011, 116–130. However, an intense and systematic analysis of
Arendt’s bilingualism is still lacking.
74 Sigrid Weigel

between different languages: between Greek, German and English,

between poetic language, philosophical reflections and the idiom of polit-
ical theory, between antique concepts, metaphors and modern ideas.
The most productive site for this work was her writing and thinking in
transition initiated by her arrival in New York.
During the first period of her stay in America it is obvious that
Arendt’s English publications (which were either written in English or
translated by her and always polished by others) don’t reach the linguistic
complexity of her German writings. For example, Die verborgene Tradition,
although written in German, appeared first in an English translation in
Jewish Social Studies 6 (1944) as “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition”
because Arendt hesitated to publish it in German. In the preface to the
German version published four years later, the reasons for the delay are
expressed in the guise of a “Dedication to Karl Jaspers:” “In the face of
what has happened, the appealing opportunity to write in one’s own lan-
guage again counts for very little, although this is the only return to home
from exile that one can never entirely ban from one’s dream.”57 In the
body of Arendt’s writings, the text Die verborgene Tradition probably
shows the clearest traces of what I call the poetical difference distinguish-
ing her German works from the American. Whereas the English transla-
tion reads like an historical narrative recounting something which took
place in the past, the German text succeeds in setting the stage for the
appearance of those historical figures whom she considers to be “Konzep-
tionen des Paria”58 – not “types” or “forms,” as the English text says. The
German original is full of historical irony and images which is lacking in
the English version. When she describes, for example, the attempt of
some Jews, “die frohe Botschaft der Emanzipation so ernst zu nehmen,
wie sie nie gemeint war, und als Juden Menschen zu sein,”59 in English
she writes: “to make the emancipation of the Jews that which it really
should have been,” and complements this obviously insufficient transla-
tion later with the comment that this conception of emancipation was
a misconstruction and also a vision.60 Where the translation is stamped
by a tone of ideological critique, the German text presents a productive

57 Arendt, Hannah, “Dedication to Karl Jaspers,” in: id., Essays in Understanding,

212.
58 Arendt, Die verborgene Tradition, 48.
59 Ibid., 46ff.
60 Arendt, Hannah, “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” in: The Jew as Pariah,
67–90, 69.
 Sounding Through – Poetic Difference – Self-Translation 75

misunderstanding from which a magnificent process emerged, namely a

history in which single Jews “in der Einbildungskraft von Kopf und
Herz, gleichsam auf eigene Faust, Volksnähe realisierten”61 – which in
the translation reads: “as individuals they started an emancipation of
their own, of their own hearts and brains.”62
Things changed during the following period as Arendt got used to
writing her articles, lectures, speeches, and books in English and started
to translate her own texts into German. When trying to find an overall
characterization of her bilingual writings, one could summarize that
Arendt’s English written texts practice a more conceptual mode of writ-
ing, while her German texts make more use of the metaphorical ground
of thinking. But this cannot be explained solely by an insufficient linguis-
tic capability as colorful as in German. Several of her texts written in
English disprove such a simple explanation and are thereby reminiscent
of the vivid portrayal of Randell Jarell. More significant is the fact that
the more conceptual mode of her writing in English coincides with the
language of political theory, whereas the more metaphorical one, prac-
ticed in German, refers to the important epistemological role of language,
etymology, and the history of concepts in her thought. The metaphor also
plays a central role in Arendt’s understanding of language, as one may see
in her Denktagebuch: “Thinking and writing poetry are linked by the met-
aphor. What is called a term in philosophy, is called a metaphor in poetry.
Thinking creates its ‘terms’ from the visible in order to name the invisi-
ble.” She writes further: “The role of the metaphor: to link the visible
with the invisible, the known with the unknowable etc.”63 Following
another note – “Die Metapher spricht das Selbe im Nicht-Gleichen aus”64
(“The metaphor says the same by the non-equal”) – Arendt’s self-translation
may be characterized as a transferal of the same into the non-equal in the
course of which the metaphorical character of the text is augmented. In
any case, her German self-translations tend toward a more metaphorical,
polyphonic, and at the same time more philosophical language.
What makes her work so fascinating is not just the difference
between her writing and thinking in English and German as such, but
rather the fact that through its bilingual character her writing turned
into an ongoing process of rewriting and working-through. By comparing

61 Arendt, Die verborgene Tradition, 47.

62 Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, 68.
63 Arendt, Denktagebuch, 728f.
64 Ibid., 744.
76 Sigrid Weigel

both works one gets the opportunity to follow the traces of a practice of
writing being pressed and encouraged to permanently reflect the implica-
tions of language for thoughts and comprehension. The process of self-
translation seemed to provide Arendt with a possibility to permanently
differentiate, clarify, and find more precise descriptions as well as to com-
ment and complement and, not seldom, invent new and unique meanings
by referring to the literalness of words instead of using conventional terms
or concepts.
Thus we come across condensed phrases that supplement the original
text and function like monads within the whole of the argument. In her
book on totalitarianism, for example, in the second paragraph of the
chapter on “The Perplexities of the Right of Man” (often translated as
“Die Aporien der Menschenrechte”), Arendt inserted the sentence:
“Die Rolle der Menschenrechte in diesem Prozeß war, das zu garantieren,
was politisch nicht garantierbar oder doch noch nie politisch garantiert
worden war.”65 (The role of the right of man was to guarantee that
which politically could not be guaranteed or yet never had been guaran-
teed.) She thus adds a sentence that puts the aporetic structure of the rights
of man in a nutshell. One also comes across tiny but meaningful insertions
that amplify the whole context – for example, when in the chapter on
“Unpredictability and the Power of Promise” of The Human Condition
the discussion of “the inviolability of agreements and treaties”66 is ex-
panded in the German translation, Vita Activa oder Vom tätigen Leben,
into a “heilige Unverletzlichkeit von Verträgen und Abkommen.”67 Attri-
buting unpredictability as holy or sacred also condenses a central argu-
ment of Arendt’s theory of contracts, namely the Biblical origin of the
covenant as the historical predecessor of contract.
In other places one may find longer supplements, such as for example
in her book On Revolution, where Arendt develops her critique of pity –
or, more precisely, of the perversion of true compassion into ordinary
pity, that is to say to an attitude of “being sorry without being touched
in the flesh.”68 The difference is easier to distinguish in English by use
of the word compassion rather than pity than it is in the single German
word Mitleid. To distinguish the two attitudes or affects linguistically,

65 Arendt, Elemente und Ursprünge totalitärer Herrschaft, 453.

66 Arendt, The Human Condition, 243.
67 Arendt, Hannah, Vita Activa oder Vom tätigen Leben, Munich, Zurich 1981, 289.
Emphasis mine, SW.
68 Arendt, On Revolution, 75.
 Sounding Through – Poetic Difference – Self-Translation 77

Arendt writes in German of Mit-Leiden, whereas in English she goes back

the Latin origin of compassion, using a literal translation and thus speak-
ing of co-suffering. By rewriting and reworking the passage into German
during the process of self-translation it has become twice as long as the
original, thus enforcing the radical difference of a “bloß mitleidiges
Bedauern [. . .] das wohl die Not der anderen sieht und sogar versteht,
sie aber nicht eigentlich teilt, von ihr nicht ergriffen wird und die Distanz
zu dem Objekt immer wahrt,” in contrast to a “leidenschaftliche Betrof-
fenheit von dem Leiden anderer” acuminating in the added statement that
both attitudes should not even be considered as related phenomena.69 And
here I cite the whole passage both in the English original:

[. . .] “The Grand Inquisitor,” in which Dostoevski contrasts the mute

compassion of Jesus with the eloquent pity of the Inquisitor. For compas-
sion, to be stricken with the suffering of someone else as though it were
contagious, and pity, to be sorry without being touched in the flesh, are
not only not the same, they may not be related.70

and the German self-translation:

[. . .] der “Großinquisitor” von Dostojewski, in dem das stumme wirkliche

Mitleiden Jesu kontrastiert wird mit dem Schwall von Reden und Worten,
in denen sich ein bloßes mitleidiges Bedauern kundtut, das wohl die Not
der andern sieht und sogar versteht, sie aber nicht eigentliche teilt, von
ihr nicht ergriffen wird und die Distanz zu dem Objekt immer wahrt.
Denn Mitleiden, die leidenschaftliche Betroffenheit von dem Leiden an-
derer, als sei es ansteckend, und mitleidiges Bedauern, also Mitleid in
dem gewöhnlichen Wortsinn, das nicht eigentlich Leiden ist, sind nicht
nur nicht dasselbe, sie dürfen nicht einmal verwandte Phänomene sein.71

These were just a few examples and varieties showing the creativity of the
constant process of rewriting and working-through in Arendt’s practice
of self-translation. As regards the role of language and the voices sounding
through from the backstage of her mind, her bilingual writing can be de-
scribed in terms of a metaphorical or poetic difference audible as an echo
of literalness in theory – or as a condensation of the different facets of per-
sonare that are so significant for the genuine sound of Arendt’s writings.

69 Ibid.
70 Ibid.
71 Arendt, Hannah, Über die Revolution, 118.
78 Sigrid Weigel

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 Sounding Through – Poetic Difference – Self-Translation 79

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