Hannah Arendt and her critics

Sir, – Bernard Wasserstein’s Commentary on Hannah Arendt (October 9) accuses her of “bile” in her treatment of everyone, but especially of “her own people” the Jews. This perhaps reflects Wasserstein’s own professorial focus on “Modern European Jewish History”, but it resonates with many other unfavourable comments about Arendt by Jewish luminaries such as Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper; in any case, it has nothing to do with the big thing, which is not about “her own people” but about the destiny of the Western world. In this context her Origins of Totalitarianism is a monumentum aere perennius, recognized by many as such from its first appearance, not in consequence of what Wasserstein incorrectly calls posthumous cult-like adulation. True, her profoundly historical conceptualization of her great subject tends to relativize the Jewish question, a deadly sin to the contemporary Holocaust industry. True, too, her notoriously harsh personality offended many lesser lights who have had the good fortune to survive her and vent their resentments in peace. Happy Homer, one thinks at this point, whose truly nasty personality has gone unrecorded, leaving only the admittedly difficult Iliad and Odyssey.

In any case, while Arendt’s work is also difficult it is certainly not what Wasserstein calls “confused, a mishmash of the structural, the social-psychological, and the conspiratorial” – an inept judgement, made alas by others as well who are equally unable to recognize the dialectical complexities of a historical method that explains a totality by the interplay of all its parts. Her three main sections, Antisemitism, Imperialism, and Totalitarianism, are not whimsically thrown together but form a progression in the disintegration of the bourgeois-national state, as she explains in detail and with precision: the emancipation of the Jews, who had been protected by the state, left them vulnerable to the hatreds of all opposed to the modernization taking place under the state; imperialism destroyed the integrity of the state by extending it beyond its possible bounds; totalitarianism was the product of the disintegrated state order in which stable class relations were replaced by mob rule. I simplify here, to be sure, but only in order to show Wasserstein the rhetorical integrity that he has not perceived.

As for his charges relating to Arendt’s use of Nazi authors and her inadequate love of the Jewish people, I admit, Jew that I am, to believing that some Nazi authors had important things to say not unrelated to their Nazism, above all the viciously anti-Semitic but incomparably brilliant Carl Schmitt (whom Arendt used even more than she says), and I also believe that Jews have created gentile hostility by demanding equal rights but refusing to surrender their ethnic integrity. Books have been written about this by a number of authors who are not overtly anti-Semitic – e.g. Kevin MacDonald and Albert Lindemann – and Arendt’s analysis of Jewish “responsibility” for anti-Semitism can hardly be dismissed as due to her “perverse world-view”, let alone her “combination of ira et studio [sic]”.

HOWARD M. KAMINSKY
6130 Ridge Lane, Ocean Ridge, Florida 33435.

Translating poetry

Sir, – I thank Catriona Kelly for her thoughtful review of my translation of selected poems from the Russian of Regina Derieva (The Sum Total of Violations, In Brief, October 23). Nevertheless, I am prompted to make the following observations.

There are, as I see it, three (maybe four) approaches to the translation of poetry: one, to translate for sense, accompanying the translation with comprehensive commentary on form, sound, context etc, this being the approach of Vladimir Nabokov in his magisterial version (with detailed notes) of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin; two, to attempt to approximate the form and sound of the source, sheer folly, one might think; three, to allow the source text to inspire a new poem in the second language, the approach of Edward Fitzgerald in his translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, resulting, in his case, in a memorable English poem. Another approach, a kind of hybrid or compromise, would invoke elements of all three, or, at least, of the first two.

Translation is inevitably a form of interpretation. In this connection, I do not believe that any two translators will translate even a comparatively simple passage identically.

Dr Kelly concludes, however, that my version presents Derieva as a “bouncier, less contemplative, more obviously humorous poet” than she is. This is a matter of opinion and I would venture to disagree.

DANIEL WEISSBORT
3 Powis Gardens, London NW11.

St Louis

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