Alumni/ae Newsroom

×

Bard Alumna Lindsey Aldrich Jordan ’24 and Bard Students Tessa Ni ’28, Anna Gaylord ’27, and Myla Allen ’27 Write About Attending Hannah Arendt Event in Vienna

Bard alumna Lindsey Aldrich Jordan ’24 and Bard students Tessa Ni ’28, Anna Gaylord ’27, and Myla Allen ’27 each wrote about their experiences attending a three day reading event in Vienna, coordinated by the Hannah Arendt Center. The Hannah Arendt Lesen event focused on the “Irreversibility and the Power to Forgive” chapter of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition and its counterpart “die Unwiderruflichkeit des Getanen und die Macht zu verzeihen” in Arendt’s German translation, titled Vita Activa. “What moved me most during the weekend, was not only the intellectual content of our discussion, but the way the event itself enacted what the text describes,” writes Ni. “We were not gathered merely to analyze forgiveness as a concept. We were speaking, responding, risking our thoughts in front of others. In Arendt’s sense, we were acting.”

The event was hosted by the translation collective Versatorium, in partnership with Transletting, a translation project formed by a group of students from Leipzig, Germany. Over the course of three days, the participants examined Arendt’s metaphors and imagery, her linguistic networks, and how the differences and similarities between the two translations could expand their reading of Arendt’s work. “There are words or whole sentences in the German that don’t appear in the English version,” writes Jordan. “This is a big reason reading the two chapters side by side was of interest to Transletting and, I would learn in the course of the weekend, to the Versatorium, too. It offered an opportunity to discuss not only what Arendt meant when she wrote about forgiveness but to compare the language, metaphors, and images in English versus German. How did they differ and how did they resemble one another across the two versions? What did English allow her to say, and how did the German language require her to say it differently, and vice versa?” 

The mission of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College is to create and nurture an institutional space for bold, risky, and provocative thinking about our political world in the spirit of Hannah Arendt. Its vision is to empower people to discover their unique opinions and political agency and also find common ground to build together a shared world through thinking, listening, and talking with one another.
 

Post Date: 04-07-2026