Arduous Tasks: Primo Levi, Translation and the Transmission of Holocaust Testimony 9781442687363

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface: Points of Entry
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: Translation Matters
1. Transmission: The Witness as Translator
2. Source Texts and Subtexts: Translation and the Grey Zone
3. Transgression: Translation and Levi’s ‘Trapassar del segno’
4. Infinite Transaction: Testimonial Numismatics and the Narrative Exchange
5. Palinodic Reversal: The Trials of Translation
Conclusion: The Witness’s Tape Recorder and the Violence of Mediation
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Index of Primo Levi’s works

Citation preview

ARDUOUS TASKS Primo Levi, Translation, and the Transmission of Holocaust Testimony

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LINA N. INSANA

Arduous Tasks Primo Levi, Translation, and the Transmission of Holocaust Testimony

U N I V E R S I T Y O F TO R O N TO P R E S S Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2009 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-9863-4

Printed on acid-free paper Toronto Italian Studies

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Insana, Lina N., 1970– Arduous tasks: Primo Levi, translation, and the transmission of Holocaust testimony / Lina N. Insana. (Toronto Italian studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9863-4 1. Levi, Primo – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Levi, Primo – Translations – History and criticism. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945), in literature. I. Title. II. Series: Toronto Italian studies D804.348.I53 2009

853'.914

C2008-907712-1

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Preface: Points of Entry vii Acknowledgments xvii Abbreviations

xxi

Introduction: Translation Matters

3

1 Transmission: The Witness as Translator

14

2 Source Texts and Subtexts: Translation and the Grey Zone 56 3 Transgression: Translation and Levi’s ‘Trapassar del segno’ 93 4 Infinite Transaction: Testimonial Numismatics and the Narrative Exchange 125 5 Palinodic Reversal: The Trials of Translation

177

Conclusion: The Witness’s Tape Recorder and the Violence of Mediation 226 Notes

235

Bibliography Index

291

309

Index of Primo Levi’s Works

317

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Preface: Points of Entry

Most contemporary scholars of Primo Levi’s work agree that his corpus is one whose breadth and generic variety offer a great many potential points of entry, all abundantly fruitful for the exploration of Levi’s literary, ethical, and moral concerns; it is precisely this view that has led Marco Belpoliti to discuss Levi’s work in terms of its ‘valore ologrammatico: contiene in ogni parte il tutto’ (Primo Levi 153) (hologrammatic value: it contains the whole in every part). This scholarly consensus is of fairly recent date, however. Prior to that, Levi criticism focused primarily on the two texts that bookend his impressive oeuvre: his Se questo è un uomo, the survivor’s memoir he began penning immediately upon returning to Turin from Auschwitz in 1946, and his last publication, I sommersi e i salvati (1986). As a result, not only were other components of his work overlooked, but a sort of hierarchy came to be established whereby Levi’s Holocaust memoirs – conventionally seen as documentary evidence of Nazi atrocities – were read in isolation from the rest of his production. This long-standing critical shortsightedness for many years encouraged readers of Levi’s work to compartmentalize his writings under distinct categories, both authorial and formal in nature: testimony, autobiography, historical fiction, science fiction, translation; memoirs, essays, short stories, novels, poetry. While these separations are superficially and in part justified by Levi’s own writing and publishing practices, they are also related to what I see as a general problem in the field of Holocaust literary criticism: a limited pool of models of testimony in the arts that often results in a reductive understanding of the forms and formats that survivor witnessing can possibly take. In response to this limitation, Arduous Tasks aims to answer the need for a more comprehensive and satisfying understanding of what constitutes testimony and proposes an expansion of the

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category of testimony to include such ostensibly secondary expressions of survivor identity as translation. Translation, then, is the point of entry that I have chosen for this project; or perhaps I should say that it is the point of entry that has chosen me. If it is possible to talk about specific textual sites for such points, I can locate mine in Levi’s 1980 essay ‘Tradurre ed essere tradotti.’1 The piece is, at first glance, a cautionary discussion of the pitfalls of translation and the violence that translation works on both author and text. In it, Levi details the challenges of interlinguistic translation with typical exactitude and irony, ticking off example after example of the idiomatic expressions, ‘local’ sayings, and false cognates that make translation such a difficult, inadequately compensated, and typically poorly executed endeavour. My initial intuition in reading this essay was that, above and beyond the fascination with languages and sign systems that I had come to cherish as part of Levi’s strategy for communicating the univers concentrationnaire, Levi’s comments on the nature of translation and on its occupational hazards, as it were, masked an undercurrent of something at once more intense and more far-reaching. If his introductory invocation of Babel (since Se questo è un uomo, a favourite figure of the communicative and cognitive chaos of the Lager and its transmission) weren’t enough indication of the complex web of connections being drawn in this essay, the harsh and even extreme language in which Levi couches his discussion of translational acts would compel anyone to take a closer look. Translation is laden with ‘trappole,’ ‘tagliole,’ and ‘insidie’ (traps and snares), dictionaries are a ‘pericolosa fonte di illusioni’ (dangerous font of illusion), and false friends are a veritable ‘campo minato’ (mine field) for the poor unsuspecting translator; and anyway, Levi tells us with a characteristic2 monetary analogy, something of value will always be lost in the ‘exchange.’ Of course, none of these challenges must diminish the translator’s imperative; indeed, the ethical demand to translate is only heightened when one considers how high the stakes really are for Levi: Ma non basta saper evitare le insidie per essere un buon traduttore. Il compito è piú arduo: si tratta di trasferire da una lingua a un’altra la forza espressiva del testo, e questa è opera sovrumana, tanto che alcune traduzioni celebri (ad esempio quella dell’Odissea in latino e quella della Bibbia in tedesco) hanno segnato delle svolte nella storia della nostra civiltà. (‘Tradurre,’ Opere II.733; emphasis mine)

Preface ix But simply knowing how to avoid these snares does not make a good translator. The task is a more arduous one: it’s a matter of transferring the expressive force of a text from one language to another. This is such a superhuman achievement that some famous translations (that of the Odyssey into Latin and that of the Bible into German, for example) have represented turning points in the history of our civilization.

Translation, then, is an ‘arduous’ and ‘superhuman’ task that carries an almost Sisyphean burden both in its practical challenges and in the forces that propel it forward; furthermore, Levi’s use of the notion of ‘compito’ or task, if not indicative of any direct connection he might have had with Benjamin’s now-canonical essay ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’ (‘The Task of the Translator’), certainly points to a shared sense of the ethical engagement inherent in each and every translatorly act. On the grander scale of history, translations are nothing less than vehicles for fundamental paradigmatic shifts, such as the rediscovery of Greek texts at the cusp of the Italian Renaissance3 and the spirit of reformation that spurred Luther’s 1534 translation of the Bible into German. As civilizations change and reconfigure themselves, translation puts a mirror to social, political, and philosophical change, foregrounding that change at the very site of its expression. In like fashion, Levi’s seemingly occasional musings on the difficulties of interlinguistic transmission – and indeed, as we will see, his translations themselves – are both a response to and a representation of the seismic shifts in individual and collective memory, in testimonial writing, and indeed in all representative processes brought about by the Shoah. Levi’s essay on translating and being translated, then, is not only the sketch of a translation theory but a testimonial theory as well, a roadmap for the reproduction of meaning across systems of signification that are linguistically, temporally, conceptually, and morally disparate. Levi’s essay is also emblematic of the way that translation acts as a vehicle for Levi’s reflections on his own testimonial position, and thus of the way this project seeks to ‘read’ translation in Levi’s testimonial oeuvre. Searching between the lines (or better, beneath the surface) of what might seem to be simple processes of interlinguistic code-switching and Levi’s lucid reflections on them, we will almost always find something much deeper, more complex, and, inevitably, intrinsically related to the larger themes of Levi’s writing. Robert Gordon and Marco Belpoliti, in their contribution to the Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi, have termed ‘Holocaust vocabularies’ those conceptual

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threads that pervade the entirety of Levi’s corpus and give it such extraordinary cohesion, even in its thematic and generic variety. Translation, of course, must be included among these vocabularies, yet another of the central principles that organize Levi’s world and pervade his work in various tropes, forms, and modalities. Translation, its acts, and its figures surface over and over again: as an explicit thematic concern (as in ‘Tradurre ed essere tradotti’); as a host of transmissional agents (Jean the ‘Pikolo’; the Ancient Mariner; the various NATCA machines in Storie naturali that produce, reproduce, and duplicate texts, objects, meaning, currency, and people; Pasquale, the poet of Lilít’s ‘La fuggitiva’); as a mode of transmission (as in Levi’s numerous translation projects, ranging from chemistry textbooks to occasional poetry, from anthropological texts to Holocaust-inspired short fiction to a commissioned modern classic); as a stylistic trope used to signal the ostensible incommensurability between sign systems (as in ‘Visto di lontano’ and ‘Una stella tranquilla,’ which recall the language of the ‘Ottobre 1944’ and ‘Al di qua del bene e del male’ chapters of Se questo è un uomo); as a (more or less transparent) object of reflection that metaphorically stands in for the larger semantic field of sources and source texts, roots, inspiration, cultural memory, representation, and the like. Levi’s employment of translation moves along a number of continuums, intersecting spectra that span from translation at its most literal to translation at its most abstract and metaphorical; from a concern with the pragmatic and theoretical implications of intra- and interlinguistic transmission to other, more anthropological, biological, and mechanical forms of reproduction and transmission; from commentaries on translation to its very enactment in artistically and commercially oriented projects and publications. In its broadest forms, Levi’s treatment of these thematics reveals itself in the pages of his many essays on language, dialect, and etymologies (mostly collected in his L’altrui mestiere), including topics on neologism and false etymologies (‘L’aria congestionata,’ ‘Leggere la vita’), dialectal surnames (‘Lo scoiattolo’), the origins of various expressions in dialect and standard Italian, terms and expressions that derive from historical figures (‘L’ispettore Silhouette’), linguistic fossils in Piedmontese dialect that survive within other language systems and despite them (‘Le parole fossili’), and sign systems of a more idiosyncratic nature; Levi’s essay on the semiotics of sidewalks (‘Segni sulla pietra’), their materiality and (d)evolution, what they can tell us about history, urban planning, and so on, stands out in particular on this count. Often and increasingly for Levi (‘Lo scoiattolo,’

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‘Il libro dei dati strani’), etymology is the point of departure for the treatment of broader anthropological concerns (evolutionary and behavioural in particular); sometimes (as in ‘L’internazionale dei bambini’ and in ‘La miglior merce’), Levi positions himself fully in the field of linguistic anthropology.4 In ‘La lingua dei chimici I’ and ‘La lingua dei chimici II,’ of course, the topic is the languages of Levi’s own ‘mestiere’ of chemistry, and his own personal shift from the ‘things’ that make up the periodic table to the ‘words’ that name them. Finally, his remarkable essays on animal and insect systems (‘Romanzi dettati dai grilli,’ ‘Paura dei ragni,’ ‘Le farfalle,’ to name a few) share with a number of Levi’s short stories a desire to imagine the linguistic properties of those systems in great detail; the protagonists of those stories – Mr Simpson in ‘Pieno impiego’ and Clotilde in ‘Ammutinamento’ – demonstrate the same curiosity and desire to bridge linguistic chasms as does Levi in his analogous essays. This preoccupation with the (often difficult) interaction among systems of signification permeates all of Levi’s various authorial positions – survivor writing in an autobiographical key, public intellectual and essayist, scientist, fanta-scientific author, historical novelist – but does take on distinctly different contours in each of the areas in which he writes. In La chiave a stella and Se non ora, quando?, Levi’s most creative, sustained development of fictional diegetic characters, he plays with the interactions between specific technical, geographical, cultural, and national languages; in ‘Argon,’ the first chapter of Il sistema periodico,5 Levi lays the groundwork for his ‘chemist’s autobiography’ with a detailed linguistic map of his Jewish-Piedmontese heritage.6 In his short fiction, most often in the science fiction or fantabiologia7 stories that populate Storie naturali (1966) and Vizio di forma (1971), Levi’s concerns turn to broader ‘languages’ and their interactions. Thus, technological innovation allows humans to extend their creative (‘Il Versificatore’), duplicative (‘L’ordine a buon mercato,’ ‘Alcune applicazioni del Mimete’), and even experiential (‘Trattamento di quiescenza’) capacities. It is human desire, instead, that breaks down barriers to human-insect and humanvegetable communication in ‘Pieno impiego’ in Storie naturali and in ‘Ammutinamento’ in Vizio di forma. In later collections, such as Vizio di forma and in the ‘twin’ volumes of L’altrui mestiere (1981) and Lilít (1981), a second theme emerges from these tales of intersystem communication, as well as those that describe a machine that generates a fixed material representation of the user’s identity (‘Psicofante’ in Vizio di forma), the ‘park’ where literary characters go to live out their days (‘Lavoro

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creativo’ and ‘Nel parco’ in the same collection), the utopian crossfertilization of species (‘Disfilassi’ in Lilít), and an inveterately escaping poem (‘La fuggitiva’ in Lilít): the tension between the fluid dynamism of evolution and the dangerous fixity of definitive statements, definitive forms, definitive states of being. We will see in chapter 5 and the conclusion that this tension also manifested itself in Levi’s thought on the Holocaust and its transmission. In all of this body of short fiction and essay work, a production spanning from the period immediately following Levi’s return from the camps in 1946 to the early 1980s, there is a dual focus: on the linguistic, biological, and technological systems described above, but also on the allegorization of the porosity between such systems. Levi’s stories thus imagine situations in which the barriers between animal and human, human and machine, and human and non-human do not exist or can be (more) easily overcome. As such, the resulting difficulties in human interaction – linguistic, sexual, reproductive, and so on – are allegorically diminished, translation thus no longer an interesting site of passage, delay, hindrance, or obstruction. If – as I show in the pages and chapters that follow – translation for Levi is a site in which to explore survivor testimony in all of its difficulties and contradictions, then much of Levi’s short fiction can be read as translation-correction fantasies, contentious interrelationships now figured instead as fruitful intrarelationships. Of course, the results of such porosity are not always felicitous, and new problems often arise from the abuse or unchecked use of technological innovation in its overcoming. In the Storie naturali, transmissive, creative, and reproductive anxieties carry the day. These, too, are fantasies of reproductive or transmissive ease through modern machine technology (in particular, the machines that populate the ‘Mr Simpson’ stories: the ‘Versificatore,’ the ‘Mimete,’ the ‘Torec’), but in the end they are also cautionary tales against the dangers of a kind of reproduction that is too automatic and duplicative, and thus too fixed. In the absence of human mediation, the copy risks being experienced not on its own terms but rather as a sterile simulacrum of the original. Among the admonitions in these tales that most strikingly resonate with the larger themes of the Arduous Tasks project is that against the reproduction of money and currency. The narrator of all six of the Mr Simpson stories is a poet-chemist who is alternately fascinated by the technological potential of NATCA’s various ‘office’ machines and repulsed by their moral implications. In ‘L’ordine a buon mercato,’ the second story in the Storie naturali dedicated to this same narrative pretext,

Preface

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the narrator moves from initially innocuous experiments with a threedimensional duplication machine called the Mimete (with leaves, dice, and the like), to the wanton reproduction of diamonds. The story ends with the NATCA company’s explicit prohibition of this particular use of the machine (citing specifically the duplication of currency, coin, and creative art); we can presume from his passing mention of time spent in jail, at the beginning of the next story (‘Alcune applicazioni del Mimete’), that it was this counterfeiting activity that earned him his punishment. The illicit fabrication of currency outside systems of exchange here stands for a host of automatic and decontextualized duplicative processes whose products are sterile reproductions of source texts.8 In the third story of this series, in which the narrator’s friend Gilberto imprudently clones his wife, Emma, despite the narrator’s recent trouble with the law, we learn that the Mimete’s copies are capable of ‘circulating’ in more authentic ways than their sources. Emma II, in fact, ‘diventava più giovane, attenta, reattiva, aperta’ (SN I.465) (became younger, more alert, more reactive, more open) while Emma I ‘si andava chiudendo in un atteggiamento negativo, di rinuncia offesa, di rifiuto’ (SN I.465) (closed herself in a negative attitude of offended renunciation, of refusal), behaving, in essence, as would the target and source of any translation process. As befits a translation, Emma II develops in a way that is tangential to her source, requiring new and different vantage points of interpretation and interaction. Gilberto’s solution to the demands of having two of the same wife who happen to be following very different trajectories is, in the end, to clone himself so that the foursome can then ‘smistar[si] ciascuno col coniuge che gli pare’ (sort itself out with whatever partner they wish), exploding traditional hierarchies of source and derivative copy: Gilberto II makes it clear in his denouement that the quartet’s eventual couplings have not been predestined by such conventions.9 Finally, in the story that brings an end to both the ‘Mr Simpson’ series and the entire collection, ‘Trattamento di quiescenza,’ reproduction is carried to its simulacral extreme. When NATCA develops a virtual reality machine, the ‘Torec’ or ‘Total Recorder,’ Mr Simpson finally succumbs to the lure of machine-aided ease, surrendering his very experience of reality. Significantly, his demise is signalled by a conclusion in which Mr Simpson ends his days alone, reading only Ecclesiastes and serially ‘experiencing’ the death of others through the Torec, to which he is now hopelessly addicted. Marco Belpoliti, referring to the bookends of ‘I mnemagoghi’ and ‘Trattamento di quiescenza’ that frame the Storie naturali, notes their

xiv Preface

common retirement theme (‘Note ai testi,’ Opere I.1440), but the two stories are also in dialogue in ways that inform the project of Arduous Tasks. Both fantasies, ‘I mnemagoghi’ and ‘Trattamento,’ imagine that memory can be externalized, codified, and transmitted in an untroubled fashion from one person to another. There is a decided shift, though, from the first tale to the last: from the perspective of the transmitter of those memories (Montesanto’s olfactory potions that at first give his young colleague pause but suddenly intrigue him) to that of the recipient (Mr Simpson’s sad addiction to the sterile and automatic virtual reality of the Torec’s eight-track tapes). As is true of the essay that provided our point of entry, ‘Tradurre ed essere tradotti’ (to which we will have opportunity to return in this work’s conclusion), this pair of stories suggests that Levi is concerned to plot out both sides of the transmission equation, but that the ethical concerns of transmitting are often very different from those of receiving. This survey of the importance of translation and its concerns for Levi’s corpus would be incomplete without at least a brief mention of the translation aspect of La ricerca delle radici (1981), the ‘personal anthology’ of influential texts from the fields of literature, philosophy, and the sciences that Levi compiled on commission from the Einaudi publishing house.10 Levi’s preface to the work seeks to give a rationale for the thirty texts represented in La ricerca delle radici, moving from an overview of his general reading practices and textual culture to a list of those specific characteristics that conditioned his selections. Though his comments confirm such well-known tropes of Levian self-analysis as his hybridity and the ‘nocturnal’ (read: subconscious) nature of some of his textual activities,11 they also declare that among the principal factors determining inclusion in the Ricerca anthology is the matter of translation: non mi sono sentito di proporre autori stranieri che mi sono cari, e che scrivono in lingue che io conosco (Villon, Heine, Lewis Carroll), perché le traduzioni esistenti mi sembrano riduttive senza che io mi senta capace di farne di migliori; e se non ne conosco la lingua (molti russi, i lirici greci), perché so gli inganni che si annidano nelle traduzioni. (‘Prefazione,’ RR II.1364; emphasis mine) I didn’t want to propose foreign authors that are dear to me, and that write in languages that I know (Villon, Heine, Lewis Carroll), because I deem the existing translations reductive but don’t feel capable of doing better ones. The same for writers whose languages I don’t know (many Russians, the Greek lyric poets), because I know the tricks that lurk in translations.

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In the end, Levi did translate five of the thirty anthologized passages himself (in addition to providing linguistic notes to G.G. Belli’s ‘La pietà nascosta sotto il riso’), those taken from Joseph-Henri Rosny, Ludwig Gattermann, an American Society for Testing Materials (ASTM) document, T.S. Eliot, and Hermann Langbein.12 From within this vast landscape of interconnected thematics, I have chosen four case studies with which to verify that intuition I had upon reading ‘Tradurre ed essere tradotti’ for the first time, case studies that have given me the opportunity to place specific passages and texts – Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ Dante’s ‘Canto di Ulisse,’ Jacob Presser’s De nacht der Girondijnen, and Franz Kafka’s Der Prozeß – in dialogue with other components of Levi’s corpus, and thus plot out broad thematic zones that span the genres, periods, and concerns of Levi’s testimonial program. They are Levi’s most clearly testimonial uses of translation, but are undeniably connected in infinite and complex ways to a great deal of Levi’s writing in many of the ways outlined above. Though it is beyond the scope of Arduous Tasks to explore the full extent to which the Levian corpus is informed by principles of translation, it is my hope that these case studies might gesture towards still more points of entry.

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Acknowledgments

Primo Levi wrote in ‘Tradurre ed essere tradotti’ that ‘il traduttore è il solo che legga veramente un testo, lo legga in profondità, in tutte le sue pieghe, pesando e apprezzando ogni parola e ogni immagine, o magari scoprendone i vuoti e i falsi.’ If, in fact, translating represents the most intense kind of reading experience, I owe a deep debt of gratitude to the people who have taught me how best to read Levi’s translatorly texts into the abyme, to read his readings, to carefully weigh and value every word, and even to discover their gaps and missteps. My goal has not been a corrective one, as was often Levi’s, but rather to better understand Levi’s testimonial and literary project in all its breadth and depth. Though I obviously take full responsibility for these readings of mine (and indeed for their own ‘gaps and missteps’), this work could not have reached its present form without the following people and institutions, whose contributions I would like to acknowledge here. At the University of Pittsburgh, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences supported this book with a Summer Term Faculty Research Stipend and a junior research leave semester, which allowed me to do the bulk of the research, thinking, and writing for the Kafka and Presser chapters; the latter also gave me the precious time necessary to finalize the manuscript. Research grants from the University of Pittsburgh Center for International Studies and the European Studies Center permitted me to do necessary archival research at the Archivi Einaudi and the Archivio dello Stato in Torino, Italy, during the summer of 2003. The disponibilità of the Archivi Einaudi directorship and staff during that time – in particular Roberto Cerati and Fulvio Barbarino – was invaluable for the materials that I was able to consult regarding Levi’s translation of Kafka’s Der Prozeß. The Modern Language Association

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honoured Arduous Tasks with the 2007 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Studies; for that I am immensely grateful to the award committee and to the award’s benefactor, Aldo Scaglione. It is, of course, especially meaningful to me that Professor Scaglione’s wife, Jeanne, in whose memory this award was established, helped to save thousands of Jewish schoolchildren in occupied Brussels, where she was a teacher. This project has its most direct origins in a dissertation written at the University of Pennsylvania, where a number of people and institutions made key contributions to the initial stages of research and writing. Among these, I must thank Robert Naborn, for early assistance with biographical and review texts in Dutch relating to Jacob Presser and De nacht der Girondijnen. The staffs of the interlibrary loan and acquisitions departments of Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania and Hillman Library at the University of Pittsburgh were tireless in their efforts to track down texts in at least four languages, and in twice as many countries; among these, I would like to single out Van Pelt Library bibliographer Stephen Lehmann, who acquired and told me about Levi’s just republished La notte dei Girondini as I was beginning to write my dissertation. The late Ruth Feldman generously discussed with me by telephone her translation of Levi’s ‘Il superstite’ poem, as well as her recollections of Levi at the end of his life. Finally, I would be remiss if I were not to mention my distinguished dissertation readers in the Department of Romance Languages: Kevin Brownlee, to whom I am grateful for an extended and remarkably fruitful exchange on Dante and Levi; and Victoria Kirkham, a consistent source of encouragement and rigorous feedback. In ways too numerous to list here, this project is most indebted to Millicent Marcus, who directed my dissertation at Penn but who has also been a veritable linchpin between that period and everything that has followed it. She has left a truly decisive mark on this work, engaging it with a consistency that extended to the very last stages of this book’s development. Her scholarly example, learned feedback, encouragement, availability, and humanity have made her the most cherished interlocutor that I or my work could hope for. Alvin Rosenfeld, Lawrence Venuti, and Risa Sodi provided invaluable readings of and careful feedback on early versions of the Kafka chapter; I would not have been able to work through this difficult terrain without them. I am grateful, as well, to Aparna Nayak-Guercio for her attentive reading of the Presser chapter, and for a valued personal

Acknowledgments xix

and intellectual relationship that goes back to the early 1990s. My colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh – past and present alike – have been unfailing in their support since my return to Pitt in 2000; I would like to thank in particular Clare Godt, Dennis Looney, Alex Orbach, Francesca Savoia, and Phil Watts. Their invitations (formal and otherwise) to talk about my work in intellectually generous contexts have consistently nourished my passion for and commitment to this project, even during periods of dubious productivity. That all of these colleagues were once my professors – and thus have played their own special part in teaching me how to read Levi – humbles me as much as it honours me. I have had the great fortune to learn my way around the world of scholarly publishing at the University of Toronto Press, and Arduous Tasks is much the better for it. Starting with the expert guidance of Ron Schoeffel and ending with the diligent copy-editing work of Margaret Allen, my book and I have been meticulously guided through the publication process with a judicious attention to both forest and trees. I am also exceedingly grateful to all of the readers who engaged my work with such intellectual generosity, rigour, and energy, especially Robert Gordon and Risa Sodi. They have shaped this work in truly immeasurable ways and challenged me to live up to their scholarly example in the field of Levi studies. In similar, if more peripheral, ways, so too have the organizers, coparticipants, and audiences of various scholarly forums, ranging from the local (the French and Italian Department and Jewish Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh) to the international (a series of extremely productive conferences organized by Stanislao Pugliese at Hofstra University, and Millicent Marcus and Risa Sodi at Yale). My genuine thanks to all involved not only for their enlightening comments and feedback but for creating the palpable sense of a common intellectual endeavour. Communities such as these, of course, also exist virtually, and so I am thankful to Levi specialists abroad, notably Ian Thomson, Mirna Cicioni, and Marco Belpoliti, who were both prompt and collegial in answering even the most seemingly random e-mail queries regarding Levi’s translation work. In this same spirit, I am delighted to acknowledge here the Italian ex-deportees and scholars (especially Gianfranco Maris of the ANED and Elisabetta Ruffini of the ISRECBG) who so graciously arranged for the use of the cover image, a view of the Memorial in onore degli italiani caduti nei campi di sterminio nazisti (the Italian Memorial in Block 21 of the Auschwitz museum

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complex). Primo Levi was closely involved with the creation of this memorial, tragically under threat of replacement at the time of this book’s publication. In using this image to introduce Arduous Tasks, I hope to underscore the multifaceted nature of Levi’s testimonial project, one that did not often lose sight of the cultural, intellectual, and above all political contexts out of which the Holocaust emerged. I am grateful for the assistance of these committed individuals and happy to support their efforts to preserve and restore the memorial. As this long list of acknowledgments shows, Arduous Tasks is the fruit of many complex intersections and rich collaborations over a good deal of time. This is most true of personal relationships, and so I save my last and most heartfelt tributes for my family, to whom I dedicate this book. In particular, I must thank my mother, Nina, whose graceful example of working motherhood I can only try to emulate, and whose constant support has always made my own juggling act markedly less precarious. I am grateful to my sons, Alex and Max, whose boundless curiosity is an inspiration to always read critically and insistently, even when it is difficult to do so, and who are a daily reminder of the beauty that lies beyond the weighty material contained in these pages. But most of all, I would like to acknowledge here my husband, Chris, who has patiently and even enthusiastically travelled this long road with me, learning more along the way about Primo Levi and the literature of the Holocaust than I’m sure he ever bargained for. In return, Chris has contributed the good humour, layman’s restraint, and sympathetic ear necessary to bring this project to completion; I hope he knows that none of it could have happened without him.

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations are used in the text to refer to Levi’s individually published works within the two-volume 1997 Einaudi edition of his Opere, edited by Marco Belpoliti. AM AOI LI OB PS RR RS SN SP SQ SS TR VF

L’altrui mestiere Ad ora incerta Lilít e altri racconti L’osteria di Brema Pagine sparse (Opere I and II) La ricerca delle radici Racconti e saggi Storie naturali Il sistema periodico Se questo è un uomo I sommersi e i salvati La tregua Vizio di forma

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ARDUOUS TASKS Primo Levi, Translation, and the Transmission of Holocaust Testimony

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Introduction: Translation Matters

Linguistic friction tends to become racial and political friction, another of our maledictions. It should follow that whoever practices the trade of translator or interpreter should be honored, insofar as he labors to limit the damage of Babel’s curse; but this doesn’t usually happen, because translating is difficult work. (Primo Levi, ‘On Translating and Being Translated’)

Holocaust survivors, returning home after liberation and the long homeward odysseys that followed, were faced with a two-sided dilemma: the ‘burning need’ to tell of their brutalizing experience, and profound confusion over how to go about representing its singular and unspeakable events. As Primo Levi tells us in the preface to his 1947 Se questo è un uomo, ‘[i]l bisogno di raccontare agli “altri”, di fare gli “altri” partecipi, aveva assunto fra noi, prima della liberazione e dopo, il carattere di un impulso immediato e violento’ (SQ I.5) ([t]he need to tell our story to ‘the rest,’ to make ‘the rest’ participate in it, had taken on for us, before our liberation and after, the character of an immediate and violent impulse). And yet, Levi says, within moments of arriving at the central camp of Auschwitz, ‘[c]i siamo accorti che la nostra lingua manca di parole per esprimere questa offesa, la demolizione di un uomo’ (SQ I.20) ([w]e became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man). Later in his narrative, he will admit that in the Lager the very nature of language is altered, and our ‘free’ words ‘hunger,’ ‘thirst,’ ‘cold’ are inadequate for use with camp referents; indeed, had the Lager been in existence for much longer, a whole new language would have been created (SQ I.119).1

4 Arduous Tasks

This crisis of representation stemmed, in part, from the specific strategy of the Nazi oppressors against their victims, which deployed tactics of cruel dehumanization, the debasement of significative language, and the eradication of all subjecthood and agency, not to speak of unheard-of physical hardships, slavery, and torture. The result is an unbearable proximity between this new reality and the limits of our imaginative capacities. As Terrence des Pres has theorized in his The Survivor, ‘what we experience, symbolically, in spirit only, survivors must go through, in spirit and in body. In extremity, states of mind become objective, metaphors tend to actualize, the word becomes flesh’ (174). When ‘normal’ language cannot represent its object, and when conventional literary figures seem inadequate to the expressive demands made of them, what recourse does the survivor-writer have? It is the goal of the present study to show that Levi’s attempts to meet the challenges of the incommensurate communicative environments of Auschwitz and the world of survival – in the belief that effective communication was fundamental to the human condition2 – are informed by the concerns, challenges, figures – and indeed acts – of translation. By the same token, those texts most properly defined in terms of interlinguistic translation – be they in the form of embedded poetic fragments or prose fiction – can often be seen in this optic as textual sites in which Levi reads and interprets the reality of the camps but also explores his own identity as witnessing survivor. We will find, moreover, that the translation metaphor is particularly appropriate for application to Levi’s oeuvre not only in light of his considerable interlinguistic translation work3 but also because of his consistent attention to language and its systems in all of his writing (as we have already seen in the preface), and the strong textual and thematic connections between his translations and other – more or less translatorly – aspects of Levi’s oeuvre. Ultimately, this project embraces not only translatio in its strict etymological sense of ‘carrying over’ as a metaphor (itself from the Greek for transfer or translation) for Holocaust testimony but also specific acts of conventionally understood translation – speech acts that perform the parallel processes of witnessing and witness creation – carried out both within the space of Levi’s ostensibly ‘original’ Holocaust writings4 and in the context of independently published translation projects.5 At the heart of this approach to Levi’s writing is the exploration of a constellation of definitions of the ‘translation’ term that results in an amplification of its conventional parameters. This constellation might be best understood as a series of concentric and expanding circles that

Introduction 5

move outward from the central and most strictly defined term, translatio, to more and more figured interpretations of the word. The first of these is Roman Jakobson’s notion of translation as a process of ‘recoding’ from one sign system to another – for example, from human experience to its linguistic expression. Shoshana Felman makes implicit reference to this mode of recoding when she writes in her 2002 Juridical Unconscious that ‘[h]istory is the “original,” the writings – its translations’ (40). This cognitive view is close to the Latin sense of translatio in that it implies the carrying of meaning from one zone of cognition to another but is already at one remove from its more literal and transportational etymological root. Moving out from structuralist recoding, we arrive at the traditional notion of linguistic transfer from one language system to another, and then to the specific subset of this category that most quickly comes to mind in considering Primo Levi’s use of language: the transfer between the Lagerjargon and the literary Italian that is the linguistic common denominator of Levi’s audience of newly created reader-witnesses.6 This study also considers translation in the even more figurative context of literary intertextuality, as a particular form of quotation whereby Levi ‘carries over’ other texts into the space of his own literary production, and then proceeds to foreground the process of their – often wilfully unfaithful, as we shall see – translation in figuring the other levels of transmission and mediation (linguistic and otherwise) that lie beneath the surface. In all of these interconnected senses, Arduous Tasks employs theories of translation to illuminate our understanding of Primo Levi’s literary-testimonial project by exploring his preoccupation with the transmission of texts, experiential, cultural, and literary alike. The metaphor of translation is not only valuable for its malleability, however. Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood shows in her Re-Belle et Infidèle / The Body Bilingual that translation can also be seen as essentially performative, that is, as a textual speech act that ‘accomplish[es] in [its] very enunciation, an action that generates effects’ (Parker and Sedgwick 3), such as the delineation of Levi’s identity as a testimonial survivor and the creation of a new community of reader-witnesses to the Nazi offence against humanity. When Levi addresses this target audience in a literary context, implicitly characterizing them as uninitiated to the horrors of Auschwitz by transmitting its complex and corrupt sign system, he does not merely declare the presence of willing witnesses but rather creates them through his very words. Likewise, when he translates Kafka’s Prozeß from German into Italian, he simultaneously responds to and creates a

6 Arduous Tasks

readership that is unified in its expectations, values, and market demands insofar as it sees the complex relationship between this text and this writer-survivor (and, by extension, between the two languages for which the translation is a ‘zone of contact’ [Venuti, ‘Translation, Community, Utopia’ 491]) in a certain light, as being defined in a certain way. The resulting community is often, at least at its origins, a utopian one. As Lawrence Venuti writes, translating is … utopian. The domestic inscription is made with the very intention to communicate the foreign text, and so it is filled with the anticipation that a community will be created around that text – although in translation. In the remainder lies the hope that the translation will establish a domestic readership, an imagined community that shares an interest in the foreign, possibly a market from the publisher’s point of view. (‘Translation, Community, Utopia’ 498)

This effect of Levi’s translatorly performativity is particularly resonant with the specific relationship between translation and the Holocaust; one of the most intriguing and fruitful aspects of the translational metaphor vis-à-vis the Holocaust is its focus on the target audience’s role as interlocutor for the survivor-witness – indeed, as the agent who allows witnessing to occur – and on the dynamism of a literary-testimonial process in which even already-translated texts demand interpretation and transmission of their readers. The notion that certain texts – as I will argue is true of the Holocaust ‘source text’ – demand translation is only one of the ways in which Arduous Tasks is indebted to late-twentieth-century translation theory, and in particular to theorists such as Walter Benjamin. Chief among these is the paradigm shift enacted by Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’ essay in which the emphasis is no longer placed on the relative values of source and translation – tipped decidedly in favour of the former from the romantic period onward – but rather on the goal of linguistic harmony through translation that potentially will unite them. Benjamin’s canonical 1923 essay (brought to the fore of translation studies by George Steiner in 1975 in After Babel) in essence levelled the playing field that had for so long favoured the original text as the most revered sort of utterance, sacred in its imitation of divine creation; in contrast, the translation was seen as a hollow and fundamentally inferior copy. In Benjamin’s view, instead, the translation shares in the sacred nature of the original as it becomes part of the antidote to

Introduction 7

Babel and participates in the general movement towards linguistic unity and purity. The focus of the sacredness of language moves from the genius of artistic creation to the ever-lessening divide between various signifiers and their common signified, moving towards the absolute purity of the sign. In light of this shift, perhaps the most striking originality in Benjamin’s essay lies in his understanding of translation as an overarching, global process, in contrast to preceding translation models that concentrated on the source and the translation as products whose values are always and essentially hierarchically situated. When Benjamin’s essay erased the binary pairs of translation studies to focus on the power of the translation process and of the translating subject, he also sparked a critical debate on the nature of translation that continues today in the form of reactions, interpretations – in other words, translations – of his original essay. The list of Benjamin’s ‘translators’ includes some of the twentieth century’s most important literary thinkers – de Man, Derrida, Blanchot – and their responses are testament to the significance of the shift that Benjamin had begun to enact, as well as to its very nature. These various deconstructions and reinterpretations7 of Benjamin’s text show the extent to which the translator and his ‘task’ have been, by now, foregrounded; not only do these critics’ wilful reworkings epitomize the continued theoretical movement towards the interpreter’s sovereignty, but their focus on the ‘death’ or ‘failure’ of the original text – even if it is Benjamin’s very essay – puts the theoretical underpinnings of this movement into practice. Whether we are referring to Jacques Derrida’s emphasis on the essential lack of all texts (starting with the original, whose very command to be translated issues from its own inherent indebtedness) or to Paul de Man’s terminology of the ‘failure’ and ‘instability’ of the original (which every translation decanonizes until it becomes decanonized by its next reinterpretation), it is clear that Benjamin’s enigmatic essay has become an ideal vehicle for the sort of ‘tangential’ contact between original and copy that it itself championed. As a result, it has engendered numerous interpretations that, [j]ust as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point, with this touch rather than with the point setting the law according to which it is to continue on its straight path to infinity … [touch] the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing [their] own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux. (Benjamin, ‘Task’ 80)

8 Arduous Tasks

So does Benjamin himself define translation, shifting its emphasis from the importance of the original text to the dynamic interaction between original and copy, and indeed among the original’s various reinterpretations. The translation, in his view, needs only to ‘touch the original lightly … at the infinitely small point of the sense’; it is neither obligated to a close, mimetic relationship with the original nor judged according to the original’s merits and value system. In this way Benjamin’s essay – with the aid of the responses that it has generated – has facilitated its own mission: the displacement of primacy from the original text to its survival through its own interpretive ‘translation’ and, ultimately, to the process of translation itself. For Benjamin, translation’s value lies principally in its metalinguistic function: it participates in the progression towards an aggregate harmony of languages whose ultimate goal is the achievement of ‘the true language … that is concealed in concentrated fashion in translation’ (‘Task’ 77) and the reversal of Babelic plurality. As Jacques Derrida points out in his own reinterpretation of Benjamin’s essay, ‘Des Tours de Babel,’8 Benjamin situates the problem, in the sense of that which is precisely before oneself as a task, as the problem of the translator and not that of the translation … He names the subject of translation, as an indebted subject, obligated by a duty, already in the position of heir, entered as survivor in a genealogy, as survivor or agent of sur-vival. (179; author’s emphasis)9

In this model, the act of translation is one that at once obliges and empowers its subject, validating his position in relation to other authors and, by extension, that of his text in relation to a chain of other translated and translating texts. Furthermore, as we shall see, the assertion of the translating subject’s right and duty to translate the dysfunctional source text enables the survival of the text, and through it, of the translator. Through the translating subject’s lack, through his obligation and indebtedness to what Derrida calls the ‘law’ of the original, the translation becomes necessary, by mandate of the original: ‘the law does not command without demanding to be read, deciphered, translated’ (184; emphasis mine). This strain of translation theory stresses the notion that the ‘original’ issues a demand for interpretation and thus translation; this study understands this original text as both the concentrationary experience and the Lagerjargon that was its first language of expression. Structuralists

Introduction 9

such as Roman Jakobson would see this demand as the cognitive need for experience to be defined linguistically. But we can reformulate Jakobson’s definition in terms of more recent translation and trauma studies if we accept Susan Rubin Suleiman’s model of the survivor as Holocaust reader of a ‘text he does not understand – a text that, for precisely that reason, he must continue to read and to write over and over’ (564). The source text of the Holocaust is unreadable because of its radical linguistic, conceptual, and moral deficiencies, but the survivor is obliged to go on trying, in spite or indeed perhaps because of the difficulties of the task.10 The demand issued by the deficient source text in effect liberates the translation to function within its own historical, linguistic, and psychological contexts, to evolve in its own concerns and preoccupations, to be appropriated by the translating agent – here, Levi – for his own needs and demands. This evolutionary nature of the source-target relationship is particularly resonant with the case studies explored within these pages, and with Levi’s later preoccupation with the dangers of fossilization in memory (as in the first chapter, ‘La memoria dell’offesa,’ of I sommersi e i salvati)11 and of an intransigent ethical fixity (such as that characterizing his portrait of ‘Lothar Müller’ in the ‘Vanadio’ chapter of Il sistema periodico, detailed in chapter 5). As the diversity of these examples suggests, even as translation for Levi (and thus for the present study) broadly embraces structuralist recoding, ritual translatio in mourning the Holocaust’s countless victims, individual (and often extended) interlinguistic acts, and an attention to language and its systems, it nonetheless transcends all of these as it develops into a complex and dynamic way of interacting with source texts of all kinds, of interpreting the world and being interpreted by it, of translating and being, in turn, translated. In all of the translation work examined in Arduous Tasks, this dynamism remains a function of what Levi constructs as an interactive testimonial model, whereby each member of Levi’s target audience in turn becomes an active witness in his own right. Implicit in this model is the fact that the weight of responsibility must be distributed among speakers and listeners alike at many different levels, as the survivor’s listener/reader must actively repeat, or retranslate, the survivor’s testimonial texts. Levi reproduces this multilevel structure of testimony by exploring, en abyme, survivor issues such as transgressive expression of the ineffable and survivor guilt within the space of translated and translating texts. Not surprisingly, Levi’s source materials in these instances are very often texts that themselves demonstrate a conspicuous preoccupation with

10 Arduous Tasks

transmission and translation, with particular emphasis on the translating process per se. We will see that this author’s portrayal of translation en abyme ultimately figures the attempt to reverse the Auschwitz source text and overcome its arrogant and omnipotent ‘authors.’ Levi’s practice of ‘manhandling’ his source texts in the service of a larger personal and literary program reveals nothing less than the reassertion of the subjecthood so diminished in the univers concentrationnaire. In the autonomous literary translation projects to be examined here, in contrast – of Presser’s De nacht der Girondijnen and Kafka’s Der Prozeß – a complex ensemble of Holocaust-related problems and images comes to the fore; clearly Levi’s decisions to translate Presser’s semi-autobiographical grey-zoner novella and to accept the commission to translate Kafka’s ur-Holocaust novel in his later years point to a different set of concerns – and concomitant textual and narrative dynamics. As his philosophical preoccupations began to shift away from a predominantly documentary impulse towards issues of guilt, shame, and contagion,12 Levi’s full-length translation projects became vehicles of testimonial expression in their own right, whether that entailed a more amicable relationship to the source text (as was the case with De nacht der Girondijnen, whose lexicon and images Levi saw as in line with his own) or a more adversarial one (as was the case with his translation of Kafka’s Prozeß, a text that Levi famously admitted to having to ‘smooth out’ and ‘rewrite,’ despite its eventual influence over his world view). It is only in Levi’s essays on translation, however, that we discover that the properties of the dynamic translation ethic briefly outlined here do not always adhere when it is Levi’s own texts that are subject to the ‘liberating,’ destabilizing forces of translation. The kind of close and intense reading process that Levi details in the first part of his essay ‘On Translating and Being Translated’ is seen as violently invasive when applied to his own work; by the same token, Levi described the process of self-reading at the heart of the Ricerca delle radici project as an ‘intervento chirurgico,’ best emblematized by Gustave Doré’s engraving of an eviscerated Mohammed (as detailed in the conclusion); in other words, what Levi practises in the way of translation is often very different from what he professes. In the end, however, whether it is translation that serves as far-reaching metaphor for the survivor’s literary testimony or Holocaust themes and images that seep into the survivor-translator’s work, the inextricable proximity of translation to the set of problematics surrounding the representation of the Holocaust and its survival is undeniable.

Introduction 11

We will find in our exploration of the case studies outlined below that translation for Levi is a site of exploration, a metaphor for testimony, a point of entry into and figure for semiotic exchanges of all kinds. For his readers, translation is a point of entry that cuts obliquely across genres, periods, and themes and that reveals important fili conduttori within Levi’s corpus. Far from discerning a coherent translation theory in Levi’s thought, Arduous Tasks rather sees in translation a signpost for Levi’s reflections on language, on language in the camps and within the project of the Final Solution, on the challenges of testimony, and on the transmissive process, revealing the essential difficulty of translation and thus the challenges of survivor-testimonial writing; the utter arduousness of the testimonial task. The focus of chapter 1 is the terminology of translation and a discussion of the reasons for which translation is an appropriate – and necessary – metaphor for Holocaust witnessing. I argue that the trauma of brutal experience, the destruction of internal and external witnessing, and the absence of appropriate testimonial language necessitate a delay of cognitive processing until a time and space subsequent to the events’ actual occurrence. The centrality of the interlocutor – in translation terms, the target audience – emerges in the survivor’s psychological responses to this trauma, as the power to witness is restored through the meeting of a recuperated ‘I’ and a newly created ‘thou,’ the willing interlocutor who was destroyed in Auschwitz. The second chapter examines Levi’s obsessive and traumatic references to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’ The English poem provides a point of departure both for Levi’s citation and mistranslation of a stanza from the ‘Rime’ in an original poem of his own, ‘Il superstite,’ and for Levi’s interrogation of survivor guilt. Levi’s translation of the Inferno’s twenty-sixth canto to Jean Samuel, ‘Pikolo,’ in Se questo è un uomo is the focus of chapter 3. Of particular interest in this passage is Levi’s development of the theme of transgression through his choice of both text – itself a transgressive mistranslation of an appropriated source – and protagonist – a problematic emblem of transgressive knowledge who is revalued in the context of Levi’s condition as prisoner and Jew. The fourth chapter of Arduous Tasks is a comprehensive study of Levi’s first large-scale literary translation, of the Dutch historian Jacob Presser’s 1962 semi-autobiographical novella, De nacht der Girondijnen, which places it in dialogue with Levi’s first meditation on camp economies in

12 Arduous Tasks

Se questo è un uomo’s ‘Al di qua del bene e del male’ chapter, as well as his November 1977 La Stampa essay inspired by the currency of the Lodz ghetto, ‘Il re dei Giudei.’ Central to our understanding of Presser’s novella will be a consideration of the relationship between the writing of ‘history’ and the writing of fictional responses to it. This project, undertaken entirely on Levi’s initiative, did not simply ‘coincide’ (as most scholars have dismissively concluded) with his interest in a moral issue that was to become perhaps his most important contribution to the field of Holocaust studies, his consideration of the grey zone. Rather, in this chapter I argue that it represented a turning point in Levi’s thought on this matter, providing him with frameworks (particularly the double) and metaphors (most notably that of narrative and moral economies) that would serve him in his development of the theme until his death. In the fifth and final chapter, on Levi’s 1983 translation of Franz Kafka’s Der Prozeß, I show that traumatic, literary, and editorial factors converged to make Levi’s translation of Kafka function as a juridical event13 in its own right. In effect, this was an experience that forced Levi to take stock of many of the most difficult aspects of the survivor’s condition and its representation, to put on trial not only the Holocaust but German culture and his own relationship to that culture along with it. On another, more subconscious level, through Levi’s encounter with this text he unwittingly put his whole literary and testimonial agenda on trial as well, prompting him to poetically recant his earlier optimism through what he later called the ‘palinode’ of translating Kafka. His well-chronicled difficulties with the project demonstrate the traumatic nature of this translation, which brought him none of the closure and fixity that the project – and, indeed, the juridical process – promised. At the same time, Levi’s relationship with the Italian publishing industry and the expectations of his large and committed readership proved to set the project up for inevitable failure. In the end, I show that Levi’s translation of Der Prozeß deserves to be understood and studied as a testimonial utterance on a par with his more properly speaking literary-testimonial works, a statement on his preoccupations as a survivor and on his role as a witness to the Nazi Genocide. My conclusion brings the project back full circle to Levi’s essay ‘Tradurre ed essere tradotti,’ putting it in dialogue with other statements of Levi’s translation theory and briefly looking at translation’s broader implications for mediation in and of Levi’s testimonial literature.

Introduction 13

Considering this project’s general concern with translation matters, a word on the translations used throughout the book is in order. When discussing primary texts in languages other than English, I have placed the translation in the body of the text for ease of reading; when the translation is less vital to the argument at hand, it can be found in the notes. The translations used in this study are either my own or those published by Levi’s various English translators. The latter have often been modified in order to better orient the reader to my interpretation of the text; unless a published translator has been explicitly cited parenthetically, the reader can assume that the translations are mine. In either case, I have used American titles for Levi’s works (Survival in Auschwitz for Se questo è un uomo and The Reawakening for La tregua) when referring to the texts. Since many of my comments require attention to source texts from various languages, I have typically given the original language first, followed by an English translation. Where my attention falls additionally on Levi’s particular translation decisions in rendering Jacob Presser’s Dutch or Franz Kafka’s German, for example, I have also given Levi’s Italian. All citations of Primo Levi’s ‘original’ works are drawn from the two-volume 1997 Einaudi edition of his Opere, edited by Marco Belpoliti. In citing Levi’s individually published works within the Opere, I have used the abbreviations identified in the list following the acknowledgments, indicating also in which volume and on which pages of the Opere the passage can be found (e.g., SQ I.109).

1 Transmission: The Witness as Translator

[A] translation issues from the original – not so much from its life as from its afterlife. For a translation comes later than the original, and since the important works of world literature never find their chosen translators at the time of their origin, their translation marks their stage of continued life. (Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’) Such sur-vival gives more of life, more than a surviving. The work does not simply live longer, it lives more and better, beyond the means of its author. (Jacques Derrida, ‘Des Tours de Babel’)

Dreaming the Survival Narrative On numerous occasions in the course of his literary and essayist oeuvre, Primo Levi recounts that one of the most horrifying – and common – aspects of the concentrationary experience was a recurring dream of failed testimony.1 This nocturnal infiltration of the prisoners’ brief allotment of sleep by the hellish realities of their victimization is described with particular force in Levi’s memoir of the eleven or so months he spent in the Auschwitz labour and death complex, Se questo è un uomo.2 In one variation on this theme, in the chapter ‘Le nostre notti,’ the ‘main’ dream is introduced by a long liminal passage: at lights out in his cot, drifting in and out of sleep on varying points of the ‘scala fra l’incoscienza e la coscienza’ (SQ I.53) (continuum between unconsciousness and consciousness), Levi feels (‘mi pare di dormire sui binari’) that he is sleeping on the train tracks; he can literally feel and hear the train just about to come upon him. His sleep ‘è

Transmission 15

molto sottile, è un velo’ (is very light, it’s a veil) that he can break through at will and, in fact, Levi tells us that he is able to distinguish between the distant whistle of the real Decauville train and the sounds of the train that he is merely dreaming. This dreamlike state transports (its railway setting is not a coincidence, as we shall soon see) both Levi and his narrative to a deeper state of unconsciousness and then, without warning, to the most painful part of the night: Qui c’è mia sorella, e qualche mio amico non precisato, e molta altra gente. Tutti mi stanno ascoltando, e io sto raccontando proprio questo: il fischio su tre note, il letto duro, il mio vicino che io vorrei spostare … Racconto anche diffusamente della nostra fame, e del controllo dei pidocchi, e del Kapo che mi ha percosso sul naso e poi mi ha mandato a lavarmi perché sanguinavo. È un godimento intenso, fisico, inesprimibile, essere nella mia casa, fra persone amiche, e avere tante cose da raccontare: ma non posso non accorgermi che i miei ascoltatori non mi seguono. Anzi, essi sono del tutto indifferenti: parlano confusamente d’altro fra di loro, come se io non ci fossi. Mia sorella mi guarda, si alza e se ne va senza far parola. Allora nasce in me una pena desolata, come certi dolori appena ricordati della prima infanzia … ed è meglio per me risalire ancora una volta in superficie, ma questa volta apro deliberatamente gli occhi, per avere di fronte a me stesso una garanzia di essere effettivamente sveglio. Il sogno mi sta davanti, ancora caldo, e io, benché sveglio, sono tuttora pieno della sua angoscia: e allora mi ricordo che questo non è un sogno qualunque, ma che da quando sono qui l’ho già sognato, non una ma molte volte, con poche variazioni di ambiente e di particolari. Ora sono in piena lucidità, e mi rammento anche di averlo già raccontato ad Alberto, e che lui mi ha confidato, con mia meraviglia, che questo è anche il suo sogno, e il sogno di molti altri, forse di tutti. (SQ I.54; emphasis mine) Here is my sister, with some unidentified friends and many other people. They are all listening to me and it is this very story that I am telling: the threenote whistle, the hard bed, my neighbour, whom I would like to move out of the way … I also narrate at length about our hunger and the lice-check, and about the Kapo who hit me on the nose and then sent me to wash myself because I was bleeding. It is an intense pleasure, physical, inexpressible, to be at home, among friendly people, and to have so many things to tell: but I cannot help noticing that my listeners do not follow me. In fact, they are completely indifferent; they speak confusedly of other things among themselves, as if I were not there. My sister looks at me, gets up, and goes away without a word.

16 Arduous Tasks A desolate grief is then born in me, like certain barely remembered pains of one’s early infancy … and it’s better to rise up to the surface again, but this time I deliberately open my eyes, to have before me a guarantee of being really awake. My dream stands in front of me, still warm, and although awake I am still now full of its anguish: and then I remember that it is not just any dream, but that I have already dreamed it not once but many times since I arrived here, with small variations of setting or details. I am now quite awake and I remember that I have recounted it to Alberto and that he confided to me, to my amazement, that it is also his dream and the dream of many others, perhaps everyone’s.3

Levi’s dream tells a tale of horribly failed communication and, at the same time, of the realization of the oft-repeated Nazi admonitions that ‘In qualunque modo questa guerra finisca, la guerra contro di voi l’abbiamo vinta noi; nessuno di voi rimarrà per portare testimonianza, ma se anche qualcuno scampasse, il mondo non gli crederà’ (SS II.997) (However this war may end, we have won the war against you; none of you will be left to bear witness, but even if someone were to survive, the world will not believe him [Rosenthal 11]).4 The protagonist of the dream is the victim as he projects himself into the post-camp future, as survivor. Interestingly, the victim-survivor duality implicit in the structure of the dream can be seen as the inverse of the traditional ‘former self-new self’ pair associated with the backward-looking perspective of the confessional autobiography or memoir genres. Here, the survivorprotagonist is projected forward, allowing the victim to comment on his new, future life: his expected reception and treatment once he has arrived home. The temporal fabric of this passage is indeed rich, blending the past of Levi’s experience, which includes the future-oriented past moment of his dream, and the present of Levi’s testimonial writing, temporal frames that meet halfway through the passage in Levi’s ‘tuttora.’ This striking adverb, which underscores temporal presence, is jarring in a passage narrating past events, and tilts the past-present balance decidedly towards Levi’s writing experience. Adding to the complexity of the passage is the striking ‘qui’ with which it begins, as well as the affirmation that ‘io sto raccontando proprio questo,’ establishing a narrative present tense that will be maintained throughout the passage; both are lexical choices that complicate temporal distinctions between ‘then’ and ‘now’ and spatial distinctions between ‘there’ and ‘here.’ As we

Transmission 17

shall see, the eternal presence implied by these textual slippages is not insignificant in terms of Levi’s representation of trauma, always returning through memory to the forefront of the survivor’s consciousness. If the reader is expecting to find the prisoners’ dreams filled with the violent and dehumanizing elements of camp life, he is not altogether wrong (‘Racconto anche … della nostra fame, e del controllo dei pidocchi, e del Kapo che mi ha percosso sul naso e poi mi ha mandato a lavarmi perché sanguinavo’). He is perhaps surprised, however, to see that the emphasis of this violence has been displaced from the daily experiences of the camp to the protagonist’s narration of them to an apathetic and unwilling audience. His ‘interlocutors,’ in fact, are so unwilling to listen to the protagonist-survivor’s tale and bear witness to his victimization that they eventually physically leave the scene of their encounter. The onus of blame, then, lies wholly and exclusively with Levi’s audience, who are catalysts for the fulfilment of the Nazi threat that ‘no one will ever believe’ the prisoners’ tale of oppression. This is made explicit when they are described as ‘speak[ing] confusedly of other things among themselves, as if I were not there,’ associating them and their actions with the oppressors, whose sins include a re-creation of the Tower of Babel, and thus the pride, arrogance, and thirst for power implied in that biblical story. Their failure to cooperate in the protagonist’s attempted transmission of his camp experience is negatively juxtaposed with the privileged final position of ‘having many things to recount’ among Levi’s reasons for his (futureoriented) newly rediscovered happiness. The survivor and his unwilling audience are in this way placed in an adversarial relationship that implicitly accuses of collaboration with the enemy anyone who refuses to engage actively in the process of bearing witness. Above and beyond any of the exigencies that arise from the strictly physical privations of camp life, Levi makes clear that the promise of successful narration is his primary need, and is also a corporeal one: ‘an intense pleasure, physical, inexpressible.’5 As we can see from this brief passage, the protagonist’s goal is nothing less than the transmission of meaning from Auschwitz to ‘after.’ The prospect that this hope could be thwarted is almost worse than the reality of Auschwitz itself, and is tantamount to collaboration with the Nazis in the destruction of their crimes’ evidence and witnesses. Translating from Auschwitz to ‘After’ According to the thesis of Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub in their book Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History,

18 Arduous Tasks

this destruction lies at the heart of the Nazi ‘Final Solution’ and is indeed its defining element. As Laub states, I would like to suggest a certain way of looking at the Holocaust that would reside in the following theoretical perspective: that what precisely made a Holocaust out of the event is the unique way in which, during its historical occurrence, the event produced no witnesses. Not only, in effect, did the Nazis try to exterminate the physical witnesses of their crime; but the inherently incomprehensible and deceptive psychological structure of the event precluded its own witnessing, even by its very victims. (80; author’s emphasis)

For Felman and Laub, the uniqueness of the Nazi crime lies in the destruction of both external and internal witnesses: external witnesses such as the Allied nations6 or even the ‘executioner himself’ refused this role outright, and the inner witness – the victim – was so dehumanized as to feel that his testimony was without value. As a strategy for dealing with the trauma of the Final Solution, Laub proposes the creation of a witness after the fact, a witness who is first and foremost a willing interlocutor who enables the emergence of witnessing in general, and eventually the specific witnessing and testimony of the victim himself. As the circumstance of Levi’s dream indicates, the trauma of the Lager was such that any cognitive processing of the events was impossible at that time. As such, linguistic, philosophical, and semantic meaning must be carried over, postponed for future cognitive processing. Levi’s psychological transmission of the events and the sign system of Auschwitz is destined, as it is for any survivor who seeks his interlocutor in a literary context, for the space of literary narrative, which can by definition only exist after the fact of the experience being narrated. As Levi tells us in I sommersi e i salvati, the prisoner who could better temporarily suspend his rationality was better equipped to function within and survive the camp’s inner ‘logic.’ La ragione, l’arte, la poesia, non aiutano a decifrare il luogo da cui esse sono state bandite. Nella vita quotidiana di ‘laggiú’, fatta di noia trapunta di orrore, era salutare dimenticarle … [N]on intendo parlare di un oblio definitivo, di cui del resto nessuno è capace, ma di una relegazione in quel solaio della memoria dove si accumula il materiale che ingombra, e che per la vita di tutti i giorni non serve piú. A questa operazione erano piú proclivi gli incolti dei colti. Si adattavano prima a quel ‘non cercar di capire’ che era il primo detto sapienziale

Transmission 19 da impararsi in Lager; cercar di capire, là, sul posto, era uno sforzo inutile … uno spreco di energie che sarebbe stato piú utile investire nella lotta quotidiana contro la fame e la fatica. (SS II.1103; emphasis mine) Reason, art, and poetry are no help in deciphering a place from which they are banned. In the daily life ‘down there,’ made up of boredom and interwoven with horror, it was salutary to forget them … By this I do not mean definitive oblivion, of which, for all that, no one is capable, but of a relegation to that attic of memory where all the clutter of stuff that is no longer useful in everyday life is stored. The uncultivated demonstrated a greater proclivity for this operation than did the cultivated. They adjusted sooner to that act of ‘not trying to understand’ which was the first wise dictum one had to learn in the Lager; to try and understand there on the spot, was a futile effort … a waste of energy that it would have been more useful to invest in the daily struggle against hunger and fatigue. (Rosenthal 142–3)

This transfer of energies and mental capacities from the rational to the physical, primal realm speaks to the practicality of delaying understanding; it was simply a better use of precious personal resources to put it off until a future time and space of survival. Levi’s recognition of this need for resource management, and of the futility of trying to understand in the camp context, would make it seem a willed and conscious choice. But his discussion of the scattered and meaningless linguistic fragments saved from Auschwitz and transmitted to the normal world outside of and after the Lager exposes the truly subconscious nature of this process. Talking about his post-camp ability to remember phrases of the Lagerjargon that was the Lager’s lingua franca, he concludes that [e]rano frammenti strappati all’indistinto: frutto di uno sforzo inutile ed inconscio di ritagliare un senso entro l’insensato … O forse, questa memoria inutile e paradossale aveva un altro significato e un altro scopo: era una inconsapevole preparazione per il ‘dopo’, per una improbabile sopravvivenza in cui ogni brandello di esperienza sarebbe diventato un tassello in un vasto mosaico. (SS II.1064; emphasis mine) [t]hey were fragments torn from the indistinct, the fruit of a useless and unconscious effort to carve a meaning or sense out of the senseless … Or perhaps this useless and paradoxical memory had another significance

20 Arduous Tasks and purpose: it was the unconscious preparation for ‘later,’ for an improbable survival, in which every shred of experience would become a tessera in a vast mosaic. (Rosenthal 94–5)

He explicitly likens these foreign phrases to ‘indigestible food’ for a famished mind, words that had no meaning to aid in memorizing them, and yet found their way out of Auschwitz intact. Their own survival, or better translatio, from Auschwitz to after, represents a relinking of signifier and signified that amounts to nothing less than the restored integrity of the sign: Non ci ha aiutati a ricordarle il loro senso, perché per noi non ne avevano; eppure, molto piú tardi, le abbiamo recitate a persone che le potevano comprendere, e un senso, tenue e banale, lo avevano: erano imprecazioni, bestemmie, o frasette quotidiane spesso ripetute … (SS II.1064; emphasis mine) Their meaning did not help us remember them because for us they had none; and yet, much later, we recited them to people who could understand them, and they did have a meaning, tenuous and banal: they were imprecations, curses, or small everyday, often repeated sentences … (Rosenthal 94)

This understanding, this attribution of meaning to the sounds heard in the Lager, must wait until after the fact for its narration. This is true of all representation, of course: it is, by definition, a reaction to the experience itself. Stefano Zampieri, however, situates this characteristic of literarytestimonial representation in the specific context of Holocaust testimony, and in doing so acquits it of any charge of conceit or ‘literariness’: Dopo la prova della nudità assoluta, dunque, resta nei sopravvissuti una lingua che dice, che ricorda, che racconta. Essa viene dopo, tuttavia non c’è in questo né colpa né vizio di forma. C’è piuttosto quel che la lingua sa da sempre e noi invece spesso ignoriamo: che il racconto si dà solo dopo. Non nel senso che l’evento muto attenda d’essere detto, non cioè nel senso della separazione tradizionale di parola e cosa. Ma nel senso che l’evento della letteratura, della parola raccontata, è per natura un evento del ripetere, che si ripete infinitamente sulla pagina, negli occhi e nella vita del lettore. (67; author’s emphasis) After the experience of absolute nudity, then, there remains in the survivor a language that tells, that remembers, that narrates. This language

Transmission 21 comes after, however there is neither blame nor a formal flaw in this. There is rather that which the language has always known and of which we are often unaware: that the story is told only after. Not in the sense that the silent event is waiting to be told, not, that is, in the sense of the separation of word and thing. But in the sense that the event of literature, of the narrated word, is by nature an event of repetition, that repeats itself infinitely on the page, in the eyes and life of the reader.

Zampieri’s notion of repetition is noteworthy because it underscores the importance of the distinction between ‘during’ and ‘after’ in both literary and psychoanalytical approaches to Holocaust testimony. The narrative repetition that takes place with the written word allows testimony to repeat itself over and over ‘in the eyes and life of the reader.’ As such, it mirrors the trauma of the survivor-as-witness, a trauma that returns and repeats itself ad infinitum, mostly unexpectedly,7 and thus demands an ongoing program of response and treatment, though we can identify in Levi’s dream the precocious impulse to put his unprocessable experience into narrative terms, even while he is living it. For Levi this program, as we have suggested, is one that allows the survivor belatedly to rectify the absence of any possible cognition in the Lager, to assert, finally, a subjective testimony of his experiences, and to narrate a set of unbelievable events, all by linguistic means. As Roman Jakobson states in his seminal ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,’8 this cognitive processing of experience after the fact is the most basic form of translation:9 In its cognitive function, language is minimally dependent on the grammatical pattern because the definition of our experience stands in complementary relation to metalinguistic operations – the cognitive level of language not only admits but directly requires recoding interpretation, i.e., translation. Any assumption of ineffable or untranslatable cognitive data would be a contradiction in terms. (236)

Interpretation and recoding of the sort defined by Jakobson are thus necessary to the cognitive processing of human experience, and the transfer from event to word, language to language, sign system to sign system becomes an integral part of understanding. In this conception of the relationship between events and narration, no event is incommunicable because its metalinguistic definition is part and parcel of its assimilation by the human mind. In a case of experience so extreme as

22 Arduous Tasks

that of Auschwitz, the burden on language as a tool of definition and understanding is even greater, so much so that Dori Laub sees the translation of events from Auschwitz to ‘after’ as a life-giving ‘speech act’ (5) that dwarfs the importance of the transmission of information: ‘What ultimately matters in all processes of witnessing, spasmodic and continuous, conscious and unconscious, is not simply the information, the establishment of the facts, but the experience itself of living through testimony, of giving testimony’ (85). It can be said that while the transmission of information at its most basic level is the highest goal to which language can normally attain within the univers concentrationnaire,10 the interpretation, recoding, and translation of that univers are the domain of the real world after and outside of the Lager.11 Jean Améry, whose views on the potential and efficacy of Holocaust communication were often sharply at odds with Levi’s own,12 articulated this in his At the Mind’s Limits. Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities: ‘To reach out [in the camps] beyond concrete reality with words became before our very eyes a game that was not only worthless and an impermissible luxury but also mocking and evil’ (18–19). After Babel The concreteness of the camp’s language is by no means the only factor in the necessity to put cognitive processing off until after Auschwitz. In fact, the brutally scatological nature of the camp’s sign system is but one element in the overwhelming difference between the Lagerjargon and the normal world of referential language, a semiotic abyss that is caused by the radical alterity of experience and language on that side of the barbed-wire fence. In order to understand this alterity, we should first consider the Lagerjargon’s essentially multilingual nature, and its effect on the camp prisoners. A mixture of all of the national and cultural languages represented in the camp, the Lagerjargon contained elements of the sign systems of both victim and oppressor: on the one hand, the German, Polish, and Yiddish of the Nazis and their ‘grey-zoner’ functionaries, and on the other, ‘bits and pieces of the languages of the victims’ (Gilman 140), including, paradoxically, all of these languages of oppression and many, many more. The existence of this lingua franca created a linguistic situation in which every inhabitant of the camps was by definition a foreigner and therefore in a position of animosity, opposition, and belligerence with respect to every other prisoner.13 Instead of contributing – as do most sign systems – to the coherence of a ‘community’

Transmission 23

of speakers who are linked by their common experience of the referent, the Lagerjargon was both a divisive factor in and a symptom of the state of humanity in the camps, a language that no man could claim as his mother tongue. Nowhere is this point illustrated more clearly than in Levi’s account of Hurbinek, in his picaresque narrative of the journey home to Turin, La tregua. This boy, literally a ‘child of Auschwitz,’ who has known no other world, is unable either to move or to speak. But his spirit struggles against his fate and his condition: Levi tells us that ‘i suoi occhi … saettavano terribilmente vivi, pieni di richiesta, di asserzione, della volontà di scatenarsi, di rompere la tomba del mutismo’ (TR I.215) (his eyes … flashed terribly alive, full of demands, assertions, of the will to break loose, to shatter the tomb of his dumbness).14 Though the prisoners, by now released from their antagonistic relationships by the flight of their oppressors, attempted to share their language with him, ‘la parola di Hurbinek rimase segreta’ (TR I.216) (Hurbinek’s word remained secret), as even the one word the child tried over and over again to utter was incomprehensible. In the end, despite his own and his campmates’ attempts at revealing his latent humanity, Hurbinek epitomizes the absence of subjectivity inherent in the loss of human language, in his withered, helpless figure, and with his inevitable, silent end: ‘Hurbinek, il senza-nome, il cui minuscolo avambraccio era pure stato segnato col tatuaggio di Auschwitz; Hurbinek morì ai primi giorni del marzo 1945, libero ma non redento’ (TR I.216) (Hurbinek, the nameless, whose tiny forearm – even his – bore the tattoo of Auschwitz; Hurbinek died in the first days of March 1945, free but not redeemed [Woolf 26]). Can the etymological proximity between Hurbinek and hurbn, the Yiddish word for ‘destruction, Holocaust,’ be mere coincidence? Hurbinek is the Lagerjargon incarnate, the linguistic and human death represented in the story of Babel; his silence is the result of the chaotic mixture of all the camp languages into one pidgin language that – much like other such contact languages – typically cannot signify beyond its spatial and temporal milieu. A precise linguistic definition of the Lagerjargon is made difficult by the lack of documentation of its structures and grammar. But despite the name that Levi and others have accorded it, we might be more correct in calling it a Lager pidgin, which is more linguistically stable than a jargon, which has ‘no fixed forms,’ according to John A. Holm. As he further states, A pidgin is a reduced language that results from extended contact between groups of people with no language in common: it evolves when they need

24 Arduous Tasks some means of verbal communication, perhaps for trade, but no group learns the native language of any other group for social reasons that may include lack of trust or of close contact. Usually those with less power (speakers of substrate languages) are more accommodating and use words from the language of those with more power (the superstrate), although the meaning, form, and use of these words may be influenced by the substrate languages … By definition the resulting pidgin is restricted to a very limited domain such as trade, and it is no one’s native language. (4–5)

Indeed, as Levi himself implies, the language of the camps was well on its way to the even greater linguistic stability and scope found in a creole, which is spoken natively by a speech community and which is not limited to one particular sphere of life, but rather is extended to all aspects of communicative necessity (Holm 6–7). This was made impossible both by the short duration of the Lager ‘community’ and by the inherent failure of this particular pidgin, given its sociological situation, as evidenced by the case of Hurbinek.15 Sander Gilman, and most other commentators on the Lagerjargon, also include ‘some words which were created only in the camps’ in the mix of that language’s defining elements; Hurbinek’s very name could be classified in this way. But it is important to note that the sign system of the Nazi labour and extermination camps is not merely linguistic; it also consists of patterns of violence16 and gesturing, the numerocentric naming code, even the extra-linguistic system of register, volume, and tone that supports the formal applications of ‘normal’ spoken language but that becomes radically expanded in the camps – from the silence17 into which the newly initiated Italian prisoner was forced to the insensate shouting18 that was the oppressor’s first measure of recourse with an uncomprehending victim.19 Testimony to the alterity of this language is the fact that even the components of the Lagerjargon that have their origins in the referential and functional languages of the prisoners and their oppressors bear little resemblance to their etymological roots. As Levi recounts in describing his arrival at the camp and the German officials who initiate him and the other prisoners, ‘I quattro parlano una lingua che non sembra di questo mondo, certo non è tedesco, io un poco il tedesco lo capicso’ (SQ I.17) (The four speak a language which does not seem to be of this world. It is certainly not German, for I understand a little German [Woolf 19]). Levi will later articulate this impression in more reflective terms, in I sommersi e i salvati:

Transmission 25 mi accorsi che il tedesco del Lager, scheletrico, urlato, costellato di oscenità e di imprecazioni, aveva soltanto una vaga parentela col linguaggio preciso e austero dei miei testi di chimica, e col tedesco melodioso e raffinato delle poesie di Heine che mi recitava Clara, una mia compagna di studi. (II.1066) I realized that the German of the Lager – skeletal, howled, studded with obscenities and imprecations – was only vaguely related to the precise, austere language of my chemistry books, or to the melodious, refined German of Heine’s poetry that Clara, a classmate of mine, used to recite to me. (Rosenthal 97)

The same can be said of the number used to identify and name the prisoners from the moment they enter the camp’s domain. This number represents a double displacement from the normal process of signification involved in a proper name. First, the prisoners’ given names, those signs of their identity and subjecthood, are obliterated and replaced with the tattooed numbers that identify them not as humans but as Häftlinge, and that literally inscribe their imprisonment indelibly on their bodies: ‘Häftling: ho imparato che sono uno Häftling. Il mio nome è 174 517; siamo stati battezzati, porteremo finché vivremo il marchio tatuato sul braccio sinistro’ (SQ I.121) (Häftling: I have learned that I am a Häftling. My name is 174 517; we have been baptized, we will carry the tattoo on our left arm as long as we live). But even this seemingly functional one-to-one correspondence between signifier and signified, between symbol and referent, is quickly perverted within the camp system. As Levi explains in I sommersi e i salvati, the link between number and prisoner was, in fact, so weak as to fail its one-to-one relationship and to easily break under the pressure of more pressing demands than those of human identity. Here Levi describes the process by which one came to answer not to one’s own number but to the sounds that signified the number-name of another prisoner: Ancora oggi io ricordo come si enunciava in polacco non il mio numero di matricola, ma quello del prigioniero che mi precedeva nel ruolino di una certa baracca: un groviglio di suoni che terminava armoniosamente, come le indecifrabili contine di bambini, in qualcosa come ‘stergísci stèri’ (oggi so che queste due parole vogliono dire ‘quarantaquattro’). Infatti, in quella baracca erano polacchi il distributore della zuppa e la maggior parte dei prigionieri, e il polacco era la lingua ufficiale; quando si veniva

26 Arduous Tasks chiamati, bisognava stare pronti con la gamella tesa per non perdere il turno, e perciò, per non essere colti di sorpresa, era bene scattare quando era chiamato il compagno col numero di matricola immediatamente precedente. Quello ‘stergísci stèri’ funzionava anzi come il campanello che condizionava i cani di Pavlov: provocava una subitanea secrezione di saliva. (SS II.1063–4) To this day I remember how one pronounced in Polish not my registration number but that of the prisoner who preceded me on the roster of a certain hut: a tangle of sounds that ended harmoniously, like the indecipherable counting jingles of children, in something like: ‘stergishi steri’ (today I know that these two words mean ‘forty-four’). As a matter of fact, in that hut the soup dispenser and the greater part of the prisoners were Polish, and Polish was the official language; when you were called, you had to be there ready, holding out your bowl in order not to miss your turn and, so as not to be caught by surprise, it was a good idea to jump when the companion with the immediately preceding registration number was called. In fact, that ‘stergishi steri’ functioned like the bell that conditioned Pavlov’s dogs: it stimulated an immediate secretion of saliva. (Rosenthal 94)

Both the concreteness of the Lagerjargon’s content and aims and its essential incommensurability with languages of normal referentiality point to the presence of an experiential situation that is so extreme as to frustrate – if not thwart – attempts at communicating it. Levi admits this difficulty frankly in Se questo è un uomo: Come questa nostra fame non è la sensazione di chi ha saltato un pasto, così il nostro modo di aver freddo esigerebbe un nome particolare. Noi diciamo ‘fame’, diciamo ‘stanchezza’, ‘paura’, e ‘dolore’, diciamo ‘inverno’, e sono altre cose. Sono parole libere, create e usate da uomini liberi che vivevano, godendo e soffrendo, nelle loro case. Se i Lager fossero durati piú a lungo, un nuovo aspro linguaggio sarebbe nato; e di questo si sente il bisogno per spiegare cosa è faticare l’intera giornata nel vento, sotto zero, con solo indosso camicia, mutande, giacca e brache di tela, e in corpo debolezza e fame e consapevolezza della fine che viene. (SQ I.119–20; emphasis mine) Just as our hunger is not the feeling of someone who’s missed a meal, so our way of being cold would require a special word. We say ‘hunger,’ we say ‘tiredness,’ ‘fear,’ and ‘pain,’ we say ‘winter,’ and they are other things. They are free words, created and used by free men who lived, in comfort

Transmission 27 and suffering, in their homes. If the Lagers had lasted any longer a new, harsh language would have been born; and one feels the necessity of this language to explain what it is to toil the whole day in the wind, with the temperature below freezing, wearing only shirt, underpants, cloth jacket and trousers, and in one’s body nothing but weakness, hunger, and knowledge of the end drawing nearer.

In this passage, Levi theorizes hypothetically about the language that would have developed had the camps continued to foster it within their walls; it is this language that would be most appropriate for describing the camps. But his comments here implying the absence of such a language should by no means be taken as naïveté with regard to the linguistic realities of the prisoners’ condition: despite the grammatical mood of Levi’s assertion, that language does exist, in the form of the pidgin created from the superstrates of the so-called Lingua Tertii Imperii (SS II.1066)20 – German, Polish, and Yiddish – and the substrates of all of the other languages represented there.21 Levi here simultaneously implies that this language is not available to him and then goes on to describe precisely that to which this language ostensibly has exclusive access; he at once recognizes and overcomes the difficulties of linguistic expression of camp experiences and feelings.22 In a move similar to the ‘inexpressibility topoi’ identified in classical and medieval literature by Ernst Curtius, Levi deploys a mechanism whereby the ‘emphasis upon [his] inability to cope with the subject’ (159) is parlayed into an expression of the subject that recognizes its own limitations but makes the attempt at meaningful communication nonetheless. The difference between Levi’s use of this strategy and Dante’s,23 for example, is of course that Dante’s use of the inexpressibility topos can be situated in a literary tradition of tropes and conceits that fall squarely in the domain of attempts to gain authority, credibility, and verisimilitude with respect to allegorical ‘truths.’ Levi’s claims of inexpressibility, on the other hand, are grounded in an epistemological crisis stemming from the historical events of the Holocaust: his authority already a given, Levi’s particular preoccupation bears more on the central relationship between words and things. Indeed, the weakness of this relationship in Auschwitz is a defining aspect of the Lagerjargon. The sign system of Auschwitz simply does not signify beyond the concrete referential relationship between word and survival; the specific links between words and things established inside the univers concentrationnaire are unique to that realm (‘orts- und zeitgebunden, legata al luogo e al tempo’ [tied to place and time], as

28 Arduous Tasks

Levi states [SS II.1066]) and moreover not transferable to other sign systems, at least not without the mediation of an informed translator such as Levi. This incompatibility between the system of Auschwitz and that of the ‘normal world’ is perhaps best exemplified in Levi’s descriptions of the camp-specific economic equivalence between language and bread, an exchange that acquires its own semantic value through the consistent and powerful association of the terms in question.24 Levi tells his reader rather quickly in his first book that ‘[i]l pane è … la sola nostra moneta’ (SQ I.33) ([b]read is … our only currency), and expresses on numerous occasions not only the importance of this currency but also its strong intracamp relationship to language and the acquisition of the tools for successful communication.25 The value accorded to language through its capacity for exchange with fundamental food staples is underscored with each textual and economic juxtaposition of food and words, from Levi’s oath that he ‘dar[ebbe] la zuppa di oggi per saper saldare “non ne avevo alcuna” col finale’ (SQ I.110) (would give today’s soup to know how to connect ‘I had never any one beheld’ to the last lines)26 in the episode of the ‘Canto di Ulisse,’ to the sad last words of Sómogyi, during the ‘Storia di dieci giorni’: ‘Da forse cinque giorni non aveva detto parola: aprì bocca quel giorno e disse con voce ferma: “ho una razione di pane sotto il saccone. Dividetela voi tre”’ (SQ I.166) (He had not uttered a word for perhaps five days; that day he opened his mouth and said in a firm voice: ‘I have a ration of bread under the sack. You three should share it’). The mechanisms underpinning this relationship between bread and language are never clearer than when Levi describes it in explicit economic terms: Io supplicai … un alsaziano, di tenermi un corso privato ed accelerato, distribuito in brevi lezioni somministrate sottovoce, fra il momento del coprifuoco e quello in cui cedevamo al sonno; lezioni da compensarsi con pane, altra moneta non c’era. Lui accettò, e credo che mai pane fu meglio speso. Mi spiegò che cosa significavano i ruggiti dei Kapos e delle SS, i motti insulsi o ironici scritti in gotico sulle capriate della baracca, che cosa significavano i colori dei triangoli che portavamo al petto sopra il numero di matricola. (SS II.1066; emphasis mine) I begged … an Alsatian, to give me a private, accelerated course, spread over brief lessons imparted in whispers, between the moment of curfew and the moment when we gave way to sleep, lessons to be recompensed with bread, since there was no other currency. He accepted, and I believe that never

Transmission 29 was bread better spent. He explained to me what the roars of the Kapos and SS meant, the empty or ironic mottoes written in Gothic letters on the hut’s roof trusses, the meaning of the colours of the triangles we wore on our chests above the registration number.27

Levi’s transaction to obtain ‘lessons’ in the language of his oppressors clearly shows us not only that the camp polysystem is a new language28 but also that it represents a new and different way of looking at the very nature of language. This new outlook on language is rooted in its inextricable association with human survival and, as such, its referential relationship to things to which it does not normally refer in the outside, ‘normal’ world, as the bread-language connection illustrates. Given Levi’s insistence on the importance of the prisoners’ daily ration of bread and the measures that they would take to guard this ration, his budgeting decision to spend bread for language doesn’t reveal so much about the ‘worth’ of this language in terms of our ‘normal’ conception of language as it does about the relative importance of these revalued economic and linguistic tools within the context of this radically different system of signs. Clearly, the relationship between bread and language is not only indicative of a system in which the importance of language is disproportionately heightened with regard to other elements of basic survival – food, shelter, and the like. Perhaps more importantly, it is also emblematic of a sign system that is essentially self-referential, of a ‘currency’ that is not intrinsically valid outside its specific time and place, and thus of a semiotics of which we can say the same. Reversing Babel How does Primo Levi then ‘revalue’ this currency? Taking some of the textual examples cited above as a point of departure, we shall see how this author-survivor in fact bridges the abyss between these two incompatible sign systems by first transmitting or translating the language and other codes of Auschwitz and then creating meaning out of them. He accomplishes this through a number of different strategies, restoring meaning to the empty signs of the Lager either by virtue of their very transmission or by reversing the signification process of the sign itself. An example of the first order can be found in Levi’s stance with regard to the German superstrate that was one of the linguistic components of the Lagerjargon. Although we have seen Levi’s clear understanding of the differences between the language of the camps

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and the German of his chemistry books and Heine’s poetry, he persisted, after the war, in speaking a German that was closer to its pidginization in the camps than to the standard, spoken national language. In I sommersi e i salvati, Levi tells of an episode after the war in which he treats the Lager pidgin as if it were a sign system interchangeable with German by speaking it with a group of professional German colleagues: Ad Auschwitz … [p]er ‘vàttene’ si usava l’espressione hau’ ab, imperativo del verbo abhauen; questo, in buona lingua, significa ‘tagliare, mozzare’, ma nel gergo del Lager equivaleva a ‘andare all’inferno, levarsi di torno’. Mi è accaduto una volta di usare in buona fede questa espressione (Jetzt hauen wir ab) poco dopo la fine della guerra, per prendere congedo da alcuni educati funzionari della Bayer29 dopo un colloquio d’affari. Era come se avvessi detto ‘ora ci togliamo dai piedi’. Mi guardarono stupiti: il termine apparteneva ad un registro linguistico diverso da quello in cui si era svolta la conversazione precedente, e non viene certo insegnato nei corsi scolastici di ‘lingua straniera’. Spiegai loro che non avevo imparato il tedesco a scuola, bensí in un Lager di nome Auschwitz … Mi sono reso conto di seguito che anche la mia pronuncia è rozza, ma deliberatamente non ho cercato di ingentilirla; per lo stesso motivo non mi sono mai fatto asportare il tatuaggio dal braccio sinistro.’ (II.1067–8; emphasis mine) In Auschwitz … [f]or ‘get out of here’ the expression hau’ ab was used, the imperative mode of the verb abhauen; in proper German, this means ‘to cut, chop off,’ but in Lagerjargon it was equivalent to ‘go to hell, get out of the way.’ I once happened to use this expression (Jetzt hauen wir ab) in good faith shortly after the end of the war to take leave of certain well-mannered functionaries of the Bayer Company after a business meeting. It was as if I had said, ‘Now let’s get the hell out of here.’ They looked at me with astonishment; the term belonged to a linguistic register different from that in which our preceding conversation had been conducted and is certainly not taught in ‘foreign language’ courses. I explained to them that I had not learned German in school but rather in a Lager called Auschwitz … I later on realized also that my pronunciation is coarse, but I deliberately have not tried to make it more genteel; for the same reason, I have never had the tattoo removed from my left arm.30

Levi’s progression in this passage, in terms of distinctions between the Lagerjargon and the standard German of collegial interaction, is a telling one. By beginning his account in the Lager, Levi initially establishes

Transmission 31

the incompatibility between the pidgin and the standardized language; this particular way of speaking German simply does not signify in the same way (and does not signify the same things) as other parts of the German polysystem. By the end of the passage, however, Levi is placing his linguistic performance in the context of ‘learning German in the Lager,’ essentially erasing any distinction between the nature of his own speech act and that of his German interlocutors. When Levi asserts his way of speaking ‘German,’ he moves his own pidginized language into the terrain of standard German discourse, forcing the former to become part of the hegemonic superstrate, part of its ‘normal’ and referential sign system. By reinserting it into the realm of normal signification, Levi thus instils even this crude saying with meaning, in that he effectively conveys the brutality of his own conditions in Auschwitz – linguistic and otherwise – to new witnesses. These interlocutors are in turn obliged to carry out individual acts of translation of their own as they come to understand that if Levi’s ‘levarsi dai piedi’ is somehow equivalent – albeit jarringly so – to their own cordial expression for leave-taking, it is only because of Levi’s passage through Auschwitz. The register and accent that Levi refuses to normalize when he translates the Lagerjargon to the time and space after Auschwitz could, at first glance, be seen as components in what translation theorist Lawrence Venuti calls the ‘foreignization’31 of the translated text. He defines this as not a transparent representation of an essence that resides in the foreign text and is valuable in itself, but a strategic construction whose value is contingent on the current target-language situation. Foreignizing translation signifies the difference of the foreign text, yet only by disrupting the cultural codes that prevail in the target language. In its effort to do right abroad, this translation method must do wrong at home, deviating enough from native norms to stage an alien reading experience … (20)

But, upon closer inspection, it becomes apparent that Levi’s steadfast maintenance of a deliberately ‘foreign’ Lager pidgin is both the ‘transparent representation’ of the foreign code and a ‘strategic construction’ destined for consumption in the target situation. Levi’s unmediated translatio of the register and accent of the language of the camps is a carefully constructed tactic meant to have an effect on the target language – in this case, the standard German of his Bayer colleagues. The

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intended effect is nothing less than the revaluation of an empty sign within the normal systems and contexts of referential languages, accomplished when Levi ‘disrupts the code’ of his interlocutors just enough to signify the horror of the camps by ‘staging an alien experience’ in their reading of (what seems to be) their own language. Yet another example of this technique on Levi’s part is his carrying over of the numerical naming system from Auschwitz to the time and space of his literary witnesses. In a counterpoint to the radical rupture of normal sign-to-concept referentiality that we saw in the prisoners’ reaction to identification numbers immediately preceding their own, we see that Levi is able to convey this warped system and in doing so overcome its destructive power. Significantly, just as he chooses the dream to explore the theme of unsuccessful communication in the passage that introduced this chapter, Levi once again has recourse to the realm of liminal consciousness to convey semantic, narrative, and chronological elements of the number’s importance. In this passage, he describes a daydream brought on by a passing train that interrupts the prisoners’ gruelling workday progress. Once again, as in the earlier dream passage, the train literally and figuratively vehicles the passage of Levi’s narrative from the space of the camp to the space beyond. Here, however, the train’s individual cars come to more fully represent ‘la sofferenza del lavoro e del campo’ (SQ I.54) (the suffering of the work and the camp), as its individual cars become components of the selfsame Babelic linguistic situation that threatens to thwart the survivors’ attempts at testimonial narrativity: Deutsche Reichsbahn. Deutsche Reichsbahn. SNCF. Due giganteschi vagoni russi, con la falce e il martello mal cancellati. Deutsche Reichsbahn. Poi, Cavalli 8, Uomini 40. Tara, Portata: un vagone italiano … Salirvi dentro, in un angolo, ben nascosto sotto il carbone, e stare fermo e zitto, al buio, ad ascoltare senza fine il ritmo delle rotaie, piú forte della fame e della stanchezza; finché, a un certo momento, il treno si fermerebbe, e sentirei l’aria tiepida e odore di fieno, e potrei uscire fuori, nel sole: allora mi coricherei a terra, a baciare la terra, come si legge nei libri: col viso nell’erba. E passerebbe una donna, e mi chiederebbe ‘Chi sei?’ in italiano, e io le racconterei, in italiano, e lei capirebbe, e mi darebbe da mangiare e da dormire. E non crederebbe alle cose che io dico, e io le farei vedere il numero che ho sul braccio, e allora crederebbe … (SQ I.37–8; emphasis mine) Deutsche Reichsbahn. Deutsche Reichsbahn. SNCF. Two huge Russian goods wagons with the hammer and the sickle badly rubbed off. Then, Cavalli 8,

Transmission 33 Uomini 70, Tara, Portata: an Italian wagon … To climb into a corner, wellhidden under the coal, and to stay there quiet and still in the dark, to listen endlessly to the rhythm of the wheels, stronger than hunger or tiredness; until, at a certain moment, the train would stop and I would feel the warm air and the smell of hay and I would get out into the sun; then I would lie down on the ground, to kiss the earth, as you read in books: with my face in the grass. And a woman would pass, and she would ask me ‘Who are you?’ in Italian, and I would tell her, in Italian, and she would understand, and she would give me food and shelter. And she would not believe the things I tell her, and I would show her the number I have on my arm, and then she would believe …32

This passage, like the other dream narrative discussed earlier, is essentially about the possibility of testimonial communication, of telling the Auschwitz experience. It is also a passage that attempts to project that narration into a future time frame, and as such must reconcile the differing sign systems of the protagonist’s experiential situation on the one hand, and of the survivor’s future-oriented metadiegetic narration (to the imagined italophone woman) on the other. Levi succeeds in bridging this gap by restoring real referentiality to the various signs that have been either hollowed out by the Auschwitz experience or are so unimaginable to the uninitiated as not to have any meaning at all. An example of this is his statement that he ‘[si] corichere[bbe] a terra, a baciare la terra, come si legge nei libri: col viso nell’erba.’ With this allusion to the reader’s ostensible literary familiarity with the rather romantic gesture of kissing the ground upon returning home, Levi simultaneously conveys both the powerful force of his emotions and the notion that it is, in fact, possible to gain understanding of events and feelings – even extreme ones – through the aid of a literary referent. Furthermore, by recognizing that this is a gesture that his readers would not have carried out personally, he allows for the reality of the distance between his readers’ experiences and his own. Indeed, it is precisely because the feelings of returning home after the singular occurrence of Auschwitz are excluded from the realm of the reader’s direct experience that Levi must transmit them in the first place. We should note that in Levi’s vision of this transmissive act, matters of national and linguistic identity are of prime importance. This is not unexpected, considering that the tattooed number’s greatest impact on the victim of Nazi atrocities is its negation of human identity. Levi reverses this process in the passage above, not least by constructing the

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train in question as a veritable smorgasbord of the nationalized train systems of Europe.33 From among the German, French, Italian, and Russian cars (the ‘badly rubbed off’ hammer and sickle an allusion to dynamically shifting political and linguistic boundaries of Poland, the site of Auschwitz), he chooses an Italian wagon that he imagines transporting him magically to Italy. Interestingly, he refers to it not with the same kind of national synecdoche that makes the other wagons representative of national and political units (the Italian equivalent would have been the Ferrovie dello Stato), but rather identifies it explicitly – with the tare weight and capacity that were often doubled in Final Solution transports – as the same kind of cattle car in which he would have taken his journey to Auschwitz. Once he has arrived in Italy and met the passing Italian woman, Levi makes his identity as an Italian the primary topic of conversation between his future-projected survivor persona and his new interlocutor. To her question, ‘Chi sei?,’ Levi is able to respond in such a way as to be immediately understood; the narrative construction of his identity – remember that it is only in the next sentence that the events surrounding his experience are put into question by his interlocutor – is accepted without question. But in the end, even these doubts are allayed, as Levi’s new witness ‘crederebbe’ after he ‘le fare[bbe] vedere il numero che h[a] sul braccio.’ The tattooed number, then, that symbol of the absolute dehumanization of the Nazi project, acquires semantic value in Levi’s future-oriented reverie and becomes the foundation of a successful exchange between inhabitants of two radically different semantic worlds. It is the gold standard that ultimately reconciles the referential chasm between Auschwitz and after, transcending both the jargon of which it is an essential component and even the relatively untainted Italian language in which the daydream has up to this point unfolded. But in the end, just as gold can only stand behind the various currencies that depend upon it and circulate around it, so must Levi’s experience eventually be conveyed in terms of a language – or languages – that has/have properties of exchange, and thus that can be easily passed on, used, and manipulated. In this sense, we might see Levi’s narration of Hurbinek – of his experience, his tattooed number, his lack of language – as another way in which he bridges the semantic gap between Auschwitz and after. When Levi speaks for Hurbinek – ‘Nulla resta di lui: egli testimonia attraverso queste mie parole’ (TR I.216) (Nothing remains of him: he bears witness through these words of mine [Woolf 26]) – he in effect translates the child’s silence into an independent and

Transmission 35

self-sustaining bearing witness. In this way, Levi’s narration of Hurbinek’s lack of subjecthood becomes, paradoxically, a restitution of that very subjecthood, in that it validates his experience by narrating his desire to speak, his will to interact in a human way with the prisoners around him; in short, his humanity. Waking Up from the Dream In some of the textual examples that we have just examined, the scene of Levi’s ‘translation’ from the space of the Lager to that of witnessing is the survivor’s written narrative. In other cases, however, the translatio is a double process whereby the language and experience of Auschwitz are first temporarily carried over to a mediating repository – the futureoriented space of his dreams – before being transmitted to the space of written testimony. Levi concludes the dream narration with which this chapter began with the following question: ‘Perché questo avviene? perché il dolore di tutti i giorni si traduce nei nostri sogni cosí costantemente, nella scena sempre ripetuta della narrazione fatta e non ascoltata?’ (SQ I.54; emphasis mine) (Why does this happen? Why is each day’s pain translated so constantly into our dreams, in the ever-repeated scene of a story told but unheard?). Dreams such as this one act as a reservoir for future and more efficacious, productive, and corrective forms of translatio: specifically, the carrying over of the Lager experience from the univers concentrationnaire to the postwar world inhabited by potentially willing interlocutors and narratees; from the geographical space of Auschwitz to that of postwar Italy. Literary testimony continues and hopes to complete the process of carrying over that Levi and his campmates tentatively – and subconsciously – begin in their camp dreams, permitting a narrating of the self that was not possible in the Lager. If we are to consider this transitional ‘reservoir’ in Freudian terms, we should resist the temptation to neatly characterize the various dreams that Levi introduces and reintroduces into his testimony as episodes of anxiety, wish-fulfilment, or traumatic recurrence. Dreams of this sort typically come into play only after the period of latency, as the space in which the victim repeatedly re-enacts the unprepared-for event to gain a sense of mastery over it and over his own reaction to it. The two dreams discussed from Se questo è un uomo (one a proper dream of failed domestic communication, and the other a corrective and more self-conscious daydream of ultimately successful communication with an Italian interlocutor) would seem rather to be dreams situated within the traumatic

36 Arduous Tasks

experience, in which the event’s eventual narration is rehearsed in dream before its very realization; it is the dream’s recounting in the textual space of the written testimony – not its initial occurrence – that operates as part of Levi’s process of mastery over the events. In other words, these are dreams that point to the fulfilment of Levi’s impulse towards narrativity, towards a future reintegration of Auschwitz into an ordered and coherent life narrative, but that – in their recording – also reflect a certain anxiety about narration at the time that narration is occurring. The dreams that would more properly fit into the paradigm of traumatic dreams come later; of particular note is the dream with which Levi both begins – characteristically, in the form of a poetic epigram, ‘Alzarsi’ – and concludes the 1963 tale of his journey home, La tregua. The ‘Wstawać’ dream is precisely a dream of traumatic re-enactment after the fact of the trauma, but a dream that is closely interwoven with the dreams of future-oriented narrativity that Levi experiences within the space of Auschwitz. Indeed, the dating of the ‘Alzarsi’ poem (11 January 1946) corresponds to the initial drafting stages of Se questo è un uomo, suggesting that the future-oriented camp dreams were actually articulated, at least in Levi’s narrative construction of events, contemporaneously to his traumatic ‘Wstawać’ dream.34 Both the epigraphic poem and La tregua’s narrative conclusion, in fact, recount a dream within a dream that begins with a convivial domestic scene much like that described in Levi’s Auschwitz dream of failed familial communication. But this time the dream is only a ‘breve vacanza, o inganno dei sensi’ (brief vacation, or trick of the senses), a ‘sogno interno’ (internal dream) from which Levi is then awakened, still within the space of his ‘sogno esterno’ (external dream), by the Polish wake-up command of the camp, ‘Wstawać’ (TR I.395). Up to this point, the scenario is almost identical to Levi’s Auschwitz dreams: the wished-for future-oriented narrativity of his brutal experience translated into a dream that is eventually interrupted by the wake-up call of the camp. But now, from his position of return and in the space of his Turin home, the whole experience is fodder for a new dream, a traumatic reoccurrence of his awakening into consciousness of Auschwitz, before waking up from this double dream into consciousness of his survival. As Cathy Caruth writes in her discussion of ‘Freud, Lacan and the Ethics of Memory,’ ‘Awakening’ is not only the ‘site of trauma’ (100) that brings the sleeper into contact with his (earlier missed) encounter with death but also a call to testimony, a call to ‘wake up,’ to see the trauma from the position of life and, ultimately, to recount it in a transmissive wake-up

Transmission 37

call to others, who will, in turn, do the same. In Levi’s case, his dream’s literal order to wake up from the internal dream of peace also figuratively ‘wakes’ Levi from the illusion that he’s returned home to an untroubled reality; it commands him to see from the outside, from the position of ‘after,’ and to see – and narrate – the oft-dreamed scene of testimony with all its problems and challenges, that is, the entire complex of issues surrounding survival and its narration.35 Translatio, or Translating the Text of Auschwitz Our understanding of Levi’s various translation acts should be informed not only by trauma theory and Jakobson’s linguistic definition of translation but also by the Latin notion of translatio, or carrying over. The Oxford Latin Dictionary defines this term variously as ‘the action of moving (a thing) from one place to another,’ ‘transfer from one person to another (of possessions, rights, etc.),’ ‘the shifting of a case from one jurisdiction, formula, time, etc., to another,’ ‘the (imaginary) shift of a situation from one time to another,’ and finally ‘translation (from one language to another).’ The multiform nature of this word’s semantic scope conforms exactly to Levi’s witnessing project, each nuance of translatio outlined above conveying a different aspect of the spirit in which Levi ‘translates’ his experience, from a univers that is conceptually and referentially ‘other’ to the world of normative referentiality; and from the temporal and geographical space of Auschwitz to the space of a war-torn Italian Republic looking to integrate individual personal narratives into (or exclude them from) a usable national one. It is not a coincidence that one component of the Oxford definition recalls the idea of temporal deferral so important to the cognitive and literary responses to traumatic experience that we have just outlined. Although Jakobson’s model – as any model of translation, by necessity – also contains an element of temporal displacement, its focus on recodification allows us to consider not only the translation from experience to language but also that from language to language. The most immediate expression of the concentrationary experience was one born of the violence, horror, and Babel of the camps, a language that, like its referent, was cognitively ‘indigestible.’ As such, this expression needs to be reinterpreted, recoded, translated into a sign system understandable to a community of reader-witnesses. The translation from experience to written word implies a movement from signified to signifier, and the according of order and meaning to

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the senseless, absurd actions of the Nazi regime. In this way, the selfreferential sign system of numbers, violence, Babelic chaos, and fragmentation gains the semantic integrity of human interpretation and communication as it makes its various ‘voyages’ across time, geographic borders, and audiences. Levi’s function as translator is multifaceted and is not limited to the etymologically strict sense of carrying over remains for a new and (one assumes) more proper burial.36 Early on in his ‘Linguistic Aspects of Translation,’ Jakobson posits another tenet of his model of translation, stating that the target language must be more precise and developed than the source language, otherwise the transfer from one sign system to another would be unnecessary: ‘any sign is translatable into a sign in which it appears to us more fully developed and precise’ (234). This underlies Jakobson’s view of translation as refined interpretation and is essential to an understanding of the way in which Levi’s translation of the Lager experience and language can surpass its Auschwitz ‘source text’ in expressive efficacy and referential meaning. Aided by a careful, textually based consideration of the importance of the translator’s role in communicating the Holocaust and the centrality of linguistic factors in the survival of the Lager trauma, we shall see that Levi’s transmission of his experience and its language is a semiotic task as well as a transportational one. Furthermore, these acts of transmission and translation – as Jakobson’s observation suggests – are laden with moral significance. For if the target text represents a necessary progression towards clarity and refinement, the conventional wisdom regarding the value hierarchies of source-target relationships is overturned. What has been conceived, at least since the dawn of romanticism, as the inherent superiority of the source text to its derivative copy in Levi begins to cede to the inherent value of translation (both as process and as the text that it produces) as a powerful gesture of interpretation, analysis, and defiance against the corruption of the source. Bringing the Text to the Reader The primacy of the source text in the modern era is in part the legacy of Western biblical translation (a tradition governed by conventions of collective translation and divine inspiration),37 in part testament to the fundamental importance of romantic thought – in particular its establishment of a sacred cult of artistic creation – in modern canons of translation theory. For some romantic poets, most notably the Italian Giacomo Leopardi and the Englishman Percy Bysshe Shelley, poetic translation was an

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impossible endeavour; as Shelley wrote in 1821, ‘Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet’ (Robinson, Western Translation Theory 244–5).38 Other romantic translators such as August Wilhelm von Schlegel drew their approach from the idea that the translator must preserve the spirit of the original text and its creator, analogues to the divine creator and His world. Bound up with this cult of the sacred source text was an emerging strain of linguistic and cultural nationalism: for von Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and others, the German language was uniquely able, in its ‘openness’ and ‘malleability,’ to mediate the passage from the great source texts of the Western tradition to less flexible cultures. Prime among these was France, whose appropriative tradition of liberal translations (epitomized in Nicolas d’Albancourt’s seventeenth-century ‘belles infidèles’) came to be synonymous, for the philosophers of German romanticism (von Schlegel, de Stäel), with an arrogant privileging of the target culture’s rigid and stagnant conventions. This German veneration for the spirit and particularities of the source text reached its peak of articulation in Schleiermacher, who constructed a paradigm of translation practice that turned on ‘disturbing’ either the translation’s reader or the ‘spirit’ of the original author. In the end, Schleiermacher advocated the former, and thus a foreignizing approach to translation: by conditioning the reader to desire the foreignness of the original text, the translator ‘disturbs the [original] writer as little as possible, and moves the reader in his direction’ (Robinson, Western Translation Theory 229). This foreignizing approach has today become the realm of cultural theorists who seek to demystify the conceit of transparency so prevalent in the field of translation (to wit, Venuti),39 and of deconstructionist translation theorists40 who point to translation’s capacity to reveal, in the original text, the inherent difference of language to itself. However, contemporary translation practices and the evaluative criteria employed by modern readers of translation continue to ‘idolize’ the original text (as d’Albancourt put it in 1654), demanding its primacy and continuing to mystify the very real role of the translator in the translating process, and the very tangible textual and cultural artefacts that the process yields. Schleiermacher’s paradigm is remarkably useful to us as we try to sketch out Levi’s de facto approach to translation as metaphor and in practice. If Schleiermacher’s ideal translation disturbs the reader, Levi

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clearly strove to leave his reader alone, accommodating his imperfect understanding of the Holocaust survivor’s extraordinary experience, and even ‘having pity on him’41 when he translated Kafka in 1983, smoothing out the Czech writer’s hammering, repetitive German. In other words, Levi was a translator of the type that Schleiermacher disdained, part of the ‘belles infidèles’ tradition of translators who adapt the text to the linguistic and stylistic milieu of the target culture, and even to the needs of the translator himself. This approach led him, more often than not, to bring the text – however we define it – to the reader, ‘shelter[ing] the reader against all trouble and toil by whisking the foreign author magically into his unmediated presence’ (Robinson, Western Translation Theory 233), as Schleiermacher ironically writes.42 When the text is a historical one – to wit, the Holocaust – he achieves this through strategies of accommodation not unlike those used by Dante to acquaint the reader with his conception of the Christian afterlife, ultimately reversing the dysfunction of the Holocaust source text, recognizing and displacing its instability even as he institutes his own (newly translated) text. As Eve Tavor Bannet writes in her response to Paul de Man’s reading of Benjamin, Translations focus on pure language and translate literally, word for word, word instead of word, to ‘disrupt the ostensibly stable meaning of a sentence and introduce in it a slippage by means of which that meaning disappears, evanesces, and by means of which all control over that meaning is lost.’ But the meaning which disappears is evidently not all meaning … Only the meaning(s) of the words in the original disappears. And the control over meaning, which is lost, is lost only by the original, which loses it to the translating text: ‘Both criticism and translation are caught in the gesture which Benjamin calls ironic, a gesture which undoes the stability of the original by giving it a definitive, canonical form in the translation or in the theorization. In a curious way, translation canonizes its own version more than the original was canonical.’ Criticism and translation therefore kill the original to supplant it; they ‘de-canonize’ the original to canonize themselves. (583; emphasis mine)

When the text is literary, Levi boldly ‘troubles the text’ to canonize his own authoritative version, imposing his own style and lexicon; adapting the original’s tense, mood, number, and person to his own ends (Coleridge); abridging source texts so as to materially change the contours of their narrative (Dante); and infusing his translations with

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personally significant testimonial paradigms that are anachronistic (Presser, Kafka) in the source text. The Target Audience Levi’s primary act of translation, from experience to narrative, implies an according of meaning to that which was senseless – to wit, the violent events and empty signs of Auschwitz. The semiotic elements of this translation thus contain, in essence, the components of his imperative to witness. This mission compels Levi to transmit the debased and disintegrated sign system of Auschwitz to an audience that a priori neither knows of its existence nor understands its meaning. Linguistically, this involves what amounts to a translation of the Lagerjargon into literary Italian for an Italian community of readers. As we have seen, Levi’s transmission on all of these levels represents an attempt belatedly to come to cognitive terms with the event and thus to create its witness in others, and in himself. In empowering his own testimony through that of his textually created community of witnesses, Levi aims at nothing less than the overturning of the Nazi plan of subject annihilation and the corrective establishment of the very community that he lacked in the Lager, a nation of witnesses not only to his offence but to that of those who did not survive to tell their ‘ghastly tale.’43 But if Levi’s literary testimony emerged from a desire to make the uninitiated ‘others’ participate in the experience of the Holocaust, he would eventually find that the matter of a target audience was complicated by the way in which Italy’s Holocaust narrative could or could not become assimilated into broader national narratives and, most immediately, into the founding myths of the new Italian Republic. Levi’s first attempt to set down the reality of his camp experience was prompted by a commission from the Russian command of the Katowice camp and duly revised for publication in Italy’s most prestigious medical journal, the Minerva Medica, providing Se questo è un uomo with a textual germ (most notably the ‘Ka-Be,’ ‘Ottobre 1944,’ and ‘Storia di dieci giorni’ chapters), and even an authorial position of scientific objectivity.44 On the personal level, at least, Levi’s camp nightmare of testimonial refusal was not realized, and he quickly found eager listeners for his tales of camp life in surviving family and friends; his wife, Lucia, soon became his first reader and his most exacting editor.45 The publication of his text, of course, was a more complex story, in some ways emblematic of the dominant discourses circulating in Italy

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at the end of the Second World War. As Alberto Cavaglion has argued in his Primo Levi e Se questo è un uomo, Levi’s difficulties in publishing his first book in 1946–7 (notoriously rejected by a number of important publishers before finally being accepted by the small De Silva house) were symptomatic of the Italians’ desire to close the ‘parenthesis’ of fascism and establish unified and resistance-based national narratives.46 Levi’s language, too, set him at cross-currents with much that was being published in the immediate postwar period. After years of fascist cultural autarky that banned foreign genres, styles, and authors, the Italian editorial industry was relishing its normalized access to foreign authors such as Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Steinbeck; as figures like Elio Vittorini, Cesare Pavese, and Beppe Fenoglio translated these authors’ works into the Italian literary scene, they also imported their styles into their own literary production.47 Levi’s broad classical formation in 1920s and 1930s Turin – and his forced absence from the turbulent and shifting cultural scene in 1944 and 1945 – marked him stylistically in a way that made his writing seem somehow anachronistic. In the opinion of Marco Belpoliti, Levi lavorava con una lingua scartata dagli altri, una lingua ‘vecchia’ e proprio per questo risultava ‘straniero’ nella propria lingua, tanto da farci riconoscere nella lingua di Se questo è un uomo quello che Deleuze e Guattari hanno definito, a proposito di Kafka, ‘l’uso minore di una lingua maggiore.’ (Primo Levi, ‘Lingua’ 111) Levi was working with a language disregarded by the others, an ‘old’ language and it is precisely for this reason that he seemed ‘foreign’ in his own language, such that we recognize in the language of Survival in Auschwitz what Deleuze and Guattari have defined, with regard to Kafka, ‘the minor use of a major language.’

According to Primo Levi, Natalia Ginzburg – the Einaudi editor who famously rejected Levi’s text in 1947 – defended her choice by stating that the text ‘non rientra nel nostro bilancio aziendale, non fa parte della nostra linea editoriale’ (‘Note ai testi’ I.1382–3) (doesn’t fit into our business plan, isn’t part of our editorial direction). Though survivor narratives by Jews and political or military deportees alike were published in relatively high numbers in Italy in the immediate postwar period, according to Robert Gordon,48 it is clear that these texts did not ‘fit in’ to the mood of reconstruction and renewal that nonetheless produced

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them. Levi, in a 1975 interview, addresses the situation of his initial publication difficulties in striking terms: A quel tempo la gente aveva altro da fare. Aveva da costruire le case, aveva da trovare un lavoro. C’era ancora il razionamento; le città erano piene di rovine; c’erano ancora gli Alleati che occupavano l’Italia. La gente non aveva voglia di questo, aveva voglia di altro, di ballare per esempio, di fare feste, di mettere al mondo dei figli. Un libro come questo mio e come molti altri che sono nati dopo, era quasi uno sgarbo, una festa guastata. (‘Note ai testi’ I.1382) At that time, people had other things to do. They had to build houses, they had to find a job. There was still rationing; the cities were in ruins; the Allies were still occupying Italy. People didn’t want this [book], they wanted other things, to dance, for example, to have parties, to have babies. A book like this one of mine and like many others that were born later, was practically an insult, a spoiled party.

Levi here evokes the image of a reading public too taken up in postwar activities like rebuilding and celebration to read literary testimony, a testimonial scene strongly resonant with that testimonial emblem invoked so often in Levi’s work, the Ancient Mariner. As we shall find to be true of Coleridge’s figure and Levi’s use of it (explored in detail in the next chapter), the testimonial or target audience is not always – or not immediately – a willing one. In Italy in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the public, collective, and editorial ‘altri’ were reluctant to hear Levi’s ghastly tale, or rather, like the Ancient Mariner’s wedding guest, needed time and relentless persuasion to really receive it. Until Se questo è un uomo’s republication with Einaudi in 1958, on the heels of a flurry of Holocaust-related public memorializations, publications, and translations in the mid-1950s,49 the idea of a testimonial interlocutor – a true target audience – in the Italian literary context remained largely theoretical. There is no doubt, however, that Levi’s preoccupation with the concrete dynamics of transmission continued to guide the development of his testimonial project through drafts and reworkings of Se questo è un uomo. The centrality of the reader in this text, the textually figured recipient of these various processes of translation, is testament to this fact: the poetic incipit of the poem he would later call ‘Shemà’ immediately alerts us to the weight placed on his new interlocutors’ shoulders,

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while his early recourse to the imagery of Babel50 to describe the univers concentrationnaire suggests that his testimony is meant to mend and reverse that particular linguistic and human ‘maledizione’;51 his focus on Ulysses’ rhetorical audacity underscores his own transgressive narration and its recipients, while Levi’s portrait of Jean as a translatorly co-creator of both text and testimony gives the audience a model of witnessing through translation that emblematizes much of Levi’s project. In all of these ways and many others, Levi shows his audience (how) to be an instrumental part of his very testimonial mechanism. He writes for them, to make them participants in the events he recounts, performatively creating them even before they exist; it is their affirmation of his subjecthood that allows him to regain his own witnessing position and set in motion an ongoing process of witnessing and transmission. One of the central components of Levi’s creation of an audience is his Italianness; indeed, it is also fundamental to the establishment of his own authorial position, and thus to the way in which he stakes out the terrain of his linguistic and cultural interactions with his readers.52 In general, the Italians’ identity in Auschwitz was a function of their alterity vis-à-vis the other prisoners: in terms of class, in terms of their status as one of the last ethnic groups to arrive in the camp system, and in terms of their non-fluency in any of the principal superstrates of the Lagerjargon: German, Polish, Yiddish. The uniqueness of this Italian situation is indeed one of the paradigms according to which Levi organizes his analysis of the camp. From the beginning, we readers are told of the prisoners’ slow understanding of the numerical system of Auschwitz, and learn, with Levi, the signification of the tattooed number within the camp’s warped semiotics: Solo molto più tardi, e a poco a poco, alcuni di noi hanno poi imparato qualcosa della funerea scienza dei numeri di Auschwitz, in cui si compendiano le tappe della distruzione dell’ebraismo d’Europa. Ai vecchi del campo, il numero dice tutto: l’epoca di ingresso al campo, il convoglio di cui si faceva parte, e di conseguenza la nazionalità … Quanto ai numeri grossi, essi comportano una nota di essenziale comicità, come avviene per i termini ‘matricola’ o ‘conscritto’ nella vita normale: il grosso numero tipico è un individuo panciuto, docile e scemo, a cui puoi far credere che all’infermeria distribuiscono scarpe di cuoio per individui dai piedi delicati, e convincerlo a corrervi e a lasciarti la sua gamella di zuppa ‘in custodia’; gli puoi vendere un cucchiaio per tre razioni di pane; lo puoi mandare dal

Transmission 45 piú feroce dei Kapos, a chiedergli (è successo a me!) se è vero che il suo è il Kartoffelschälkommando, il Kommando Pelatura Patate, e se è possibile esservi arruolati. (SQ I.22; emphasis mine) Only much later, slowly, a few of us learned something of the funereal science of the numbers of Auschwitz, which epitomize the stages of the destruction of European Judaism. For the camp’s old-timers, the numbers tell it all: the period of entry into the camp, the convoy one came in with, and consequently one’s nationality … As for the high numbers, they carry an essentially comic air about them, like the words ‘freshman’ or ‘conscript’ in ordinary life. The typical high number is a corpulent, docile, and stupid fellow: you can make him believe that leather shoes are distributed at the infirmary to those with delicate feet, and can convince him to run there and leave his bowl of soup ‘in your care’; you can sell him a spoon for three rations of bread; you can send him to the most ferocious of the Kapos to ask him (it happened to me!) if it is true that his is the Kartoffelschälkommando, the ‘Potato Peeling Command,’ and if one can be enrolled in it.53

The tattooed number, the prisoners’ new name, thus becomes a classification system that, though devised and implemented by the oppressors, is an integral part of the camp’s internal hierarchy and polysystem of signification. The Italians’ ‘high numbers’ represent their identity to the most obvious enemy, the Germans, and simultaneously to that unique enemy created by the logic of Auschwitz and the grey zone, the campmate. Of particular note in this passage is the manner in which Levi assumes the position of knowing insider (as part of the already initiated and informed ‘alcuni di noi’ and the now-knowing victim of the Kartoffelschälkommando dupe), as well as that of ‘other’ (identifying himself as an ‘ebreo d’Europa’ and in opposition to the Kapos in control of the camp). In so doing, he gives himself the authority to translate key terms and concepts for the reader, who is also a ‘rookie,’ just embarking on his own education in the rules of the camp. Linguistically, Levi must first communicate the meaning of the number; in other words, its definition or translation. By giving rough equivalents from two familiar semantic fields (school and the military), Levi translates the numerical aspect of the Lagerjargon into Italian to convey its full import as an identity-defining sign that not only replaces the name but goes beyond it to represent the camp-standard intelligence quotient, as well. The number also takes on the function of camp citizenship document,54 as we see when Levi describes his first visit to the infirmary

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and tells us that the Italians were quickly identified by their tattooed numbers as the rookies of the camp: Ho provato a chiedergli se sa quando ci faranno entrare. Lui si è voltato all’infermiere, che gli somiglia come un gemello e sta in un angolo a fumare; hanno parlato e riso insieme senza rispondere, come se io non ci fossi: poi uno di loro mi ha preso il braccio e ha guardato il numero, e allora hanno riso piú forte. Tutti sanno che i centosettantaquattromila sono gli ebrei italiani: i ben noti ebrei italiani, arrivati due mesi fa, tutti avvocati, tutti dottori, erano piú di cento e già non sono che quaranta, quelli che non sanno lavorare e si lasciano rubare il pane e prendono schiaffi dal mattino alla sera; i tedeschi li chiamano ‘zwei linke Hände’ (due mani sinistre), e perfino gli ebrei polacchi li disprezzano perchè non sanno parlare yiddisch. (SQ I.42–3; emphasis mine) I tried to ask him if he knew when they would let us enter. He turned to the nurse, who looks like his twin and is smoking in the corner; they talked and laughed together without replying, as if I were not there. Then one of them took my arm and looked at my number and then they both laughed even harder. Everyone knows that the 174000s are the Italian Jews, the well-known Italian Jews who arrived two months ago, all lawyers, all with degrees, there used to be more than a hundred of them and already there are only forty; the ones who don’t know how to work and let their bread be stolen, and are slapped from morning to night. The Germans call them ‘zwei linke Hände’ (two left hands), and even the Polish Jews despise them for not knowing how to speak Yiddish.55

This ‘latecomer’ label thus revealed not only the Italians’ naiveté with regard to the camp rules but also their distinctive socio-economic characteristics, which set them apart even from the home cultures of the other prisoners. We can discern in this last passage the definition of an identification process of double displacement for the Italian prisoner, one in which he was distinguished both from the veterans who had already learned the camp rules from experience and from other newcomers who had more potential to adapt to the language and thus the logic of their new world than did the intellectual, bourgeois Italians. As such, the Italians found themselves in the position of ‘other’ (and thus enemy) in the eyes of their Nazi oppressors as well as in the eyes of their campmates, for whom they were not really authentic Jews.56 On both counts, the Italians were destined to fare worse than

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the average Jewish prisoner. The camp authorities treated them with even more derision than the other prisoners because of their awkwardness and inability to survive in the Lager system, while that same system of constantly shifting allegiances among prisoners and functionaries – a system that in theory forced all prisoners to be enemies to each other, denying trust and unity even among the oppressed – also made the Italians more susceptible to oppression on the part of their campmates. This double-otherness of the Italian Jewish condition in Auschwitz is emblematized by their linguistic isolation: they are unable to understand the language of the oppressors and are ostracized by their ‘natural’ allies because they cannot speak the mother tongue of the majority ‘other,’ Yiddish. As Levi himself puts it, ‘eravamo … stranieri all’inizio per i tedeschi in quanto ebrei, e stranieri anche per gli ebrei dell’Est in quanto non dei loro’ (cited in Bravo and Cereja 310) (we were foreigners … at the beginning for the Germans in that we were Jews, and foreigners also for the Eastern Jews in that we were not part of their group). As Sander L. Gilman suggests in his article ‘To Quote Primo Levi: “Redest keyn jiddisch, bist nit kejn jid” [“If you don’t speak Yiddish, you’re not a Jew”],’ the linguistic otherness of the Italian Jews in Auschwitz has important implications for the resolution of their trauma as survivors: [C]entral to Levi’s own project, the central project of all survivor-authors, is the recreation of the memory of the Holocaust in a world that needs to see itself disassociated from that earlier, horrific one. Their task is not merely the ‘bearing of testimony,’ but the resurrection of the dead, of the past, in the discourse of the literary work, a work that by conventions of Western letters, cannot die. And for Primo Levi, that discourse is clothed in the universal, undying, truthful language, the language of high culture, Italian. (140–1)

By using a literary Italian untouched by the language of atrocity as a vehicle for the Babel of the Lager, Levi creates the community of witnesses that the Lager sought to destroy. Though the dehumanizing and demoralizing conditions quickly undermine any semblance of community that the Italians attempted to maintain,57 Levi seeks to reverse the dystopian society of the camp to form a narrative testimonial utopia made up of those readers in the postwar situation inclined to figuratively and literarily ‘gather around’ Levi’s testimonial text. This utopian reading of Levi’s intended target audience also finds support in recent translation studies theory: in his ‘Translation, Community, Utopia,’58 Lawrence Venuti advances a model of translation wherein certain acts of trans-

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lation, specifically those that in one way or another ‘inscribe’ the translation process into the translated text, ‘becom[e] the site of unexpected groupings, fostering communities of readers who would otherwise be separated by cultural differences and social divisions yet are now joined by a common fascination’ (491). Emblematic of this process on Levi’s part is the episode of the ‘Canto di Ulisse,’59 in which he attempts to translate a key segment of Dante’s Inferno for a campmate who knows neither the passage nor the Italian language. His halting rendering of the Italian text into French (made textually present by his agonizing attempts to recall it from memory) creates a new audience not only for this passage of Dante’s Inferno (recontextualizing the founding text of the Italian language and Italian national culture) but also for the other ‘texts’ that Levi transmits in the process: the Italian cultural tradition, the possibility of humanistic understanding through speech, and, at the end of this chain, humanity itself. His abridgment of the original – necessitated and shaped by the forced absence of the material text – and its transformation from poetry to prose in some passages are forms of ‘domestic inscription’ that mark Levi’s version of Dante’s Ulysses as an essentially changed one, destined specifically for its new, post-Auschwitz audience. This audience begins with ‘Pikolo,’ as we shall see, and ultimately extends to the readers of Se questo è un uomo, forming a ‘community that includes foreign intelligibilities’ – in this case those surrounding the alterity of the univers concentrationnaire – ‘an understanding in common with another culture’ (Venuti, ‘Translation, Community, Utopia’ 491). The Translator in the Text This passage’s placement within the text is one of the keys to both its importance and the specific way that it signifies, as it follows Levi’s acceptance into the Buna-Monowitz chemistry laboratory and the beginning of his voyage back to humanity. His extemporaneous translation of the Dantean text continues this voyage, allowing Levi to rediscover his own humanistic cultural identity (mediated by the founding work of the Italian literary heritage), while establishing what turns out to be the first narratee in a long series of diegetic and extradiegetic witnesses and readers, Jean Samuel. ‘Pikolo,’ as the young student is called within the camp command system, is quickly revealed to be an ideal recipient for Levi’s brief literature lesson, and for the translation that follows. He is ‘attentissimo’ (I.108) (extremely attentive) to Levi’s initial description of the Commedia and its own internal logic, ‘ammira’ (I.108) (admires)

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Levi’s efforts and the affinities between their two languages, and even ‘suggerisce il termine appropriato’ (I.108) (suggests the appropriate term) when Levi can’t quite find the word to render ‘antica.’ In this way, he proves himself to be an interested and interactive recipient for Dante’s – and Levi’s – text. Their ability to create a translation together, to negotiate meaning across linguistic boundaries, reinstates the power of the word, albeit tentatively. In the end, it is clear to Levi that Pikolo ‘ha ricevuto il messaggio’ (I.110), which is not so much a message about Ulysses or even the Inferno as a whole, but rather a far more metaliterary message regarding the very nature of Levi’s act: Pikolo mi prega di ripetere. Come è buono Pikolo, si è accorto che mi sta facendo del bene. O forse è qualcosa di piú: forse, nonostante la traduzione scialba e il commento pedestre e frettoloso, ha ricevuto il messaggio, ha sentito che lo riguarda, che riguarda tutti gli uomini in travaglio, e noi in specie; e che riguarda noi due, che osiamo ragionare di queste cose con le stanghe della zuppa sulle spalle. (I.109–10; emphasis mine) Pikolo begs me to repeat it. How good Pikolo is, he is aware that it is doing me good. Or perhaps it is something more: perhaps, despite the wan translation and the pedestrian, rushed commentary, he has received the message, he has felt that it has to do with him, that it has to do with all men who toil, and with us in particular; and that it has to do with us two, who dare to reason of these things with the poles for the soup on our shoulders. (Woolf 103–4)

The attempt to translate Dante, the ‘daring’ – and successful – move to transmit more than the bare facts and information that were the only potentially communicable units of the Lagerjargon sign system, is a model for Levi’s overall narrative project.60 Moreover, Levi’s boldness in carrying over the intact cultural world represented by Dante prefigures the difficulty and the audacity of his translatio from Auschwitz to after, while simultaneously conveying the importance of a stable cultural language to that task. Levi’s choice of this particular text is thus both natural and crucial to his project of community creation, given its value as a cultural artefact that unifies all literate Italians on the basis of their shared experience with the text and that transcends age, class, and religious boundaries. As Risa Sodi states in the introduction to her A Dante of Our Time: Primo Levi and Auschwitz, ‘Levi received a classical education in Italy at a time when Dante still occupied a central place in secondary schooling’ (1).61 Other

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prominent Holocaust survivors, notably Elie Wiesel, had recourse to sacred texts as models for both literary representation and spiritual transcendence when they began to write of their experiences upon their return home. But the centrality of Dante in Levi’s secular education made the Commedia – a sacred text in Italy’s literary canon – a powerful choice when Levi decided to teach Jean something about his language, his culture, the two men’s unspeakable situation, and, ultimately, their common humanity. Levi’s decision to couch the episode in the explicit terms of interlinguistic translation (‘Qui mi fermo e cerco di tradurre’ [101; emphasis mine]) marks the importance of this act both as a practical means of communication and as a metaphor for humanistic understanding, its rhetorical vehicles, and its processes. He doesn’t merely teach Jean the passage; rather, they create a translation of it together, in community. Pikolo’s role as a narrative model extends beyond the parameters of individual interlocutive relationships, though: his attentive, interactive reception of Levi’s message – at all of its levels – is the first step in the formation of the community of witnesses that will eventually restore Levi’s subjecthood and his own ability to witness: what Primo so passionately says to Jean about having to listen and open his mind is rooted in two times and two places: it was said in the camp by one prisoner to the other; it was written by the survivor burdened by his need to tell a reluctant, uncomprehending world what it does not want to know. (Jagendorf 39)

In stark contrast to the dark foreboding of the dream with which this analysis began, Levi’s translation of Dante to Pikolo stands as Leviprisoner’s62 first tangible effort to create an interlocutor and, through their interaction, to create meaning within the space of the barbed-wire fence and beyond. As we are beginning to see, the metaphor of translation is an important one for Levi’s project because it accounts for the centrality of his interlocutors (the theoretical ‘ideal narratee’ who is corporealized in Laub’s psychoanalytic model), as well as for the recuperation of subjecthood that is just as central to the crisis of witnessing as it is to the concerns of contemporary translation theory. Structuralist literary criticism has long made the ‘narratee’ one of its central foci,63 beginning with Genette’s establishment of the essential terminology necessary to dissect all of the various levels of diegetic and extra-diegetic recipients. But only an application of Genette’s classification system to the concerns of psychoanalytic theory

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allows for the corporealization of the ‘implied reader’ or ‘implied narratee,’ and thus for an examination of the full import of the narratee in the context of Holocaust testimony. Although Felman and Laub posit a model of literature as ‘a witness, and perhaps the only witness, to the crisis within history which precisely cannot be articulated’ (xviii), perhaps Zampieri’s observation regarding the experience and writings of Bruno Bettelheim is more in line with the very real psychoanalytic need for a reader who is more than simply imagined: [La] ‘coazione alla testimonianza’, chiamiamola così, comune a tanti sopravvissuti, si presenta dunque in Bettelheim come desiderio insieme di capire e far capire, di spiegare ad altri per spiegare a se stesso, nel tentativo di padroneggiare razionalmente un’esperienza che eccede inesorabilmente le capacità. (82; emphasis mine) The ‘coercion to testimony,’ let’s call it, common to many survivors, is thus presented in Bettelheim as the desire to both understand and make others understand, to explain to others in order to explain to oneself, in the attempt to rationally master an experience that inexorably exceeds [mental] capacities.

Zampieri’s comment puts into relief the importance of ‘explanation’ to others as a means for understanding on the part of the survivor, as a means for the survivor’s rational incorporation of the event into his psyche. By explaining the event to an interlocutor, the survivor mirrors his own attempt to use reason and narration to understand his trauma, splitting the inner duality of the knowing victim and the unbelieving potential witness into the narrative dialogue between narrator and narratee. Levi makes this narrativizing process explicit at the very beginning of Se questo è un uomo, when he describes the advice given him by Steinlauf – one of the few characters accorded the honoured title of ‘amico’ (I.34) – during his ‘Iniziazione:’ Ho scordato ormai, e me ne duole, le sue parole diritte e chiare, le parole del già sergente Steinlauf dell’esercito austro-ungarico, croce di ferro della guerra ’14–18. Me ne duole, perché dovrò tradurre il suo italiano incerto e il suo discorso piano di buon soldato nel mio linguaggio di uomo incredulo. (I.35; emphasis mine) I have since forgotten, and this sorrows me, his straightforward and clear words, the words of ex-sergeant Steinlauf of the Austro-Hungarian army,

52 Arduous Tasks Iron Cross of the ’14–18 war. It sorrows me because I will have to translate his uncertain Italian and his good soldier’s steady speech into my language of an incredulous man.64

Levi’s ‘translation’ from the ‘straightforward’ and ‘clear’ yet ‘uncertain’ Italian of his campmate into his own language, that of the ‘incredulous man’ that he was at the time of the episode, is a telling moment on many levels. First, it shows the multilayered process of narrating and witnessing that has its fragile beginnings in the camp: the content of Steinlauf’s message addresses nothing less than the nature of witnessing (‘questo ne era il senso … che anche in questo luogo si può soppravvivere, e perciò si deve voler sopravvivere, per raccontare, per portare testimonianza’ [I.35] [this was the sense of it … that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness]), translated in Steinlauf’s halting Italian for Levi’s consumption. This puts Levi first in the position of narratee, who must validate another victim’s subjecthood and witness position, in this case in response to Steinlauf’s own ‘text.’ Levi must then take over as mediator for the reader, transforming the sergeant’s uncertain yet clear Italian into the strong, literary Italian that is linguistically familiar to his readers but that ironically carries a conceptual message that is radically difficult and obscure. Levi, spanning the roles of traumatized prisoner and surviving writer, positions himself as the ideal translator. Not only does he know at first hand the experience of the referent; he also speaks the language of the recipient: he, too, was once that incredulous man and can empathize with the communicative barrier of disbelief that he now – just as Steinlauf did – must overcome. Levi’s frustration at his inability to maintain some sort of formal equivalency is evident both in this episode and in his translation of the twenty-sixth canto of the Inferno to Jean Samuel: both cause him the same kind of ‘sorrow’ that afflicted Dante as he struggled to transmit his encounter with the noble figure of Ulysses, and in the Ulysses passage in particular Levi is explicitly cognizant of the ‘sacrilegio’ involved in his prose translation of Dante’s poetic form. Ultimately, however, it is not Steinlauf’s words that are at issue, but his sense, which Levi has decidedly never forgotten (‘non dimenticato allora né poi’ [SQ I.35]), and Levi’s ability to absorb Steinlauf’s ‘discorso’ and draw it into an implicit comparison with the stages of his own language through which the ‘translation’ must pass – incredulous then, knowing now. Nowhere is the complex play between past and present,

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traumatizing occurrence and traumatic recurrence, living and writing, more clear than in the interaction between Steinlauf and Levi. This is further heightened by Levi’s characterization of his own former language as ‘incredulous’; in this one subtle gesture, Levi the writer distances himself from his naïve textual alter ego and makes the passage from uninitiated figure of the reader to knowing survivor right before our eyes. It is as true of Jean as it is of Levi himself in his interaction with Steinlauf, that the listener (or the interviewer) becomes the Holocaust witness before the narrator does. To a certain extent, the interviewer-listener takes on the responsibility for bearing witness that previously the narrator felt he bore alone, and therefore could not carry out. It is the encounter and the coming together between the survivor and the listener, which makes possible something like a repossession of the act of witnessing. (Laub 85)

In both cases, it is their cooperation in witnessing – the reintegration of the surviving subject’s knowing and disbelieving aspects – that overcomes the crisis of witnessing and restores the survivor’s subjecthood. We should be particularly attentive, then, to figures of such narrative activity – target audiences, recipients, interlocutors, interpreters, translators in bono and in malo alike – as we move through Levi’s oeuvre. These figures and the spaces they populate are signposts for the careful reader, and as such can illuminate a path or paths in our navigation of Levi’s testimonial world. Taken together with Levi’s own interlinguistic translation work, those more properly textual sites of translation within which these translating figures are often embedded (the Ancient Mariner, Ulysses, Virgil, Jean, Levi himself), they point to an ethics of testimonial transmission and interpretation, ultimately interrogating, How do we transmit the Holocaust across time, distance, language, and the wounds of trauma? Moving Outward This chapter has sketched out a paradigm for the interpretation of Primo Levi’s testimonial literature, in which the survivor’s text acts as a vehicle for the survivor’s reacquisition and reassertion of his subjecthood and puts into relief the essential role of the interlocutor within the process of witnessing. I have chosen the emblematic metaphor of

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translation to situate and organize the many nuances of this paradigm, in which broadly defined acts of carrying over (translatio) linguistic, cognitive, and moral information about the events of the Holocaust is not less important than the more narrow sense of translating, or recoding, experience and language. All of this, of course, is given greater resonance by the importance of traumatic delay, latency, and self-reading and self-interpretation that characterize both the experience of the Holocaust and its narrativized memory. If translatio is indeed an organic optic through which to view the testimony of the Holocaust survivor, the nature of this metaphor compels us now to consider in a particularly focused way the borders that are traversed when experience and language are transferred from one zone to another, and the new intermediary spaces that are created though and by the processes of translation. In other words, in the following chapters we shall look at the ways in which Primo Levi uses translation – often en abyme, placing his own at the end of a series of translations of translations – to explore the transmission process; to examine its textual artefacts; to interrogate the very condition of survival; and to theorize the challenges of its narrativization. By examining four examples of this process – two translations embedded within his original testimonial work and two independent literary translation projects – we shall come to a greater understanding of the complex way in which Levi develops translation as standing for a veritable constellation of dynamic and motional acts relating to the survivor’s condition: transmission, transgression, transcendence, and transaction among them. This study will show unequivocally that Levi’s engagement with the processes of translation is not untroubled. Indeed, not withstanding the oversimplified and largely optimistic65 view of Levi’s writing that has predominated in Italian studies and Holocaust scholarship over the last half-century, the artefacts issuing from Levi’s various testimonial crossings are marked by ambiguity and tension. But these discoveries will serve students of Levi’s writing – and Levi – well. The instances of foregrounded literary translation that we are about to examine emerge as extensions and elaborations of Levi’s core testimonial precepts: not as ancillaries but rather as constituent elements of his larger testimonial oeuvre, rich textual sites that reflect upon and interrogate other, more conventionally ‘canonical’ aspects of Levi’s testimonial work. As we explore the texts at issue in the next four chapters, we should always keep in mind that translation is ultimately an act of highly sophisticated interpretation, apparently focused on a source

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text or one of its passages, but in fact in dialogue with multiple facets of the survivor experience on one hand and Levi’s rich corpus on the other. Levi’s translations – whether embedded in larger texts or published as independent works of literature – are as much meditations on his own corpus66 as they are mediations of the most apparent or proximate source text.

2 Source Texts and Subtexts: Translation and the Grey Zone

The strong reader, whose readings will matter to others as well as to himself, is thus placed in the dilemmas of the revisionist, who wishes to find his own original relation to truth, whether in texts or in reality (which he treats as texts anyway), but also wishes to open received texts to his own sufferings, or what he wants to call the sufferings of history. (Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading)

Introduction In this chapter, we will consider Levi’s decades-long mediation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ through paraphrase, quotation, and eventually the translation of a synecdochic four-line stanza of the ‘Rime’ within the text of his own original poem ‘Il superstite.’ As it did for Levi, Coleridge’s poem directs us to organize reality in terms of zones of ambiguity, indeterminacy, and flux: the Ancient Mariner has much to teach us about the survivor’s complex and difficult navigation of subject positions between life and death, complicity and resistance, lived experience and relived narrativization. Levi’s attraction to the Ancient Mariner figure led him to align it textually to equally ambiguous zones of his own thought and experience. Though Levi scholars have tended to dismissively assign the Ancient Mariner the status of literary model for the real-life survivor’s ‘burning urge to tell,’ Levi’s incorporation of both text and protagonist into his testimonial work suggests a much richer tapestry of associations. It is not by chance that Levi cites the Ancient Mariner in describing the unique urgency and liminality of his poetic production, nor that his

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four-line translation of the Mariner’s narrative credo would become the fulcrum of a biting poem about survivor guilt, in which the ambiguous moral, narrative, and existential positionality of the Holocaust survivor takes centre stage. We will see, however, that Levi’s use of the Ancient Mariner goes beyond that of a mere model or emblem for traumatic narrativity to reveal his complicated relationship with both the source text and his own survivorhood. As with the other translations to be treated in this book, we will see that Levi’s translation of Coleridge becomes a textual site where processes of testimony and aspects of the survivor’s condition are explored in complex and traumatically repetitive ways, mirroring the trauma of the experience itself. Another notable aspect of Levi’s translations borne out in the Coleridge case is that they are often intentionally unfaithful, representing an unsettling or even a reversal of the source text. This undermining foregrounding of the texts that Levi chooses to appropriate and translate within the space of his ostensibly ‘original’ testimonial production should not be inscribed within a Bloomian ‘anxiety of influence’ directed towards authorial figures like Dante Alighieri and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Rather, Levi’s en abyme staging of translation figures his attempt to reverse a very different kind of oppressive source text: that of the experience of Auschwitz. Levi’s tendency to manhandle his source texts in the service of a larger literary-testimonial program is characteristic of the renewed psychological and authorial agency granted by literary witnessing à la Felman and Laub. Levi’s relationship to the ‘Ancient Mariner’ text exemplifies this general tendency in his oeuvre. As we shall see, Levi’s traumatic return to the text and its protagonist places the source text’s own preoccupation with the transmission of trauma en abyme, foregrounding not only Levi’s and Coleridge’s common themes of transmission, translation, and survivor guilt but specifically the mechanisms by which these phenomena play themselves out textually. Within this context, however, Levi makes changes to the text that simultaneously reassert his authorial agency (and thus his subjecthood) and recast Coleridge’s text as a testimonial utterance relevant – indeed, perhaps essential – to Levi’s experience. La ‘Zona Grigia’ No intermediary zone is more essential to Levi’s oeuvre than the one he termed ‘la zona grigia,’ or the ‘grey zone’ in the most famous of his last published book of essays, I sommersi e i salvati. The importance of

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the grey zone in Levi’s writings cannot be overstated, and in fact the development of ‘lo spazio the separa le vittime dai carnefici’ (PS I.1210) (the space that separates the victims from the executioners) constitutes the central motive of the last two decades of Levi’s writing and thought. Given Levi’s tendency to recall the Ancient Mariner text and figure in ‘grey zone’ contexts – most notably in the epigraph to I sommersi e i salvati and in the ‘Il superstite’ poem – I will take the relationship between translation and the grey zone as this chapter’s main focus. Using the morally ambiguous intermediary space of the ‘grey zone’ as its point of entry, this chapter will explore Levi’s translational use of a stanza of Coleridge’s ‘Rime’ to describe the ambiguous realities of Holocaust survivorhood in all their flux and indeterminacy. Though Levi began to formulate his thoughts on the grey zone in the mid-1970s, his treatment of the issue finds its fullest expression in the ‘La zona grigia’ chapter of his last published book, I sommersi e i salvati. His main focus in the discussion is that category of mid-level functionaries in the Nazi regime whose defence was that they were ‘just following orders,’ but without whose complicity the Nazi machine would have ceased to operate in its particularly omnipotent and efficient fashion. These ‘greyzoners’ are, for Levi, emblematic of the Nazi regime’s unique brand of evil: its ability to implicate every stratum of society in its crime, so that no one – not even the victim – could claim innocence or ignorance. Levi’s recourse to the moral gravitas of Alessandro Manzoni indicates that this element of how absolute power is able to corrupt absolutely is nothing new in the human landscape: ‘Lo sapeva bene il Manzoni: “I provocatori, i soverchiatori, tutti coloro che, in qualunque modo, fanno torto altrui, sono rei, non solo del male che commettono, ma del pervertimento ancora a cui portano l’animo degli offesi”’ (SS II.1023) (Alessandro Manzoni knew this quite well: ‘Provokers, oppressors, all those who, in one way or another, do wrong unto others, are guilty not only of the wrong that they commit, but also of the perversion into which they lead the soul of the victim’).1 However, Levi quickly adds that ‘La condizione di offeso non esclude la colpa, e spesso questa è obiettivamente grave, ma non conosco tribunale umano a cui delegarne la misura’ (SS II.1023) (The condition of being offended does not exclude guilt, often an objectively weighty one, but I do not know any human tribunal to which to delegate its measurement). This introduction of Manzoni’s observation into the Holocaust context is not meant to normalize the Lager’s perverse morality: its power to taint its victims with guilt or shame remains unique in its scale and in its institutionalized moral ambiguity, a factor also in the difficulty of its

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juridical resolution. Levi is faced with institutional power on a scale never before seen, its capacity for corruption extending to any member of the society who must interact with the oppressive institution. In this case, that institution is nothing less than the entire state apparatus, which encompasses everything from the most basic elements of the modern state to the most strikingly evil manifestation of this nation’s modernity, the Lager system. According to Levi’s assessment of blame for the existence and efficacy of the Lager, ‘la massima colpa pesa sul sistema’ (SS II.1023) (the greatest responsibility lies with the system),2 a system that creates zones of ambiguity – moral, existential, and otherwise – in its tendency to confuse binary opposites such as right and wrong, good and evil, guilt and innocence, even life and death. As we have already noted, the altered moral system of the univers concentrationnaire was one in which the concepts and terminology of right and wrong as human society had come to understand them were no longer appropriate. Though Levi’s comments come in reference to the alterity of the Lager’s bases for human interaction of all kinds, the roots of this alterity can be traced to the system’s overwhelmingly large scale and technologically efficient means. When the system itself is the source of such an ‘offence,’ its human exponents must perforce assume a dual role in which they are simultaneously victims and oppressors. They are victimized by the system itself, and by those who are at its helm, who have decision-making power over the political and moral direction of the state. And they are, of course, part and parcel of that same system, oppressors and abusers themselves of that portion of the population over which they have been given some degree of control or oversight. This is the grey zone as Levi defines it. But the space of the grey zone must not be confined to the very middle of the good/evil spectrum, and the vast moral ambiguities of the Nazi regime compel us to interpret Levi’s grey zone in the broadest possible terms. As such, we should recognize that even the most powerless members of such a society – whether that society is defined as the entire nation-state of Germany3 or more narrowly as the dystopian society of the Lager – are driven to a state of absolute war against all other members. Although Levi does not explicitly place this phenomenon within the context of ‘grey zones’ – as this study will attempt to do – this is a theme that Levi develops throughout his own oeuvre, as early as Se questo è un uomo, and culminating in the ‘La zona grigia’ essay. As Marco Belpoliti states in his Primo Levi,

60 Arduous Tasks Ritornando a considerazioni già presenti in Se questo è un uomo (nel Lager il nemico non era solo intorno, ma anche dentro, il ‘noi’ perdeva i suoi confini), Levi prende in esame tutti i riti e le cerimonie che accoglievano il deportato nel Lager e mostra come la sua realtà fosse quella di ‘una guerra senza fine’, dove ciascuno lotta per ottenere un privilegio indispensabile alla sopravvivenza … (190; emphasis mine) Returning to considerations already present in Survival in Auschwitz (in the Lager the enemy was not only all around, but also within; the ‘we’ lost its boundaries), Levi examines all of the rites and ceremonies that welcomed the deportee into the Lager and shows how his reality was that of ‘a war without end,’ where each man fights to obtain the privileges necessary for survival …

This interminable struggle for privileges results in a social construct that the survivor comes to understand as a zero-sum game: if I win, someone else must lose. This sentiment is made explicit in Levi’s Se questo è un uomo: ‘I giovani dicono ai giovani che saranno scelti tutti i vecchi. I sani dicono ai sani che saranno scelti solo i malati. Saranno esclusi gli ebrei tedeschi. Saranno esclusi i Piccoli Numeri. Sarai scelto tu. Sarò escluso io’ (SQ I.122) (The young tell the young that all the old ones will be chosen. The healthy tell the healthy that only the ill will be chosen. Specialists will be excluded. German Jews will be excluded. Low Numbers will be excluded. You will be chosen. I will be excluded [Woolf 115]). It is important to note that any sense of guilt over this organization of the reality of Auschwitz – as does all reflection upon the Holocaust – typically comes later, for the survivor; as we see from this passage, guilt does not normally belong to the realm of the prisoner. The survival impulse as it is felt during the course of traumatic experience is essentially an animal one, and all things human – reflection, emotion, the state of survivorhood itself – must wait for the experience to end.4 So it is with the survivor’s sense that his life has come at the cost of another’s, a feeling that has been seen to increase over the survivor’s lifetime or that has been revived in unexpected, often cyclical, patterns by historical or personal events. This circumstance has come to be defined in various ways by the medical and mental health communities ever since the end of the war, most often under the umbrella terms ‘survivor syndrome’ and ‘survivor guilt.’ Psychologist Robert Jay Lifton has explained that the phenomenon of priority guilt is a specific form of survival guilt, one to which Nazi camp survivors are particularly prone because of the meticulous lists

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and selection procedures that were so inherent to the camp system (History and Human Survival, 171). Lifton defines this condition in the following way: I would hold [that the survivor] is bound by an unconscious perception of organic social balance which makes him feel that his survival was made possible by others’ deaths: If they had not died, he would have had to; and if he had not survived, someone else would have. (Ibid. 169; emphasis mine)

But we must not limit our understanding of the survivor’s identity to the sense of guilt or shame5 that he retains with regard to his Lager experience. Rather, our study of this particular aspect of survivorhood should focus on the survivor as a figure who has carried himself over the boundary between then and now, the Lager and the present time of survival. It is in this context that we begin our study of Levi as a survivor, as one who has ‘crossed over’ himself, allowing us to return to a primary meaning of translatio that was important in this study’s introductory discussion of the term. That discussion initially talked about Levi as being in a position to symbolically carry out a sort of testimonial ‘burial’ for the ‘sommersi,’ who were not mourned or buried in any ritual way at the time of their deaths.6 Through his witnessing acts, Levi can accord the victims of the Nazi Holocaust the sort of rhetorical burial that is central to human responses to death as understood in both psychoanalytic and anthropological fields. Similarly, the discussion of this most strict definition of the Latin translatio can also be framed in terms of Levi’s own need for closure, and not merely in the context of those on whose behalf Levi feels he is speaking, the ‘sommersi.’ Rather, as Lifton has written, the rituals of burial that the survivor enacts are as much a part of his own psychic healing as gestures of duty to those family members, friends, or comrades who did not survive the traumatic experience (Death in Life 492). As a result of the survivor’s desire to ‘appease’ potentially dangerous dead spirits, he experiences what Lifton calls an identification with the dead, making the distinction between survivor and dead, between ‘salvati’ and ‘sommersi,’ often difficult to draw. The enormity of the trauma created by the Nazi Holocaust and the effect that this has on the distinction between life and death is yet another example of the blurring of binaries in the Nazi system, and of the ambiguous grey zone that emerges from the murky moral code of the Lager. As we shall see, the very event7 of crossing over from traumatic experience to survival can create conflicting

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feelings for the survivor: intense feelings of guilt surrounding the survival itself, mixed with the strong, even irresistible impulse to erase that guilt by carrying over a testimonial record on behalf of those who did not cross over themselves.8 The resulting space is a limbo of sorts, whose inhabitants are neither alive nor dead, neither exclusively ‘sommersi’ nor exclusively ‘salvati,’ because their constant transit from the space of traumatic reliving to relative normalcy and back again means that they truly exist in both realms simultaneously. This occupation of multiple – and conflicting – zones of existence only underscores the survivor’s unusual status of mediator: as Terrence des Pres notes (41), the survivor not only speaks for someone else (those who did not survive) but also to someone else (the reader or listener who is imagined to participate in the new community of witnesses sketched out in chapter 1). This connection between speech and the survivor’s unique intermediary position is an important one: in addition to inhabiting various other mediating zones proper to survival, the survivor may also be said to occupy that created by transgression, or the crossing of boundaries of propriety and/or law, most notably the propriety of speech or indeed any representation of referents whose ineffability imposes a taboo or prohibition. The fact of the survivor’s role of speaker on behalf of the dead accords his identity an inherently transgressive element in that he seeks to transmit precisely that which is unspeakable. This is true not only in that the Holocaust represents an absolutely new experience in the landscape of human history but also because, according to the law of the oppressors, no evidence – verbal or otherwise – was to breach the Lager’s barbed-wire walls. Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ Levi’s increased attention to the ‘grey zone’ near the end of his life,9 and its central position in his last published book, indicates that it, and zones of intermediacy and indeterminacy in general, demand especially careful consideration on our part. The translation process, made present in the traces that it leaves on Levi’s testimonial texts, constitutes yet another type of intermediary zone, as does the process of surviving itself: a space of becoming and flux before the (temporary) fixity of the textual product and the textual identity that it creates. These themes converge in Levi’s poem ‘Il superstite,’ in which Levi stages textually – largely through what Bloom might call the ‘strong’ reading and translation of Coleridge and Dante – intermediary zones that reflect the survivor’s condition: between death and life, between guilt

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and victimization, between bearing witness to the fate of the ‘sommersi’ and narrating the experience of the ‘salvati.’10 The central subtext to be reckoned with in ‘Il superstite,’ written in 1984 and published in the collection Ad ora incerta in that same year, is the English romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’ It is a subtext that can easily be read anachronistically as a metaphor for the trauma of survival and its narrativization, both of which emerge as central themes of both Levi’s poem and, indeed, much of his later thought. It is no coincidence, then, that the ‘Rime’ and its protagonist are increasingly present in Levi’s articulation of his own identity as a survivor. A brief summary of Coleridge’s 1817 poem should aid us in understanding Levi’s striking attraction to the piece. The poem’s frame – the logical reality of a wedding and its guests – is the pretext for the Mariner’s compulsive narrative of ‘malefizi,’ as Levi puts it, the story of a sea voyage gone terribly and strangely wrong. The ghostly Mariner, the lone survivor of the eerie shipwreck that he recounts, accosts one of the wedding guests just as he is about to enter the wedding reception and forces him to listen to his tale. The doomed voyage began uneventfully, he tells him, but when a storm carried the Mariner’s ship to the ice and fog of the South Pole, the sailors saw what they perceived to be a good omen, an albatross, and were soon led northward (ll 63–74). The Ancient Mariner’s killing of the bird in the next stanza animates the rest of the Mariner’s story, but without any clear explanation as to the causal relationship between the Mariner’s ‘crime’ and the crew’s and his own ‘punishments.’ The Mariner then tells of his comrades’ scorn for him when their luck ran out and the ship was suddenly becalmed, apparently as a supernatural avenging of the albatross’s ‘murder.’ The Mariner was eventually made to wear the dead omen around his neck for his ‘crime’ (ll 141–2). Just as the entire crew began to die of starvation and thirst, the Mariner tells the guest, a ship appeared on the horizon. Though at first both the Mariner and his comrades were certain of an imminent rescue, the Gloss – an editorial conceit added by Coleridge in one of the later versions of the poem – informs the reader that what they saw was, in fact, a ‘skeleton of a ship’ (l 177, Gloss) with only two passengers, Death and Life-in-Death. In a game of dice between the two (ll 195–8), the latter wins the Ancient Mariner, with the rest of the crew going to Death (ll 195–8, Gloss). Just as the Mariner is recounting his comrades’ deaths, the Wedding Guest interrupts, assuming that the Mariner, too, had been taken into Death. The Ancient Mariner reassures him that he remained alive, as his comrades’ accusing glances haunted him for seven

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days and nights (ll 261–4). As the albatross fell from the Ancient Mariner’s neck, breaking its spell, a life-giving rain began to fall, after which the ship’s crew was ‘inspirited’ (l 331, Gloss) to drive the ship again. Eventually, as the Mariner’s ship approached his native land, it was greeted by a Hermit’s craft, which took on the Mariner’s floating body when his own boat sank into the sea (ll 550–9). The Pilot and the Pilot’s boy, though they originally believed that they had recovered a corpse, interrogated the Mariner when he came to and ignored his pleas for death; the Mariner was thus ‘wrenched / With a woeful agony, / Which forced [him] to begin [his] tale; / And then it left [him] free’ (ll 577–81). The Mariner finishes his tale, admonishing the Wedding Guest to learn from his example. According to Marco Belpoliti (Primo Levi 21), the catalyst for Primo Levi’s interest in Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ was Beppe Fenoglio’s translation of it, republished by Einaudi in 1964 after an earlier serial printing; we can trace Levi’s public references to the poem more or less to this same period, when Levi first compares himself to the Ancient Mariner in his preface to the 1966 theatrical version of Se questo è un uomo: Ero diventato simile al vecchio marinaio della ballata di Coleridge, che artiglia per il petto, in strada, i convitati che vanno alla festa, per infliggere loro la sua storia sinistra di malefizi e di fantasmi. Ho ripetuto le mie storie decine di volte in pochi giorni, ad amici, nemici, ed estranei; poi mi sono accorto che il racconto si andava cristalizzando in una forma definita, costante: per scriverlo non mancavano che la carta, la penna e il tempo. […] [Io e Pieralberto Miché] abbiamo cercato di dire tutto, ed insieme di non strafare. La materia di cui disponevamo era già fin troppo scottante: si trattava di decantarla, di incanalarla, di trarne un significato civile ed universale, di guidare lo spettatore ad una conclusione, ad una sentenza, senza gridargliela negli orecchi, senza presentargliela già fabbricata … (PS I.1159, 1162; emphasis mine) [After returning from Auschwitz] I had become similar to the Ancient Mariner of the Coleridge ballad, who seizes wedding guests in the street, by the collar, to inflict on them his sinister story of spells and ghosts. I repeated my stories dozens of times in just a few days, to friends, enemies, and strangers. Then I realized that the story was crystallizing, taking a defined and consistent form: I needed only pen, paper, and the time to write it down. […]

Source Texts and Subtexts 65 [Co-adapter Pieralberto Marché and I] tried to say everything, and at the same time to not overdo it. The material that we were handling was already a burning tale: it was a matter of distilling it, channelling it, drawing from it a civil and universal meaning, guiding the spectator to a conclusion, a judgment – without screaming it into his ears – without handing him one already made.

Levi’s characterization of the ‘materia’ as ‘scottante’ (in the second segment of the quotation) is a direct reference to the ‘burning tale’ that the Ancient Mariner accosts the Wedding Guest to tell. Implicit in these comments is the expectation that the spectator-as-interlocutor will attempt to draw meaning or a moral from the performance of witnessing, thereby reaching an ostensibly impartial judgment at the end of the tale’s telling. But one of the most interesting comparisons to be made between Primo Levi’s status as Holocaust survivor and Coleridge’s fictional ‘Rime’ is the problematic relationship between crime and punishment present in both. Both Coleridge’s poem and the mechanisms of survival guilt create the facade of a moral or lesson to be derived from the actions of the protagonist by placing an emphasis on the survivor’s attempts to exculpate himself and thus mitigate his heavy emotional burden. In the case of the Ancient Mariner, both the protagonist and his interlocutors are expected to learn from the punishment imposed by the Mariner’s comrades, and thus avoid the recurrence of the criminal action. But in the end, the moral code that ostensibly links the Mariner’s crime to his punishment is simply incomprehensible. The promise of moral truth at the end of a process of repentance is defeated when, in the absence of any wrongdoing, the punishment is revealed to be nothing short of absurd. Similarly, the Holocaust survivor sees his persecution as punishment for a crime that he does not quite understand but of which he must repeatedly acquit himself. And just as the Ancient Mariner does, the Holocaust survivor recognizes that narration is an integral part of this process. Levi next mentions his affinity for Coleridge’s poem in the ‘Cromo’ chapter of Il sistema periodico, published in 1974. Recalling his feelings upon returning to Turin after more than a year of imprisonment and the wandering voyage home, Levi once again compares himself explicitly to the Ancient Mariner. In this passage, he mentions his urgent need to tell, and speaks in terms of the need to purify himself, to rid himself of the albatross hanging around his own neck: io ero ritornato dalla prigionia da tre mesi, e vivevo male. Le cose viste e sofferte mi bruciavano dentro; mi sentivo piú vicino ai morti che ai vivi, e colpevole di

66 Arduous Tasks essere uomo, perché gli uomini avevano edificato Auschwitz, ed Auschwitz aveva ingoiato milioni di esseri umani, e molti miei amici, ed una donna che mi stava nel cuore. Mi pareva che mi sarei purificato raccontando, e mi sentivo simile al Vecchio Marinaio di Coleridge, che abbranca in strada i convitati che vanno alla festa per infligere loro la sua storia di malefizi. Scrivevo poesie concise e sanguinose, raccontavo con vertigine, a voce e per iscritto, tanto che a poco a poco ne nacque poi un libro: scrivendo trovavo breve pace e mi sentivo ridiventare uomo, uno come tutti, né martire né infame né santo, uno di quelli che si fanno una famiglia, e guardano al futuro anziché al passato. (SP I.870–1, emphasis mine) I had returned from my imprisonment three months before, and I was not living well. The things that I had seen and endured burned within me; I felt closer to the dead than to the living, and guilty of being a man, because men had constructed Auschwitz, and Auschwitz had swallowed up millions of human beings, and many of my friends, and a woman who was close to my heart. It seemed that I would purify myself by telling, and I felt similar to Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, who grabs the wedding guests in the street on their way to the banquet to inflict upon them his story of witchcraft. I wrote stinging and concise poems, told my story in dizzying fashion, out loud and in writing, so that little by little my book was born: by writing I found a brief peace and felt myself becoming a man again, a man like all others, neither martyr, nor villain, nor saint, but one of those men who starts a family and looks to the future instead of the past.

Levi here – as he does elsewhere – limits his explicit self-comparison with the Ancient Mariner to their impulse to narrate and the fundamental role of the interlocutor. But this passage, read in tandem with the poem that is the focus of this part of my study and with the numerous interviews in which Levi returns to the Coleridge text, will reveal a much more complex relationship between Coleridge’s romantic classic and Primo Levi’s later thought and writings. Levi’s introductory statement that ‘non vivevo bene’ is a strange turn of phrase and one that disturbs the expectations of a reader more accustomed to the colloquial ‘non stavo bene’ (I was not doing well). But Levi’s choice of ‘vivere’ (to live) instead of ‘stare’ (to be), by implying that he is a living person who does not demonstrate or perform this condition very well, points forward to the next sentence, where he explicitly juxtaposes the living and the dead. Here, he emphasizes the ambiguous and transitional zone that he exemplifies as one who ‘felt closer to the dead than to the living.’ Another element of the ‘Rime’ that Levi echoes in these brief comments

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is the taint that he feels of a general human guilt, which recalls Lifton’s distinction between categories of survivor guilt (‘The Concept of the Survivor’ 117–20), the first of which is the guilt of being human, of having been a party to the atrocities of which man is capable. Not coincidentally, this generalized class of guilt is also similar to that which many critics have attributed to the Ancient Mariner, whose albatross has been variously described as representative of collective human guilt for the slave trade, for the terror following the French Revolution, even for original sin. Furthermore, the Mariner’s narration of his own ‘crime’ is explicitly identified as his key to redemption from his guilt, a redemption that is short-lived since the teller is nonetheless doomed to a lifetime of cyclically traumatic retelling. By the same token, Levi also expresses a desire to cleanse himself of that guilt, and identifies narration as the most immediate and promising purification process. For both Levi and the Ancient Mariner to whom he compares himself, the ‘sin’ or ‘fault’ ostensibly at the heart of their guilty feelings is elusive to the outside observer: at best, the result of conjecture; at worst, their ‘sins’ are not intelligible according to any known moral code. The Ancient Mariner’s wrong is most often linked to inaccessible moral systems of non-human agency, most obviously the dice game that decides his fate and the symbolic value of the albatross, occulted to the Ancient Mariner and reader alike. In Primo Levi’s case, his feelings of guilt are linked to the code of the Nazi regime, inherently illogical and paradoxical in its design to implicate its victims in the system’s crimes. In the end, Levi tells us, his narrative strategy finds at least limited success, giving him ‘breve pace’ from the burning need that compels him to tell in the first place. In this last section of Levi’s comments in Il sistema periodico, the composition of testimonial documents, both ‘a voce e per iscritto’ (spoken and written), acts as a bridge that links the past and the future that he can now envision, thus assisting the writer in passing over from imprisonment to survival. But we should note that, as in many other passages in Levi’s testimonial writing, the articulation of Levi’s temporal situation is clouded here and permits us to ask: is Levi’s self-comparison with the Ancient Mariner more reflective of his feelings in 1945 or in the later, more distanced and thus reflective time of writing Il sistema periodico (1968–75)?11 Moreover, is this temporal ambiguity made even more problematic by the comparison’s implication that the ‘tregua’ of ‘breve pace’ is destined to repeat itself as often as the pain from which it offers respite? In the last few years of Levi’s life, the image of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner comes to take on a decidedly more liminal role, introducing as

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it does the poem ‘Il superstite’ and his last published book, I sommersi e i salvati. This annunciative function, however, does not diminish the image’s force. Indeed, as we shall see, his use of the poem in these last years represents a culmination of his previously shifting references to it, as the poem and its protagonist are applied to survival issues in a more comprehensive way than ever before. No longer does the figure of the Ancient Mariner stand merely for the impulse of poetic composition, for the intrusive nature of memory, or even for the guilt of survival; rather it stands for a constellation of all of these, both as independent concerns and as complex interrelationships. In February 1984, Levi writes ‘Il superstite,’ using a central line from the Coleridge poem as his point of departure: ‘Since then, at an uncertain hour’ (‘Rime’ l 582). When his first major collection of poetry is published in that same year, he draws the title, Ad ora incerta, from the same line, explaining to Giovanni Tesio that he found his own sudden and unexpected impulses to poetic expression to be mirrored in the sporadic nature of the Ancient Mariner’s narration.12 And his last book, I sommersi e i salvati (1986), cites the stanza to which Levi has so often made reference in more complete form than ever before, adopting it in epigraphic form: Since then, at an uncertain hour, That agony returns: And till my ghastly tale is told This heart within me burns. (S.T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, ll 582–5)

A close textual analysis of ‘Il superstite,’ together with the other references to Coleridge in Levi’s later writings and interviews, will show his relationship to the Ancient Mariner to be a much richer one than critical treatment has thus far revealed. His choice of the Ancient Mariner as a symbolic stand-in is so thematically broad as to be a potential source of confusion for the casual reader, spanning Levi’s narrative, poetic, and survivor identities. In reference to his burning need to tell upon returning to Italy after his imprisonment; when he addresses the suddenness of his poetic ‘occasioni’;13 and when his comparison to the Ancient Mariner centres on the return of memories ‘at an uncertain hour’ and a renewed narrative impulse thirty-five years after the Lager experience14 – in each of these aspects Coleridge’s poetic protagonist seems to be omnipresent. As we have already begun to see, the breadth and variety

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of the contexts in which Levi uses the figure of the Ancient Mariner as an emblem for his own position of narrator and survivor is striking and gives us licence to delve deeper into the affinities between Levi and his fictional counterpart, and into Levi’s complex relationship with the medium of poetic expression. The ‘Uncertain Hour’ of Poetic Testimony The most pressing question in this complex of issues is this: how are we to understand Levi’s far-ranging comments on his affinities with Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner? Is the comparison to be taken as a figure of his role as spokesperson for Italy’s collective memory of the Holocaust? Or is it more indicative of an attempt to identify with a particular poetic prototype, one that can adequately reflect the preoccupations of Levi both as the writer and as the protagonist of a poetic articulation of the Holocaust? The privileged position of the Coleridge poem within Levi’s oeuvre in verse – both in the title of Levi’s most comprehensive collection of published poetry and in its first-line citation and translation in one of his most powerful poems15 – demands that our principal optic be that of the role of poetry in Levi’s testimonial project. The overwhelmingly dominant critical opinion of Levi’s poetic production, shared by Levi himself, places his poetry in a liminal position vis-à-vis his prose work.16 This liminality is not only positional, in the sense that textually it tends to precede and introduce similar narrative or essayistic themes, but also qualitative, in that Levi’s poetic work is representative of an essentially different literary, psychological, and moral agenda, obvious generic issues aside. Even ignoring all pretensions of modesty, Levi’s own assessment of his poetry places it decidedly at the edges of his rational reflection on his world. For Levi, poetry is a sudden and irrational – or at least pre-rational – occurrence, a form of expression that takes shape and articulates itself in the space preceding that of reflective, logical prose. As he himself states in his introduction to Ad ora incerta, In tutte le civiltà, anche in quelle ancora senza scrittura, molti, illustri e oscuri, provano il bisogno di esprimersi in versi, e vi soggiacciono … La poesia è nata certamente prima della prosa. Chi non ha mai scritto versi? Uomo sono. Anch’io, ad intervali irregolari, ‘ad ora incerta’, ho ceduto alla spinta … Non so dire perché, e non me ne sono mai preoccupato: conosco male le teorie della poetica, leggo poca poesia altrui, non credo alla sacertà dell’arte, e neppure credo che questi miei versi siano eccellenti.

70 Arduous Tasks Posso solo assicurare l’eventuale lettore che in rari istanti (in media, non piú di una volta all’anno) singoli stimoli hanno assunto naturaliter una certa forma, che la mia metà razionale continua a considerare innaturale. (AOI II.517; emphasis mine) In every civilization, even in those which have not yet developed writing systems, many, famous and unknown, feel the need to express themselves in verse, and they succumb … Poetry was surely born before prose. Who has never written a poem? I am a man. I, too, at irregular intervals, ‘at an uncertain hour,’ have given in to the impulse … I do not know why, and I have never concerned myself with it: I don’t know much about theories of poetry, I don’t read other people’s poetry, I don’t believe in the sacred nature of the art, and I don’t believe that these verses of mine are excellent. I can only assure any potential readers that in rare instances (on average, not more than once a year) individual stimuli have assumed naturaliter a certain form, which my rational side continues to consider unnatural.

The uncertainty with which Levi’s impulses take poetic form concerns both the occult nature of poetry (‘I don’t know why …’, ‘I don’t know much … ’, ‘I don’t read …’, ‘I don’t believe …’) and its rhythms, which are ‘irregular’ and ‘rare.’ What is certain is what his rational side assumes about poetic expression: it is unnatural and overwhelming when it comes, something to which one ‘succumbs’ with some cyclical regularity. Levi gives this sense explicit form in his interview with Giulio Nascimbeni, where he reveals that Ad ora incerta’s title was prompted by his a posteriori realization that the poems fell into rather neat chronological groups that recall Robert Jay Lifton’s ‘rhythms of guilt’: NASCIMBENI: Perché questo titolo? Perché la poesia viene ‘ad ora incerta’? LEVI:

È una constatazione che ho fatto ‘a posteriori,’ quando ho messo in ordine le date. C’è un accumulo fra il 1945 e il ’46, e un altro accumulo fra il 1983 e quest’anno [1984]. Sembrano due grappoli staccati. In mezzo, nei rimanenti anni ci sono i miei lavori in prosa e la professione di chimico … (137; emphasis mine)

NASCIMBENI: Why this title? Why does poetry come ‘at an uncertain hour’? LEVI: It’s an observation that I made ‘a posteriori,’ when I put the dates

in order. There’s a group between 1945 and 1946, and another one between 1983 and this year [1984]. They seem to be divided into distinct

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bunches. In the middle, in the remaining years there are my prose works and the chemistry profession … Not only are his poems separated in ‘grappoli’ from his prose work, but Levi here also explicitly associates his prose writing with his professional life as a chemist and clearly distinguishes – in chronology and thus in typology – that sort of work from the activity of poetic expression.17 Levi continues: ‘Per scrivere, dopo otto ore al giorno di fabbrica, dovevo adottare un metodo, una regola. La poesia non trovava posto: le mancava, appunto, “l’ora incerta”’ (Nascimbeni 137) (In order to write, after eight hours a day in the plant, I had to adopt a method, a system. There wasn’t room for poetry, it was missing, precisely, its ‘uncertain hour’). Levi’s comments also allow us to see his affinity with the Ancient Mariner figure in a more schematic way, both chronologically and thematically. In effect, the naming of his poetry collection was the result of two factors, one explicit in his remarks, the other more implicit. The former, Levi’s recognition of the existence of two distinct chronological groupings for his poems, indicates and at the same time temporally situates the suddenness, the ‘incertezza,’ of his inspiration for poetic activity. Of course, the unexpectedness of these impulses and their subconscious (or ‘unnatural’) nature strikingly call to mind the victim’s fundamental unpreparedness in the face of traumatic events and their cyclical return through memory.18 The second factor centres more on the exact characteristics of the time periods that Levi identifies, and supports a more direct thematic (Holocaust survival) and generic (poetic forms and sources) link with the Ancient Mariner than Levi’s comments in Il sistema periodico and the theatrical version of Se questo è un uomo would, at first blush, suggest.19 In other words, we can surmise that both the most immediate (Levi’s initial return home in 1946) and most delayed (the last decade and a half of his life) periods of Levi’s reflections on the Holocaust share not only an openness to poetic expression but also a common propensity for explicit (albeit delayed, in the first case) self-comparison with the figure of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. The testimonial immediacy that Levi articulates with the help of his Ancient Mariner comparisons is thus linked, though not exclusively, with his sporadic and unexpected recourse to poetic forms more apt to accommodate this urgency than Levi’s studied prose.20 Moreover, these references bookend Levi’s Holocaust reflections in a way that echoes the bookending function of the other poetic reference of ‘Il superstite,’ to Dante. Line 14 of

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the poem, ‘Indietro, via di qui, gente sommersa’ (Stand back, leave me alone, submerged people [Feldman and Swann 64]), as well as the paraphrase in its last line, ‘E mangio e bevo e dormo e vesto panni’ (Eat, drink, sleep and put on clothes [Feldman and Swann 64]), of Inferno 33.141, ‘e mangia e bee e dorme e veste panni’ (and eats and drinks and sleeps and puts on clothes), make direct reference to Dantean distinctions between the dead and the living, the drowned and the saved, recalling a lexical field that characterizes both Levi’s first and his last writings. The use of the Dantean terms ‘sommersi’ and ‘salvati’21 as a framework for understanding complex systems of death, survival, and guilt dates back to Levi’s first narrativizations of his experience. Indeed, the appropriateness of Dante’s Commedia as a source of Holocaust analogy was clearly present in Levi’s consciousness even before he began writing, as his narration of the ‘Canto di Ulisse’ to Jean in the camp space reveals. In this sense, the infernal subtext is an even more organic expression of Levi’s Holocaust experience than the Ancient Mariner figure and poem, a subtext that surfaces only after Levi’s encounter with Beppe Fenoglio’s translation of the poem in 1964.22 As has been well documented, the title of the ninth chapter of Se questo è un uomo, ‘I sommersi e i salvati,’ was actually Levi’s original choice for the title of the book itself;23 it was only in Levi’s reconsideration of those same Holocaust themes more than thirty-five years later that he finally obtained the title that he had wanted all along. Taken together, these poetic references to the ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and to the idea of ‘sommersi’ and ‘salvati’ represent a set of organizing principles for Levi’s understanding of his own identity as survivor and indicate not only that poetry is linked with Levi’s most ‘uncertain’ and urgent testimonial production but also that poetic source texts provide the inspiration for these moments. In this sense, Levi’s affinity for the Coleridge poem and for Dantean distinctions between life and death, the ‘sommersi’ and the ‘salvati,’ suggests that Levi’s choice of poetic subtexts and his translation of them in poetic form is an indicator of the unique role of poetry in Levi’s articulation of the survivor’s position. Is poetry constitutive of Levi’s greater testimonial and literary projects or does it create an essentially separate space unto itself? In light of these essential and complex connections between poetry, irrationality, survival, and the figure of the Ancient Mariner, this critical question is a valid point of departure for other questions addressing the interaction of these elements in Levi’s work. Specifically, we are forced to confront

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whether poetry’s Ancient Mariner-like irrationality represents a constant state for the survivor, to be associated generally with the act and need for witnessing, or only an animating part of his irrational side, a liminal and annunciatory space reserved for the urgency of ‘unnatural’ traumatic impulses. The parallels that we have drawn thus far between poetry and rhythms of survival would seem to point to the latter position. Guided by a close textual analysis of Levi’s poem ‘Il superstite’ and its use of two poetic source texts, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, we shall see that poetry is indeed a privileged mode in Levi’s treatment of the most troubling and difficult aspects of survivorhood. For Levi, poetry articulates on a formal level the sudden and uncertain moments of conflict about his own survival, and so creates an expressive space that is in the margins of, and often in conflict with, his otherwise rational persona. As Italo Rosato concludes in his careful examination of intertextuality between Levi’s prose and poetry, it is precisely in the ‘diversa verità’ (‘Poesia’ 420), the ‘different truth,’ that is represented as ineffable and transgressive in his prose works that Levi’s poetry finds its very raison d’être. ‘Il superstite’ and the image of the Ancient Mariner thus stand as a poetic emblem of the zone of uncertainty – intermediate spaces of hesitation, doubt, oscillation, or ambiguity – that is the survivor’s painful legacy. To say it again with Levi, ‘la poesia è nata certamente prima della prosa’ (poetry is certainly born before prose), not only embodying the ambiguity that it expresses but also representing a sort of formal and generic border zone that lies midway between experience and its more narrativized expressions and that is thus more prone to the impulses of traumatic expressive activity. Levi certainly saw the affinities between the Ancient Mariner’s ambiguous existential position and Dante’s exploration of salvation and damnation in the Inferno. But this poem’s complex use of translation and paraphrase suggests that a more interactive and dynamic reading of these source texts may be warranted if we are to come to a full understanding of Levi’s incorporation of them. Daniel Boyarin’s comment on midrashic writing is helpful in this context: [the midrashic writer’s] move here is to place these ‘two utterances in juxtaposition’ so that they ‘enter into a particular kind of semantic relation’ – dialogue or intertextuality. Meaning is released in this interaction of texts which neither text had on its own, in its own context. … That meaning is already there in verses or rather between them, that is in the potential

74 Arduous Tasks dialogue between them. It is neither imposed on the verses ‘from outside’ nor does it lie behind them as ‘intention’ but is revealed/created in their coming together – in the bringing together performed by the midrashist. (548)

Reading the Coleridge citation in tandem with the poem’s other poetic reference to Dante’s Inferno allows us to see this ‘potential dialogue’ between the two texts, and ultimately gives us licence to interpret their uncanny commonalities – the border zone between life and death; systems of justice and priority that dictate survival; the mutually identity-shaping roles of the ‘sommersi’ and the ‘salvati’ – as the real motivating force behind their juxtaposed citations. The emphatic final-line position of Levi’s paraphrase of Dante, in light of its juxtaposition with the Coleridge quotation and translation, warrants a more detailed exploration of its implications for Levi’s survivor status than it has been accorded until now. Furthermore, because of its privileged first-line position and its emblematic relationship with the theories of translation that have been the focus of our study, the citation and translation of Coleridge demand that we pay greater attention to the affinities between Levi-as-survivor and the Ancient Mariner that he so often cites. Why does Levi return to this image so often, and what it is about the Ancient Mariner that he finds so resonant with his own situation? A deeper examination of the ‘Rime’ will indeed reveal both Coleridge and his protagonist to be templates for the Holocaust survivor, insofar as their traumatic compulsion to rewrite and transmit their ‘tale’ mirrors that of the survivor, who must obsessively and symbolically return to the scene of the ‘crime.’ Furthermore, we shall see that Levi’s foregrounding of citation, shared by Coleridge, constitutes yet another formal articulation of his central theme of testimony, wherein the witness demands that his message be repeated (cited, recoded, translated) by each interlocutor who hears it. A Template for the Surviving Witness Levi’s almost obsessive attraction to ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and its protagonist has been largely ignored by his critical readers. Only the writer Gina Lagorio has attempted to go beyond Levi’s explicit statements to seek more global affinities between Levi’s situation and that of the Ancient Mariner. Non si spiegherebbe altrimenti la suggestione che il poemetto di Coleridge esercitò con tanta insistenza su di lui, tanto da tornarci in momenti

Source Texts and Subtexts 75 diversi: c’è infatti nel racconto del vecchio marinaio il fascino che deriva dall’incontro del reale e del soprannaturale, la storia raccontata colorandosi via via della carica realistica di una vicenda vissuta e insieme addensandosi di senso dell’eterno. (64; emphasis mine) There is no other explanation for the insistent attraction that Coleridge’s little poem held, such that it sprang up over and over: there is, in fact, in the tale of the Ancient Mariner, the fascination that results from the encounter between the real and the supernatural, his narrated story assuming bit by bit the realistic charge of a lived event and at the same time becoming filled with the sense of eternity.

This meeting of the real and the unreal is certainly one of the ‘Rime’s’ most conspicuous characteristics, and its confrontation of logic (the wedding, the Wedding Guest, the land) with the imagination (the voyage, the sea, the Mariner himself) as strategies for understanding the world and its moral systems (Boulger 12) raise questions of competing ‘realities’ that are not unlike Levi’s own. Most notable in this regard are Levi’s poem ‘Alzarsi’ and the last paragraph of La tregua, both of which address the survivor’s fear that perhaps the reality of Auschwitz was more authentic than the fragile and recently reconstructed reality of home. It is fitting that Levi chooses this interplay between dreaming and waking to articulate the same notion of divergent realities that motivates the Coleridge poem. The Ancient Mariner’s two realities meet periodically during the course of the poem, competing for primacy in the protagonist’s consciousness (in the Wedding Guest’s surprise at the surreal events surrounding the shipwreck; in the disjunction between the Mariner’s ‘crime’ and his punishment). In much the same way, Levi’s clashing realities become juxtaposed in his own narrative, often through the mechanism of dream narrations such as those explored in chapter 1. These paradoxical dreams of reality simultaneously prompt and portray repetitively traumatic confrontations between the comforting reality of survival and the horrifying intrusion of a past ‘reality’ that, for all its otherworldliness, is insistently present in the survivor’s consciousness. For the Holocaust survivor, the uncertain and sporadic return of painful memories is accompanied by the burning need to tell, a painful and unending narrative penance for an unknown crime. As we have already seen in chapter 1, the narrative response to trauma is just as painful as its impetus, a constant reliving of the traumatic event, an eternal past-as-present. The Ancient Mariner’s punishment follows a similar pattern. His process of exculpation, begun when the albatross is hung around his

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neck, does not end there. Rather, as we see from the poem’s ending, containing the section so often quoted by Levi – Since then, at an uncertain hour, That agony returns: And till my ghastly tale is told This heart within me burns.

(ll 582–5)

– it must continue and repeat itself, in narrative form, whenever the Mariner finds an interlocutor for whom he can narrate and perform his experience.24 The ‘traumatic repetition’ of the Mariner’s tale, as Susan Eilenberg (300) calls it, is just the tip of the iceberg, really, in a portrayal of the narrative or transmissive act that is overdetermined and multilayered. Jerome McGann echoes this analysis in his foundational article, ‘The Meaning of the Ancient Mariner,’ underscoring the poem’s preoccupation with serial transmission and interpretation: Coleridge means us to understand that the ballad narrative dates from the sixteenth century, that the gloss is a late seventeenth-century addition, and, of course, that Coleridge, at the turn of the nineteenth century, has provided yet another (and controlling) perspective on the poetic material. (50)

Much in the same way, Levi’s ‘Il superstite’ deploys narrative layering and distancing strategies that put the repetitive trauma of transmission into strong relief. Specifically, Levi’s skilful citation and immediate mistranslation (‘E se non trova chi lo ascolti / Gli brucia in petto il cuore’ [ll 4–5]) of the Coleridge text subtly introduce a splitting of the narrative voice that is then further developed through the poem’s use of quotation, both overt (quotation marks to set off the survivor’s command to his ‘drowned’ comrades) and occulted (the point of view of the ‘drowned’ in their implicit accusations of the ‘saved’; the uncited and unmarked paraphrase of Dante that constitutes the poem’s last verse). The result of this demarcation of the various levels of transmission is, paradoxically, the creation of a poetic space for the pain of this particular zona grigia, the zone of survivor guilt and shame. ‘Il superstite’ The first line of the oft-cited Coleridge passage (l 582) is reproduced tale quale, as the first verse of Levi’s poem: ‘Since then, at an uncertain hour’; its

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typography, in italics, clearly marks it as a direct citation of the Coleridge source text. The second line is Levi’s almost literal translation of the firstline citation, in regular type: ‘Dopo di allora, ad ora incerta.’ This is followed in the third line by a close translation of Coleridge’s next line (l 583), ‘That agony returns’ (‘Quella pena ritorna’), and then a significantly altered rendering of the next two lines, to which we will soon return.25 Despite critical unanimity regarding the role of the Fenoglio translation in familiarizing Levi with the poem, Levi’s translation of the lines from the ‘Rime’ is clearly original.26 Fenoglio’s translation of lines 582–5 reads, ‘Da quel momento, a un’ora imprecisa, / Quell’agonia mi torna; / E fino a che non ho detta la mia storia / Di morti, dentro mi brucia il cuore.’ Levi’s version, instead, reads, ‘Dopo di allora, ad ora incerta, / Quella pena ritorna, / E se non trova chi lo ascolti / Gli brucia in petto il cuore.’ Of particular note in a casual comparison between the source text and Fenoglio’s and Levi’s respective translations of it is the fact that Fenoglio’s addition of ‘Di morti’ in line 585 – made, one assumes, to approximate Coleridge’s original metre – does not materialize in Levi’s translation, strongly suggesting that Levi was, in fact, translating from Coleridge directly and not from Fenoglio’s 1964 rendition of the poem. Levi’s omission of Fenoglio’s unfaithful reference to death not only provides textual proof of his direct relationship to the Coleridge source text but also helps to interrogate ostensibly clear-cut distinctions between life and death, ‘sommersi’ and ‘salvati.’ Starting with line 6, Levi’s ‘Il superstite’ makes a transition from the Coleridge source text and his interpretation of it to a more properly ‘original’ segment (ll 6–13) describing the ‘sommersi’ that the poem’s survivor persona will soon address.27 By then admonishing the ‘gente sommersa’ in lines 14–20, Levi ostensibly places himself in the diametrically opposed category of the ‘salvati,’ who must defensively account for their survival both to the ‘sommersi’ – the audience to which the quoted segment is addressed – and to the poem’s broader audience of outsiders, who, privy to both sides of the dialogue, are placed in the position of judge. As such, he sets up a seemingly neat distinction between survivors and their dead companions, complete with a dialogue within a monologue that presents both points of view: ‘Indietro, via di qui, gente sommersa, Andate. Non ho soppiantato nessuno, Non ho usurpato il pane di nessuno,

78 Arduous Tasks Nessuno è morto in vece mia. Nessuno. Ritornate alla vostra nebbia. Non è mia colpa se vivo e respiro E mangio e bevo e dormo e vesto panni.’

(ll 14–20)

‘Stand back, leave me alone, submerged people, / Go away. I haven’t dispossessed anyone, / Haven’t usurped anyone’s bread. / No one died in my place. No one. / Go back into your mist. / It’s not my fault if I live and breathe, / Eat, drink, sleep and put on clothes.’ (Feldman and Swann 64)

This segment, enclosed entirely in quotation marks, is characterized by a repetition of negative clauses: ‘Non ho soppiantato nessuno’; ‘Non ho usurpato il pane di nessuno’; ‘Nessuno è morto … Nessuno’; ‘Non è mia colpa …’ Not only is this negational structure an example of Freud’s affirming negations,28 but its repetitive cadence constitutes, in microcosmic form, the sort of traumatic repetition that Levi’s use of Coleridge’s ‘Rime’ and his testimonial work represent on more global levels.29 It is precisely this combination of repetition and negation that aids Levi in portraying the dialogue within a monologue between the two parts of a divided and conflicted survivor self. The affirming negations, in this context, have the striking effect of validating the accusations of the ‘sommersi,’ even while presenting the opposing – and seemingly dominant – point of view of the ‘salvati.’ Furthermore, the rhetorical strategy of redundancy, in line with the theme of trauma that has been a strong undercurrent of our entire study, suggests that this implicit ‘dialogue’ is a repeating one that the surviving subject must enact over and over again.30 But Levi makes two interesting changes to Coleridge’s original in his own loose translation (in ll 4–5) that displace him with regard to this neatly divided dichotomy of the ‘drowned’ and the ‘saved’ and create, in effect, the zone of flux and uncertainty that lies between them. This transitional segment, which bridges the two introductory lines of faithful translation and the original lines beginning at line 6, represents a space of many ambiguities: between faithful and unfaithful translation, between the giving and the receiving of testimony, between survival and death. First, the focus on the first-person narrator’s tale in Coleridge’s line 584 (‘And till my ghastly tale is told’) has been shifted to one shared between the now third-person narrator and his listener in Levi’s rewriting: ‘E se non trova chi lo ascolti’ (And if he doesn’t find someone who might listen to him). By emphasizing the necessity of

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finding an interlocutor, a witness to the survivor’s testimony, Levi establishes an interactive model of narrative responsibility, in which the living must find willing interlocutors to hear their tale on behalf of those who did not survive. As Levi will later explain in the ‘La vergogna’ (‘Shame’) chapter of I sommersi e i salvati, ‘[n]oi toccati dalla sorte abbiamo cercato, con maggiore o minore sapienza, di raccontare non solo il nostro destino, ma anche quello degli altri, dei sommersi, appunto … Parliamo noi in loro vece, per delega’ (SS II.1056) ([t]hose of us touched by fate have sought, more or less wisely, to tell not only our own story, but that of the others, the drowned …We speak in their stead, by proxy). Implicit in this model is the fact that the weight of responsibility must be distributed among speakers and listeners alike at many different levels, as the ‘salvati’ must become witnesses to the atrocities committed against the ‘sommersi’ and the survivor’s listener-reader must, in turn, bear witness to that which is recounted to him by the survivor. It is not enough merely to tell; the reader-listener after the fact must also be a willing interlocutor and witness, mirroring and repeating the narrative testimonial act of the survivor to create an infinite chain of witnessing and telling, listening and witnessing.31 For both the Holocaust survivor and the protagonist of the ‘Rime,’ each link in the transmission of the tale is simultaneously narrator and narratee, yet another example of the manner in which the representation en abyme of the transmissive act shines a particularly bright metanarrative light on the processes of witnessing. Referring to the Coleridge poem, Eilenberg identifies this phenomenon as a thematic ‘doubling’ of the protagonist in that ‘each person who hears the story becomes, like the Mariner, the teller of that story’ (cited in Murfin 277). For Eilenberg, these textual doubles include the sixteenth-century ‘mistral who narrates the poem that the antiquarian would gloss’ (291), as well as the Hermit and Wedding Guest who are the Mariner’s most immediate (intradiegetic and diegetic) interlocutors. Upon close inspection, it becomes clear that Levi’s own poem shares Coleridge’s predilection for textual doubles, though not as explicit as those present in the ‘Rime.’ Ultimately, the persona of the poet proves to be only the outermost layer in the transmission of this poem, a poet who quotes Coleridge’s original English text, who knows but ignores a good-faith Italian translation of Coleridge (Beppe Fenoglio’s), who puts forward his own mistranslation of Coleridge, but also a survivor who, in his vehement denial of any wrongdoing against the ‘gente sommersa,’ indirectly cites the charges of his accusers. Even the final line of the poem

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constitutes another layer of this game of doubling through citation, as the survivor translates Dante (‘e mangia e bee e dorme e veste panni’ [Inferno 33.141] [and eats and drinks and sleeps and puts on clothes]), into twentieth-century Italian, once again making changes of person and perspective (‘E mangio e bevo e dormo e vesto panni’ [‘Il superstite’ 20] [(I) eat and drink and sleep and put on clothes]) to invoke the double of the traitor Branca Doria. But in keeping with poetry’s role as the space in which this author works through his more conflicted responses to his own survivorhood, Levi’s unfaithful translation of the fourth line also subtly undermines this very narrative model whereby interlocutors, and therefore witnesses, are created within the textual space of testimony. While Coleridge’s main verb is decidedly indicative and future-oriented (‘And till my ghastly tale is told’), Levi’s version is constructed on the first part of a hypothetical phrase, raising the disturbing spectre of an audience in the subjunctive – possible, but far from certain: ‘E se non trova chi lo ascolti.’ Levi’s mistranslation of Coleridge, then, prompts us to question his faith in the very narrative-testimonial model that he has constructed. The second change in Levi’s reworking of the original poem involves a shift from the first person (‘And till my ghastly tale is told / This heart within me burns’) to the third: ‘E se non trova chi lo ascolti / Gli brucia in petto il cuore’ (ll 4–5) (And if he doesn’t find someone who might listen to him / His heart burns in his chest [emphasis mine]). By displacing the subject position away from the lyric first person, Levi problematizes his own status as survivor, and thus, in effect, his own position in this interactive model of witnessing. In addition to creating the splitting and doubling effects of this move that we have already outlined, Levi’s decision to speak of the survivor in third-person terms would seem to place him at least one remove from the survivor’s ostensibly ‘authoritative’ position, which Levi in fact begins to question in his later years. In the essay ‘La vergogna’ (‘Shame’), Levi discusses at length the feelings of guilt that he and his fellow survivors experienced after their liberation from the camps. One of its main themes is Levi’s assertion that the ‘salvati’ who survived to tell about the horror of the Holocaust are the minority, and that it is the majority, those who ‘hanno toccato il fondo’ (touched bottom), who constitute the norm of the prisoner’s reality. As such, the survivors are not the true witnesses to the horrors of the extermination; rather, the ‘sommersi’ are the only ones who would have been able to truly testify to

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humankind’s extreme capacity for evil: ‘sono loro, i “mussulmani,” i sommersi, i testimoni integrali, coloro la cui deposizione avrebbe avuto significato generale’ (SS II.1056) (it is they, the ‘mussulmen,’ the submerged, the complete witnesses, those whose testimony would have had general meaning).32 Instead, survivors like Levi must take on their role of witness even though that role’s force – even its truth – is diminished by their very survival. [Quello dei sopravvisuti] è stato un discorso ‘per conto di terzi,’ il racconto di cose viste da vicino, non sperimentate in proprio. La demolizione condotta a termine, l’opera compiuta, non l’ha raccontata nessuno, come nessuno è mai tornato a raccontare la sua morte. (SS II.1056)33 [That of the survivors] was a discourse ‘on behalf of third parties,’ the story of things seen at close range, not personally experienced. The completion of the destruction, the finished job, has not been told by anyone, just as no one has ever returned to tell of his own death.34

This weakened view of the authority of survivorhood is only confirmed later on in the poem when Levi overtly quotes the survivor’s defensive rebuke of the submerged. By taking the survivor’s words out of the poet’s mouth and citing them as the words of an ambiguous, unnamed survivor-speaker, Levi further develops the narrative duality that is set up by his mistranslation of Coleridge’s first-person stance into a third-person narrative position. But this technique is representative of far more than the Dantesque poet-pilgrim relationship between Levi’s writerly and survivor identities that we have already discussed. Rather, the poet’s explicit quotation of the survivor’s defensive words as if he did not own them amounts to a decision to position himself definitively outside the neat drowned-versus-saved dichotomy that he himself has created. This rhetorical technique constructs a poet-persona who is neither ‘sommerso’ nor ‘salvato’; not prey to the true depths of the Nazi atrocities, and yet not willing, in this moment of the poem, to accept the survivor’s words, his responsibility, or his guilt. In effect, Levi establishes himself as a border figure who stands astride these two opposing zones of the moral system of Auschwitz – drowned and saved – but recognizes that it is his very identification with both survivorhood and death that warrants his occupancy of an entirely different intermediary zone.

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Death-in-Life and the Trauma of Survival As we have seen, Levi’s poem’s focus on quotation and transmission mirrors that present in Coleridge’s ‘Rime.’ Both are indicative of a programmatic preoccupation with the problematics of transmission; and the techniques of quoting, distancing, and narrative framing en abyme only serve to accent further both Coleridge’s and Levi’s interest in using their respective poems to explore the zone of interactivity in the transmissive act. Furthermore, Levi’s particular use of translation in addressing these thematic and moral concerns is in line with what we have already identified as a global metaphor for Levi’s role as Holocaust witness, and as such provides another interpretive angle on Levi’s affinity for this particular source text. Levi was the first to recognize that his traumatic narration of the Holocaust tale was paralleled by the Ancient Mariner’s ‘burning need to tell.’ But Levi’s appropriation of the poem for his own poetic ends constitutes yet another layer of ‘cultural transmission and interpretation,’ extending and yet containing those layers already present in Coleridge’s final 1817 version. Coleridge’s obsession with narrative repetition is not represented only in the complex diegetic and metadiegetic system of framing and glossing that characterizes the text. Susan Eilenberg, in her essay ‘Voice and Ventriloquy in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,”’ argues that the poet proved to be just as ‘traumatized’ in his repetition of his tale – the ‘Rime’ itself – as was his protagonist: As the Mariner is subject to a ‘strange power of speech’ that forces him to repeat his tale endlessly, so the poet himself lay under a similar though more limited compulsion to repeat himself, revising the poem in 1800 and again in 1817, when he doubled it with a prose gloss in the style of a learned seventeenth-century antiquarian. (291)

This observation reveals both Coleridge and his famous protagonist to be apt models for Levi’s ‘burning need to tell’ and his preoccupation with issues of transmission. The parallel between Levi and Coleridge works on both levels of Levi’s poet-prisoner narration, the extradiegetic and the diegetic alike. Just as Levi the survivor is compelled to translate his tale obsessively in the interest of creating a new community of witness-reader-listeners, so does Levi the writer traumatically cite – in poetic, epigraphic, narrative, and dialogic forms – a traumatically repetitive and repeating text.

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The affinities between Levi’s identity as survivor and the Ancient Mariner’s are no less striking than those between Levi and Coleridge as traumatically transmissive writers. Indeed, if we consider the characterizations of survival syndrome put forward by Robert Jay Lifton, the protagonist of the ‘Rime’ emerges as an uncanny prototype for survivorhood of all sorts but, most specifically, of the overwhelming human catastrophe of the Nazi Holocaust. It is no coincidence that the title of Lifton’s first major work on the topic of survival is entitled Death in Life, recalling the intermediary ‘nightmarish’ character who wins the Mariner’s soul in the skeleton ship game of dice, Life-in-Death. As her booty, the Mariner, too, comes to epitomize life in death: Are those her ribs through which the Sun Did peer, as through a grate? And is that Woman all her crew? Is that a DEATH? and are there two? Is DEATH that woman’s mate?

And its ribs are seen as bars on the face of the setting Sun. The spectre-woman and her death-mate, and no other on board the skeleton-ship.

Her lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was white as leprosy, The Night-Mair LIFE-IN-DEATH was she, Who thicks man’s blood with cold

Like vessel, like crew!

The naked hulk alongside came, And the twain were casting dice; ‘The game is done, I’ve, I’ve won’

DEATH, and LIFE-IN-DEATH have diced for the ship’s crew, and she (the latter) winneth the ancient Mariner.

Quoth she, and whistles thrice. (ll 185–98; Gloss included)

The Mariner’s curse, or penance, as it is variously called, is that he must live on while his comrades die one by one. Even in death, however, the dead mariners participate in his condemnation to a life in death: their accusatory stares, together with the Mariner’s explicit characterization of his own death as a desirable event (‘Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse, / And yet I could not die’ [l 266; emphasis mine]) reveal that his condemnation to live on in the limbo state between life and death, traumatically compelled to tell his tale over

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and over again, is a fate even worse than death itself. The sense of condemnation experienced by the Ancient Mariner resonates with the persona of the Holocaust survivor. As Terrence des Pres has noted, we as a society tend to perceive the survivor as ‘damned’ (172), a term that resonates with Levi’s apt problematization of his own use of the ‘sommersi’ and ‘salvati’ terms but that also connotes the punishment to which a soul is doomed in a temporally ambiguous way. As the final line of ‘Il superstite’ shows, damnation does not preclude a soul’s walking the earth, and indeed marks the assigning of a penance more than the beginning of the penance itself. As such, the term leaves ample room for an intermediary or limbo space where a soul – or in this case a survivor – is caught between life and death. The life-death ambiguity of the survivor figure is mutually reinforced by the Coleridge subtext and Levi’s poetic text. In the former, the Ancient Mariner and his various interlocutors comment on or enquire about his status as a living being no fewer than four times35 in the course of the poem. The first to question the Ancient Mariner’s existential status is the Wedding Guest, but soon after it is the Mariner himself who points to the uncertainty of his position, saying that he once believed himself to be ‘a blessed ghost’ (312). The Mariner repeats his comparison to a dead man when he is saved by the Pilot and the Hermit – who also believe him dead – after the sinking of his own ship. Their confusion – and the Mariner’s true state – is finally made explicit in lines 580–1 when the Hermit poses a question that mirrors the question asked by the Wedding Guest in the Fourth Part: ‘“Say quick,” quoth he, “I bid thee say – / What manner of man art thou?”’ The repeated interrogation of the Mariner’s true state confirms the ambiguous nature of his survivorhood and shows his ‘survival’ of the ill-fated voyage to be inextricably linked not simply to the penance of his own traumatic narrative but more specifically to a metanarrative that is constantly seeking to make clear distinctions between life and death, the living and the dead. This fundamental preoccupation of the ‘Rime’ surfaces in ‘Il superstite,’ not in Levi’s opening citation and translation of Coleridge, however, but in the concluding lines of Levi’s poem: ‘Non è mia colpa se vivo e respiro/ E mangio e bevo e dormo e vesto panni’ (It’s not my fault if I live and breathe, / Eat, drink, sleep and put on clothes). The result is a complex triangulation of subtexts and source texts that compels us to read Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner through the lens of Dante’s Inferno, and Levi’s survivor position through his mediation – the ‘recontexting’ – of both texts in his poem.

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The last line of ‘Il superstite’ is a recontexted citation of a line from Canto 33 of Dante’s Inferno: ‘“Io credo,” diss’io lui, “che tu m’inganni; / ché Branca Doria non morì unquanche, / e mangia e bee e dorme e veste panni”’ (33.139–41; emphasis mine).36 The figure in question is Branca Doria (or d’Oria) (1233–1325), a Genovese Ghibelline nobleman. The poet Dante has placed Doria in the division of Cocytus, the realm of the treacherous, specifically reserved for murderers of guests and friends; his sin is the murder of his father-in-law (Singleton 624). In the preceding passage, which narrates Dante’s infernal encounter with Fra’ Alberigo, the latter contends that souls guilty of this particular sin are brought down to hell while their bodies live on, inhabited by demons, on earth. He continues by saying that his own body could possibly still ‘live’ on earth, and furthermore tries to introduce a soul whom Dante knows to be ‘alive’ at the fictional time of his narrative, 1300. Dante the poet concludes that this earthly figure, Branca Doria, must have been inhabited by demons for at least thirty-five years before his physical death sent him to his rightful place in hell; fittingly, Doria never materializes textually in the passage and is present only in his conspicuous, and ambiguous, absence.37 It is at this point that the pilgrim Dante makes the statement cited by Levi in the last line of his poem, in what amounts to an Italian-toItalian translation of the original Dantean text: ‘e mangia e bee e dorme e veste panni’ (Inferno 33.141) is rendered as ‘E mangio e bevo e dormo e vesto panni’ (‘Il superstite’ l 20; emphasis mine). Not surprisingly, this translation changes its source text in ways that are strikingly similar to the changes that we have already noted in the Coleridge citation. While the source text consists of the final phrase of a declarative sentence expressing Dante’s certainty of the well-being of the character in question, its translation is the second part of a hypothetical phrase: ‘Non è mia colpa se vivo e respire / E mangio e bevo e dormo e vesto panni’ (emphasis mine). Levi’s version thus throws a shadow of doubt on the survivor’s status as survivor, even while quoting Dante’s forceful declaration of Branca Doria’s life on earth. He thus makes an even stronger statement of life/death ambiguity than Dante’s own text, and explicitly introduces the element of guilt (‘Non è mia colpa …’) as the fulcrum on which the list of ‘living’ activities turns. The second change represents a direct inversion of Levi’s translation of the ‘Rime’ lines: while he rejects the first-person narrative position in that text, he assumes it in his appropriation of the Dantean text, changing the third-person verbs attributable to Branca Doria to first-person

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verbs that describe his own situation: ‘Osserviamo, tra l’altro, che la voce che dice “io” ne Il superstite riferisce a sé (v 20 “E mangio e bevo, ecc.”) le parole di Inf. XXXIII, 141, con cui Dante allude a Branca D’Oria, traditore degli ospiti’ (Rosato, ‘Poesia’ 425) (We can observe, among other things, that the voice that says ‘I’ in ‘The Survivor’ refers to himself the words from Inf. XXXIII.141 with which Dante refers to Branca D’Oria, traitor to guests). The survivor’s appropriation of these words results in a selfdescription that not only places guilt squarely on his own shoulders but also implies that his sin of omission is worthy of one of the lowest regions of Dante’s hell. Levi thus fashions the survivor in the role of the treacherous host, and the ‘submerged’ in the role of his murdered fatherin-law; given this analogy, what began as the survivor’s seemingly vague sense of guilt in having ‘soppiantato’ his campmate is recast in ominously homicidal terms, and the survivor’s agency in Lifton’s model of an implicitly zero-sum social construct acquires decidedly more definite – and active – contours. It is easy to see how the textual and existential uncertainty of a character like Branca Doria might become a space for the exploration of those issues most central to survivor guilt and shame: in particular, the ways in which the living shape the memory of the dead, and in which the dead shape the identity of the living. Robert Lifton has suggested that one of the main characteristics of the survivor psyche is the tendency to associate his survivor identity with death and the symbolic manifestations of his dead comrades and family members; in short, the survivor’s identity is often so linked to marks of death as to constitute an identification with the dead. In this regard, Lifton makes explicit reference to the ‘stigmata’ (History 169) that become external manifestations of this link, namely the scars left by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that would include, by extension, the Holocaust survivor’s tattooed number. The importance of the number as both symbol and vehicle of an identification with the dead lies in its relationship to the issue of priority guilt, which Lifton acknowledges to be especially pronounced in the Holocaust survivor because of the Nazi system’s particular use of lists in its exhaustive pursuit of society’s most undesirable elements (History 169). In support of Lifton’s analysis, we can add the Nazis’ predilection for retaliatory tactics, such as those employed in the infamous incident at the Ardeatine Caves in March of 1944.38 We should also briefly elaborate on Lifton’s comment on the particular role of the Nazi ‘list’ in the survivor’s priority guilt. The list is a theoretical entity made into a very real instrument of death

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by the Nazi system, beginning with the ghettos where Judenräte39 were forced to create and hand over their own community lists, and ending with the omnipresent and meticulously kept labour, concentration, and extermination camp lists. Each prisoner’s number is a unique and sequential component in the aggregate list of all numbers, a list in which each term’s value is determined by its relationship to a numerical sequence, and thus to each component of that sequence. As such, each number refers simultaneously to the list as a whole and to its missing terms – terms in a sequence that is unmistakably human, despite its numerical cloak. In this sense, the tattooed number acquires yet another level of meaning for the Holocaust survivor who must bear its mark. It is not only a sign of an incredible and (almost) unspeakable experience. It also represents the presence-in-absence of every missing member of the list’s sequence and, as such, an indelible reminder of every survivor’s eternal double, the ‘drowned.’ The survivor’s relationship in memory to his dead comrades is in this way constitutive of his identity as survivor. By a similar dynamic, the ‘gaze’ of the ‘sommersi’ emerges as an important element in this identity. Both Lifton and Terry attribute many of the feelings associated with survivor syndrome to the lack of appropriate burial and mourning rituals at the time of the traumatic event. The result is an overwhelming sense of guilt and a need to appease the dead’s anger: ‘[i]n virtually every culture the failure of the living to enact the rituals necessary to appease the dead is thought to so anger the latter (or their sacred representatives) as to bring about dangerous retribution for this failure to atone for the guilt of survival priority’ (Lifton, History 176). What Lifton describes here is in effect a two-tiered process of interpreting the imagined accusatory gaze of the ‘sommersi’: first, a fear of the dead because the survivor has been remiss in his duty to engage in appropriate ritual burial symbolism, and then guilt over inadequate atonement for the ‘sin’ of having survived in the first place. The result is an attempt to respond to the accusatory gaze of the ‘sommersi’ and compensate for such perceived sins of omission by carrying over the rites of burial. Levi – or, more precisely, the survivor persona created in part through his poem ‘Il superstite’ – is certainly not exempt from this ‘tendency to see ourselves through the eyes of others, in some cases, even the accusing gaze of the dead’ (Lifton, Death in Life 496): ‘“Indietro, via di qui, gente sommersa, / Andate”’ (‘Il superstite’ ll 14–15). This order to ‘“Stand back, leave me alone, submerged people, / Go away”’40 underscores both the souls’ proximity

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to the survivor’s position and the survivor’s obvious discomfort with the vigilant attention and surveillance that this almost palpable closeness implies. Italo Rosato astutely points out the striking connection between the feelings of guilt underlying many of the lines of ‘Il superstite’ and Levi’s account of his missed opportunity to share a few drops of water with his conational, Daniele (‘Poesia’ 423–5). We can see further support of this connection in the proximity of this very account in Levi’s final and most philosophically complex treatment of the Holocaust, I sommersi e i salvati, to his chapter on shame, ‘La vergogna.’ But according to both Lifton’s portrait of the survivor psyche and Levi’s own testimony – most notably at the beginning of La tregua – survivor guilt and shame are not necessarily limited to a prisoner’s particular relationships with the ‘sommersi,’ or even with other survivors.41 Indeed, one of the first classes of survivor shame identified by Lifton in his analysis of the phenomenon is that caused by what the survivor has merely witnessed, active or passive participation in the crimes notwithstanding. This assertion is borne out in Levi’s own writings, such as this segment of La tregua, which Levi claims to have written in 1947, where he describes the reaction of the liberating Russian solders in the presence of Levi and his fellow prisoners: Non salutavano, non sorridevano; apparivano oppressi, oltre che da pietà, da un confuso ritegno, che sigillava le loro bocche, e avvinceva i loro occhi allo scenario funereo. Era la stessa vergogna a noi ben nota, quella che ci sommergeva dopo le selezioni, ed ogni volta che ci toccava assistere o sottostare a un oltraggio: la vergogna che i tedeschi non conobbero, quella che il giusto prova davanti alla colpa commessa da altrui, e gli rimorde che esista, che sia stata introdotta irrevocabilmente nel mondo delle cose che esistono … (TR I.206; emphasis mine) They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funereal scene. It was that shame we knew so well, the same that drowned us after the selections, and every time we had to watch, or submit to, some outrage: the shame the Germans did not know, that the just man experiences at another man’s crime; the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist … (Woolf 12)

and later, in 1986, in I sommersi e i salvati:

Source Texts and Subtexts 89 i giusti fra noi, non piú né meno numerosi che in qualsiasi altro gruppo umano, hanno provato rimorso, vergogna, dolore insomma, per la colpa che altri e non loro avevano commessa, ed in cui si sono sentiti coinvolti, perché sentivano che quanto era avvenuto intorno a loro, ed in loro presenza, e in loro, era irrevocabile. (SS II.1057–58; emphasis mine) the just among us, neither more nor less numerous than in any other human group, felt remorse, shame, and pain for the misdeeds that others and not they had committed, and in which they felt involved, because they sensed that what had happened around them and in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable. (Rosenthal 86)

We can see that, along a trajectory of more than forty years, Levi is consistent in describing a universal guilt felt on behalf of all humankind for the offence perpetuated at Auschwitz. Lifton in his essay ‘Jews as Survivors’ echoes Levi’s analysis of this vicarious class of survivor guilt when he speaks of ‘a lingering sense that the principles governing life and death have been violated once and for all and that one has, even as a victim, participated in this violation’ (History 201). At least to some degree, the limbo position developed by Levi in his ‘Il superstite’ poem – aided in large part by the subtext of Coleridge’s own treatment of similar issues of universal guilt42 and ambiguous or intermediary moral spaces – is reflective of the Holocaust survivor’s incarnation of a transgressive existential confusion between life and death. As such, his survivor shame assumes a far more universal burden than the personal debt to specific ‘drowned’ prisoners that the poem’s dialogue-withina-monologue seems to imply. In this regard, as in many others that we have addressed, the ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ provides an illuminating subtext. Specifically, the problematic connection between guilt and redemption, between ‘crime’ and punishment in the ‘Rime,’ resonates particularly strongly with the issues that Levi confronts in his own work. Despite a strong early critical tradition of Christian interpretations of the ‘Rime’ as a redemption tale,43 William Empson reads the poem as a deliberate ‘parody of the traditional struggle for atonement’ (316), wherein the conventional model of crimeatonement-redemption is not only problematized but seriously undermined. According to Modiano, Empson argues that ‘the Mariner is fundamentally innocent, even though he feels guilty … “he has been framed by the supreme powers”’ (Modiano 193). Coleridge’s is thus a hollowedout redemptive tale at best, one in which the outward appearances of a

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traditional moral construct are intact – the Mariner commits a ‘crime,’ feels guilty, asks to be ‘shrieved’ (l 578) and thus forgiven, and pursues a strategy of narrative repentance to that very end – even though his crime is devoid of any relationship to moral or spiritual codes of conduct accessible to the poem’s readers, de facto judges of the Mariner’s moral status. At the root of the Ancient Mariner’s quest for redemption is his ‘neurotic guilt,’ which Empson defines as a state of ‘feeling guilty without being able to identify rationally any source of wrong doing [sic]’ (306) and which is repeatedly expressed in terms of a moral violation when the law against which the violation is incurred is unknown to both the reader and the Mariner himself and, indeed, ultimately does not exist. In a similar fashion, Levi’s references to his own feelings of guilt are couched in terms of crime, and, as we have already noted, the expressive mode of poetry is never too far removed when he addresses the unpredictable and sporadic (re)appearance of difficult Holocaust memories and the guilt that they prompt. In a 1986 interview with Giorgio Calcagno on the occasion of the publication of I sommersi e i salvati, Levi was asked to comment on the forty years that had passed since his liberation and the changes that they had brought about in him: ‘Sono stati quarant’anni di vita, di professione, di arrovellamento per capire, soprattutto.’ Prende la prima pagina del libro, dove ci sono quattro versi di Coleridge: ‘Da allora, a un’ora incerta / quell’agonia ritorna …’ [sic] Sottolinea le prime parole: ‘A un’ora incerta, ogni tanto … Non è che ci viva dentro, questo mondo. Altrimenti non avrei scritto La chiave a stella, non avrei messo su famiglia, non farei tante cose che mi piacciono. Ma è vero che, a un’ora incerta, queste memorie ritornano. Sono un recidivo.’ (146; emphasis mine) ‘It’s been forty years of life, of a profession, of striving to understand, above all.’ He takes the first page of the book, where there are four lines of Coleridge: ‘Since then, at an uncertain hour / that agony returns …’ He underlines the first words: ‘At an uncertain hour, now and then … It’s not that I live inside this world. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have written The Monkey’s Wrench, wouldn’t have raised a family, wouldn’t have done so many things that I like. But it is true that, at an uncertain hour, these memories return. I’m a repeat offender.’

Levi’s assessment of his status vis-à-vis these memories leads him to use the term ‘recidivo,’ which means ‘che, chi è ricaduto nella stessa

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colpa, nello stesso delitto,’44 or, in the translation of the Cambridge/ Signorelli dictionary, a ‘repeat offender.’ Reversing the passive and rather furtive portrayal of guilt and memory (‘Ad un’ora incerta, quell’agonia ritorna …’) implicit in the Coleridge passage that he has just quoted, Levi places the full onus of agency on his own survivor persona by implying that his ‘redemptive’ narration of his ‘tale’ – and, by association, the guilt, intermediary positionality, and death identification that we have linked to it – is an act committed by the survivor in almost compulsive fashion. But this, too, is a ‘neurotic guilt’; as Ernesto Neppi concisely states, the ‘autodifesa’ or ‘apologia’ that is constitutive of Levi’s entire oeuvre is really ‘un tentativo di scagionarsi da questo rimprovero [di essere sopravvissuto] (che del resto nessun altro oserebbe muovergli …)’ (485; emphasis mine) (an attempt to acquit himself of this charge [of having survived] [that, moreover, no one else would dare bring against him …]). Levi is hard-pressed to produce any concrete evidence to support his feelings of culpability – his only explicit examples are his turning his back on the requests of newly arrived prisoners (SS II.1051) in need of assistance, and the water episode with Daniele (SS II.1052–4) – and the exact source of his wrongdoing remains on the level of the self-accusation, the vague and intangible sense that he should have somehow done more.45 In the case of both Coleridge’s ‘Rime’ and Levi’s many references to his ‘burning need to tell,’ the promise of transcendent redemption is ultimately undermined by the absence of any real crime for which to atone. In light of such a confused moral system (the Mariner’s, the Lager’s), in which punishments (traumatic repetition, the compulsion to narrate ‘ad ora incerta,’ an intermediary and ambiguous existential status) are wholly incommensurate with ‘crimes’ (killing an albatross, having lived through a traumatic experience, survival itself), we can read Coleridge’s and Levi’s poems as attempts to come to grips with the respective moral codes that have been imposed on them. As Frances Ferguson states in her discussion of the many revisions of the ‘Rime,’ it often seems that the poem’s major issue is ‘not the moral but the process of arriving at morals’ (123) – in effect, a process of reading and interpretation that is only foregrounded in Coleridge’s and Levi’s at times disorienting development of citation, paraphrase, and translation. This view of interpretation as translation brings us back full circle, paradoxically, to Jakobson’s vision of translation as a cognitively necessary process wherein experience is interpreted and restructured as a result of its codification. Furthermore, we see that this interpretive process is

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continuously formulated in terms of justice, in terms of this ‘process of arriving at morals.’ The interpretation of the texts of Auschwitz – linguistic, experiential, and otherwise – represents, in effect, a juridical process that involves not only Levi’s obeying of the ‘law’ for translation issued by the source text but also both Levi’s and our own attempts to come to a conclusion, to pass judgment – much like the spectators who saw the theatrical adaptation of Se questo è un uomo in 1966 – on issues of morality and culpability. Ultimately, at least in the case of Auschwitz, it is clear that justice is rarely interpretable in blackand-white terms, and so if Levi’s own ‘exoneration’ is at stake here too, it must play itself out in the courtroom that is created in the space between testimony and its reception: [N]ello scrivere questo libro, ho assunto deliberatamente il linguaggio pacato e sobrio del testimone, non quello lamentevole della vittima né quello irato del vendicatore: pensavo che la mia parola sarebbe stata tanto piú credibile ed utile quanto piú apparisse obiettiva e quanto meno suonasse appassionata; solo cosí il testimone in giudizio adempie alla sua funzione, che è quella di preparare il terreno al giudice. I giudici siete voi. (Appendice, SQ I.175) [I]n writing this book, I deliberately adopted the calm and sober language of the witness, neither the plaintive language of the victim nor the irate language of the avenger: I thought that the more objective my words seemed and the less impassioned they sounded, the more credible and useful they would be. Only in this way does the witness fulfil his duty before the court, which is to lay the groundwork for the judge. The judges are you.

3 Transgression: Translation and Levi’s ‘Trapassar del segno’

Ulysses dramatically and powerfully represents the dignity of man, even in his defeat. (Amilcare Iannucci, ‘Ulysses’ folle volo’)

Introduction Ernst Curtius, in his European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, begins his discussion of metaphorics1 with those nautical metaphors in which ‘[t]he poet becomes the sailor, his mind or his work the boat’ (129) and urges that ‘[a] commentator on Dante ought to be aware of’ his significant use of nautical imagery. Of course, the importance of this figure has not been lost on Dante scholars, for whom the metaphor of sea travel in the Commedia2 is given double valence by the voyage motif inherent in the narrative’s ‘plot’ and the interplay between Dante’s two parallel privileged and transgressive voyages: the pilgrim’s through the afterlife and the poet’s through his own narrative.3 Only recently, however, have critics come to recognize the centrality of this metaphor for Levi studies. Sophie Nezri, in her ‘Primo Levi ou le naufrage de la déportation,’ shows the figure of sea travel, and more importantly shipwreck, to be a fundamental element of Levi’s testimonial strategies. The most conspicuous example of Levi’s use of the figure is the exquisite ‘Canto di Ulisse’ chapter of Se questo è un uomo, where the author’s use of the Dantean text not only adapts the topos of exile as shipwreck to the unexampled condition of Nazi deportation but also marks the subtle introduction of the theme of transgression into the Levian testimonial oeuvre. As Nezri states:

94 Arduous Tasks Le naufrage est alors une conséquence héröique de l’élan vital de l’homme et de sa recherche de la connaissance au risque d’en mourir. Mais face à cette interprétation que semble proposer Primo Levi et qui se veut optimiste, car elle célèbre la grandeur de l’homme à travers son propre naufrage, l’engloutissement de l’Ulysse dantesque nous transmet également un message profondément noir, tout en reprenant les mêmes symboles: dans Se questo è un uomo, Ulysse incarne aussi le déporté qui a pénétré dans un univers tabou, indicible, ‘in-humain’, car il est allé audelà des colonnes d’Hercule, c’est-à-dire dans un univers où les repères de la civilisation ont été dépassés, trangressés, violés, provoquant ainsi le naufrage de toutes les valeurs humaines. (102) Shipwreck is thus a heroic consequence of man’s vital force and of his search for knowledge, even on pain of death. But alongside this ostensibly optimistic interpretation that Levi seems to propose – optimistic in that it celebrates the grandeur of man through his own shipwreck – the engulfing of the Dantean Ulysses also transmits another, profoundly dark message, taking up the same symbols. In Se questo è un uomo, Ulysses in this way incarnates the deportee who has penetrated a taboo universe, unspeakable, ‘un-human,’ in that he has gone beyond the pillars of Hercules, that is to say in a universe where the limits of civilization have been surpassed, transgressed, violated, causing in this way the shipwreck of all human values.

Nezri’s view of the exact nature of transgression in Levi’s thought places the Nazi oppressors in the role of transgressor; for her, the Final Solution has created a new world that transgresses all norms of human behaviour, and Levi has merely happened upon it. As we shall see in this chapter, however, Levi himself tentatively sketches out a more strictly causative view of the relationship between his agency in the decision to ‘go beyond’ and his condition – a relationship that both participates in and symbolizes that of European Jewry in general. In this interpretation, it is Levi who has transgressed, resulting in his inhabiting of this other world. The transgressive element embodied by Ulysses in both Dante’s and Levi’s portrayals of him will prove to be a vital link between the Dantean text and Primo Levi’s testimonial mission. This link is anything but coincidental; indeed, Levi’s explicit appropriation of Dante’s transgressive character signals the transgression inherent in Levi’s own text. As such, it sheds much light on the logic behind Levi’s affinity for the

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Dantean text, not only as a signpost of Italian cultural integrity and thus the Italian community to whom Levi addresses his testimony, but also insofar as Dante’s vision of the Greek hero simultaneously represents his transgression against canonical or ‘sacred’ literary sources and enacts his own transgression against the rigid parameters of divine propriety. As Teodolinda Barolini has argued, transgression is an important ‘mode’ of Dante’s narrative, a constituent part of the function through which the poet’s and the pilgrim’s tasks become reversed in terms of difficulty and propriety: the pilgrim’s voyage becomes easier as the poet’s becomes more and more difficult, necessitating an ever-greater degree of poetic transgression against accepted limits of expression. Barolini aptly calls this mode of transgression ‘Ulyssean,’ finding in the Ulysses episode of Inferno 26 an emblem of Dante-poet’s struggle for signification as his poem progresses into decidedly uncharted territories. In other words, Ulysses is the lightning rod Dante places in his poem to attract and defuse his own consciousness of the presumption involved in anointing oneself God’s scribe … The Ulyssean component of the poem is thus related to the basic representational impresa of the Commedia, which involves transgressing the boundary between life and death: ‘ché non è impresa da pigliare a gabbo / discriver fondo a tutto l’universo’ [for it is not an enterprise to take in jest, to describe the bottom of all the universe (Inf. 32.7–8)]. (116– 17; emphasis mine)

Ulysses, as he is constructed by Dante throughout the three cantiche of the Commedia, functions as a double for our poet and as a focal point for his preoccupations with transgression, experiential and narrative alike. That Ulysses should occupy this emblematic position within the narrative structure of the Commedia comes as no surprise, in light of both Curtius’s discussion of nautical metaphors and Piero Boitani’s and William Stanford’s excellent studies of the Ulysses figure. As their observations make explicit, the theme of exploration in its many manifestations constitutes a commonplace in literature that is so malleable and vast as to withstand the modulations necessary to embrace the existential concerns of each new age.4 This is particularly true of the Ulysses figure and the specific subset of the voyage motif for which he has come to stand, which because of the ‘eccesso d’informazione’ present in the Homeric text – Tiresias’s ambiguous prophecy in Canto XI of the Odyssey – creates

96 Arduous Tasks un enorme vuoto di mistero che i lettori di epoche posteriori, siano essi poeti o interpreti, tentano di riempire per mezzo di nuove storie o di quello che in ambito ebraico-biblico si chiamerebbe midrash: una lettura interpretativo-narrativa senza fine. (Boitani 30; author’s emphasis) a chasm of mystery which readers of successive ages, whether poets or commentators, have tried to fill with new stories or what in a biblical Hebrew context would be called midrash: an unending interpretativecreative reading.5

Through the ages, Ulysses has thus acquired a multifaceted field of signification that extends above and beyond his ‘originary’ Homeric shell and yet inevitably refers back to it, creating a Ulyssean tradition that is at once heterogeneous and aggregate, infinitely appropriated and adaptable. Again, to cite Boitani’s foundational study, Odisseo, il Nessuno del canto IX, appare come un viandante ignoto e non riconosciuto … e allo stesso tempo come il rappresentante di un’intera civiltà … Vuotando, sia pure per un solo attimo, del suo nome e della sua ‘storia’ personale nel poema, ma mantenendo ed esaltando il suo ruolo di viaggiatore, e riempiendolo di un valore universale, Omero apre la strada alle future semiotizzazioni di Odisseo. Egli lo rende ‘segno’ capace di accogliere un ‘significato’ ogni volta che esso incontra un ‘significante’. Età successive … ‘riconosceranno’ se stesse in quel segno, attribuendogli il significato del proprio momento storico – del loro kairos – e del proprio sistema di valori. Odisseo diverrà così di volta in volta il rappresentate di ciascuna civiltà. (33) Odysseus, the Nobody of Canto IX, appears as an unknown and unrecognized wayfarer … and at the same time as the representative of a whole civilization … By depriving him, however momentarily, of his name and personal ‘history’ in the poem, while maintaining and emphasizing his rôle as traveller and universalizing its significance, Homer opens the way for future semiotizations of Odysseus. He makes him into a sign which is able to receive a signified whenever it meets a signifier. Future eras … ‘recognize’ themselves in that sign, attributing to it the meaning of their own moment in history – their own kairos – and their own system of values. Odysseus thus becomes the representative of the different civilizations. (Weston 21)

What Boitani’s quotation does not convey, but what his study implicitly does, is that these incarnations of the Ulysses figure are not, for

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the most part, directly derivative of Homer’s ‘original’ imagining of it. Rather, these innovative reimaginings, or translations, are most often filtered through layers of Ulysses’ ‘shadows’ – one or more versions of the Ulysses myth that have come before. While Stanford rightly claims that ‘next to Homer’s conception of Ulysses, Dante’s, despite its brevity, is the most influential in the whole evolution of the wandering hero’ (178), it is also true that Dante’s own translation of Homer’s hero has been, in turn, retranslated by countless writers whose artistic or philosophical exigencies can lead them far from the medieval transgressor of divine boundaries, though Dante’s version remains a constant point of reference, an inevitable ‘repeat dal segno’ for all versions of the Ulysses myth that might follow it. The aim of this chapter is to examine the figure of this most influential Ulysses – Dante’s – through the filter of Primo Levi’s translation of it to his campmate, Jean Samuel. We shall see that Levi’s preoccupation with his role as translator and associated matters of border crossing finds yet another means of expression in Ulysses. Here, transgression in the form of forbidden exploration of boundaries becomes associated with a whole constellation of issues resonant with Levi’s status as a Holocaust witness and survivor: the zone of ambiguity that is created when the binary of return versus death – the extreme poles of otherworldly exploration – is exploded; the nexus between transgression and creation created by the transgressor’s need to tell upon his return; the intermediaries or translators whose roles are foregrounded in these episodes of explicit geographical and metaphysical border crossing. Furthermore, we shall see that the Ancient Mariner, the focus of chapter 2, re-emerges in the light of the present chapter as yet another intermediary filter between Dante’s portrayal of Ulysses and Levi’s own. Indeed, the Mariner will prove to be yet another ‘shadow’ of the Ulysses myth whose emphasis on maritime exploration as a metaphor for transgressive acts against, and retribution by, divine agents is a refraction, to use André Lefevere’s term, of Homer’s prototypical navigator, and one that informs Levi’s appropriation of Ulysses in one of the central episodes of his first work of literary testimony. Dante’s Ulysses: ‘sempre acquistando dal lato mancino’ It is not insignificant that Piero Boitani’s study of Ulysses figures lays out its theoretical groundwork only to move immediately to the example of Dante’s portrayal of the epic figure: Dante’s contribution to

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the Ulysses myth is considered to be a keystone in its general literary development, not only a significant departure from its predecessors but a reference point, a textual fulcrum, for all successive portrayals. Paralleling the centrality of Dante in the Ulysses tradition is Ulysses’ importance within the context of Dante’s Commedia, representing the introduction of a complex organizing principle that remains significant from its introduction at the end of the Inferno throughout the entire work. Barolini has discussed Ulysses’ unique status as the only singleepisode sinner to be named in each cantica,6 not to mention those additional moments in the Commedia in which his ‘shadow’ is ‘evoked’: by surrogate figures like Phaeton and Icarus; through semantic tags such as ‘folle’; and in Ulyssean flight imagery (Barolini 115). Ulysses’ consistent presence in the Commedia has fuelled one of the most contentious debates in Dante criticism, that regarding the exact nature of his sin and Dante’s decision to place Ulysses in hell, a decision that fundamentally altered the canonical conception of the hero’s fate. Though this is not the place for an in-depth examination of these matters,7 they do bear quite significantly on our area of inquiry. Dante’s relationship to the Ulysses figure is central to our understanding of both Leviprisoner’s translation of the episode within the confines of the univers concentrationnaire and Levi-survivor’s textual appropriation of it in the context of his post-Auschwitz testimonial mission. As such, our study of Levi’s Ulysses must begin with Homer’s. As Stanford has shown, Homer’s portrayal of Ulysses was marked by rich character development, ‘endowing Odysseus with a share of the normal heroic qualities,’ and at the same time ‘distinguishing Odysseus by slight deviations from the norm in almost every heroic feature’ (66). These qualities, as absolute values, are for the most part those that remain constant through subsequent representations, from Dante to Tennyson, from Tasso to Saba: his oratorical talents, his intellectual curiosity, his knack for cunning strategizing in difficult situations.8 But Homer’s complex and ambiguous portrayal leaves ample room for distortions, disproportionate amplifications, and omissions; in brief, what we have in other contexts referred to as unfaithful or mis-translation. Stanford, in concluding his discussion of Homer’s Ulysses, echoes Boitani’s statement about the midrashic quality of this tradition: One other aspect of Odysseus’s Homeric character needs to be kept in mind at the last. In a way it is the most important of all for the development of the tradition. This is the fundamental ambiguity of his essential

Transgression 99 qualities. We have seen how prudence may decline towards timidity, tactfulness towards a blameworthy suppressio veri, serviceability towards servility, and so on … Homer was large-minded enough to comprehend a unity in apparent diversity, a structural consistency within an external changefulness, in the character of Ulysses. But few later authors were as comprehending. Instead, in the post-Homeric tradition, Odysseus’s complex personality becomes broken up into various simple types – the politique, the romantic amorist, the sophisticated villain, the sensualist, the philosophic traveller, and others. (79–80)

Dante’s own portrayal of Ulysses exploits this fragmentation of the figure into its constituent characteristics, accentuating certain (negatively marked) elements while flattening and even omitting others. At the same time, Dante’s Ulysses also retains much of the complexity of his Homeric source (itself filtered, as we shall see), though Dante transforms Homer’s ‘ambiguity’ into what may be better termed ‘tension’ in his own figure of the myth, plotting out Ulysses’ traits in such a way as to reflect his attitude of simultaneous attraction and repulsion towards him.9 Scholars10 have attempted to trace the specific literary sources and historical realities (such as the failed voyage of the Vivaldi brothers) that may have contributed to the ‘kindling’ of Dante’s imagination with regard to the Ulysses myth, and thus his unfaithful translation of Homer’s character into the Middle Ages. Among all of these factors, Virgil’s role in passing down specific images of the hero deserves particular attention as a source for Dante’s damned figure of Ulysses. Virgil’s choice of Aeneas over Ulysses as progenitor of the Latins – influenced, of course, by the latter’s status as the victor of the Trojan war – meant a de facto vilification of Ulysses (Stanford 128–31). In this way Virgil situates the Greek hero in a rivalry with his own hero, Aeneas; from Dante’s point of view, Virgil’s already important position as a literary model is bolstered by his hero Aeneas’s submissive and humble (and thus decidedly more assimilable to Christian values) stance with regard to the gods’ wishes for him, as well as by the ultimately transcendent aim of his journey, the founding of Rome: Because of Aeneas’ unselfish and perfect response to the will of the gods, to the call of history itself, Rome rose from the ashes of Troy and became caput mundi, the seat of both the empire and the papacy, the two institutions established directly by God in order to assure world order. (Iannucci 415)11

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Though Ulysses shares Aeneas’s identity as a wanderer and a muchenduring hero, his goals do not mesh with the transcendent obligation to country and destiny that mark Aeneas’s journey to the founding of Rome. As is also true of his quest for knowledge, Ulysses’ ‘purposefulness, endurance, and courage’ (Stanford 136) represent a heroic end unto itself, in stark contrast to Aeneas’s pious submissiveness to the will of an all-powerful divine authority. The impact of Virgil’s prejudices against Ulysses on Dante’s stance vis-à-vis the Greek figure leads us to surmise that perhaps the single most important organizing principle of the entire Commedia – that of Dante’s guides and his relation to them as both poet and protagonist – also informs Dante’s particular vision of the Ulysses myth. Virgil’s importance as Dante’s guide (textual model and source) through the literary voyage of the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso is clearly figured by his role as literal guide (escort) through the journey through hell and part of purgatory. But Virgil’s role as intermediary between Dante and his Greek interlocutors in Inferno 26 serves to further foreground Dante’s dependence on him as a source for this particular episode’s tone and ‘plot,’ and, for some Dante scholars, as a distancing mechanism to advance the intentional complication of his own relationship to the Ulysses figure.12 Whether or not we concur with Benvenuto da Imola’s statement that Dante could not have been unaware of the ‘real’ (read Homeric) ending to Ulysses’ story,13 we cannot ignore Virgil’s conspicuous presence in the scene of Dante’s encounter with Ulysses and Diomedes, and Dante’s explicit nod to Virgil’s particular role as linguistic intermediary in the latter’s proactive intervention between and among the other three characters. As has the entire episode, this intervention on Virgil’s part has been the object of much critical debate. Freccero (193–8) has theorized that Virgil’s ‘translation’ from Dante’s ‘language’ into Ulysses’ is more a function of the stylistic differences between the two men (Dante’s ‘stile umile’ as opposed to the epic style that is Ulysses’ native mode) than of their differing native tongues, extending the term ‘detto’ (Inferno 26.75) beyond mere linguistic terrain and into the realm of rhetorical style. Stanford, instead, considers Virgil’s representation of Ulysses to be characterized by a narrative strategy that uses direct discourse as a distancing technique, in effect allowing the translating author to cast Ulysses in a negative light – through the words of his characters – even while the figure is brought to the fore through his significant and empathetic textual presence (133). In Dante’s case, this technique of allowing Virgil to speak for his pilgrim in the episode not only provides a

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textual homage to Virgil’s importance as an intermediary between the ostensible source text (Homer’s Odyssey) and Dante’s translation of it (allowing Dante to deflect whatever negative views he may have of Ulysses onto the historical and literary character of Virgil), but also serves to foreground the role of the translator in more general terms. Virgil’s intermediary position in the Ulysses lineage thus participates in a complex series of ‘translators’ of the Ulysses figure, doubles who are played both against Ulysses as a figure of their own oratorical skills and against previous translators of the figure, who come to be associated metonymically with their particular conception of it. In this way, Virgil can be seen as a double for Dante’s translator persona, acting as a literal and figurative intermediary between the extreme terms of Dante’s various levels of translation: the linguistic movement from Homer’s Greek to fragmentary Latin interpretations of the episode to Dante’s Italian; the ‘recontexting’ of the classical story within more relevant Christian contexts; and the recoding that must occur to enact the shift from the circularity of the classical voyage to the ‘oltretomba’ perspective of death and salvation – or damnation. Dante’s parallel translations – his (linguistic) translation of Homer, and his figurative (conceptual) translation of his hero, Ulysses – effect a translatio of the Ulyssean tradition from antiquity to the Middle Ages, while Virgil’s doubling of Dante foregrounds the Latin intermediary sources to which Dante would attribute the episode’s unfaithful and transgressive nature. This notion of doubling has long been used by Dante critics as a means to better understand Dante’s complex relationship to his Ulysses figure. As Juri Lotman has famously stated, ‘Ulisse è l’originale doppio di Dante’ (96) (Ulysses is Dante’s original double). Barolini, citing Lotman, further distinguishes between Ulysses as the pilgrim’s double and as the poet’s (116). But given that our interest in the double as topos stems in part from its potential as an optic through which to view the translation elements of Dante’s Ulysses episode, we can take Lotman’s and Barolini’s comments one step farther. In this context, even the poet-protagonist pair can be seen as an example of the sort of doubling that figures the translatio of information from the time of experience to that of writing. As such, Dante’s doubling as both poet and pilgrim vis-à-vis the Ulysses character is essential for the purposes of our study of Levi, furthering our understanding of the episode on at least two levels. Not only does it serve as a figure of the translating subject; it also creates a critical mechanism by which one term of the double can be looked at in terms of the other. To quote Maria Corti,

102 Arduous Tasks we recall Lotman … where he finds a more profound meaning underlying Dante’s views, and writes; ‘Ulysses is Dante’s double’; like Dante, he is the hero of a voyage of discovery into an inaccessible space (96–7). If however, as psychoanalysts would say, the significance of every double lies in its difference, here we have Dante opposing himself to those intellectuals, his former friends, for whom he rejects the ideal of independent knowledge by choosing the path marked out in the Commedia by Beatrice and St Bernard. (47; emphasis mine)

As Corti implies, the ambiguity of the double – allowing for either affinity or distance – permits us to view its terms in the context not only of their similarities but also of their differences. Indeed, critical readings of Dante’s Ulysses have been conditioned by the episode’s manifest tension between attraction and condemnation, paralleling that between the pilgrim’s and the poet’s respective stances, exigencies, and trajectories. Le juge Dante – influencé dans ce cas par les catégories virgiliennes – est obligé de prendre act d’un fait – à ses yeux indubitable – et de punir selon les normes de son système pénal et, dans une certaine mesure, de son époque. Une telle condamnation ne l’empêche pas d’exprimer sa fascination et son admiration personnelle, comme nous pouvons le remarquer tout au long du chant 26 de ‘l’Enfer.’ (Klesczewski 220–1) Dante the judge – influenced in this case by Virgilian categories – is obligated to recognize a fact – indubitable to his eyes – and to punish it according to the norms of his penal system and, to a certain extent, of his time. Such a condemnation does not stop him from expressing his fascination and personal admiration, as we observe throughout Canto 26 of the Inferno.

It is precisely this tension that has prompted so much debate on the sources and reasoning for the Ulysses episode: how are we to weigh the importance of Dante’s ostensible rejection of the figure – evidenced by his very placement in hell – against his palpable respect and sympathy for him? In other words, what exactly is the nature of Dante’s attraction to the Ulysses figure and how does it relate to the ‘real’ reason for which Ulysses is condemned not only to a death that was unimagined for him until Dante’s invention of it but also to inhabit one of the deepest regions of hell? Furthermore, does this tension provide any

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clues to Ulysses’ sin? Dante’s introduction to the episode is a striking example of poetic skill that contains, in microcosm, at least tentative answers to these matters of concern for our present study: Allor mi dolsi, e ora mi ridoglio quando drizzo la mente a ciò ch’io vidi, e più lo ‘ngegno affreno ch’i’ non soglio, perché non corra che virtù nol guidi; sì che, se stella bona o miglior cosa m’ha dato’l ben, ch’io stessi nol m’invidi. (Inferno 26.19–24; emphasis mine) I sorrowed then, and sorrow now again, when I turn my mind to what I saw; and I curb my genius more than I wont, lest it run where virtue does not guide it; so that, if a kindly star or something better has granted me the good, I not grudge myself that gift.14

The original Italian text is characterized by a chiasmus in which Dante creates tension between past and present and reveals that both the poet and the wayfarer find Ulysses to be a dangerously appealing character. This structure provides us with a concise and clear juxtaposition of the pilgrim’s experience in encountering Ulysses in hell (‘dolsi,’ and ‘vidi’), and the poet’s experience as poet (‘ridoglio,’ ‘drizzo’). While the pilgrim’s sentiments are not explicitly addressed again until line 43, the elaborate double simile that follows these introductory lines is meant to convey the poet’s ostensible ‘affrenare’ of his own ‘’ngegno,’ his diligent attempt to observe the rules of ‘misura’ lest he be punished for going beyond them (‘perché non corra che virtù nol guidi’ [22; emphasis mine]). The poet’s task of translating his experience into appropriate words acquires particular relevance by virtue of its privileged introductory position within the episode’s narration and its explicit invitation to the reader to recall both the pilgrim and the poet ninety-eight lines later in Ulysses’ ‘orazion picciola’ to his men: ‘… Considerate la vostra semenza: fatti non foste a viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.’

(118–20; emphasis mine)

‘Consider your origin: you were not made to live as brutes, but to pursue virtue and knowledge.’

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Dante’s desire to follow the guide of virtue in his own rhetorical pursuits is thus explicitly and positively compared to Ulysses’ treacherous oration to his men, which urges them – instead of allowing true virtue to be their guide – on to a failed voyage that ultimately leads to their deaths. However, Dante-poet is not only passively guided (by nameless, faceless virtù; by a series of significantly chosen guides); he will elsewhere, through another use of the nautical metaphor that recalls once again Ulysses’ failed journey (Purgatorio 1.1–3, for example), cast himself as a successful and active guide. At the same time, Dante-poet’s metaphor of movement for the potential erring of his own ‘’ngegno’ (‘perché non corra’) points the reader to the pilgrim’s role as guided traveller, resulting in yet another mingling of the poet’s and pilgrim’s ‘voyages’ even as they are respectively articulated. It is clear from the very beginning of the episode that each figure (Dante-poet, Dante-pilgrim) identifies and is aligned with specific aspects of the Greek hero’s traditional conception (Ulysses as orator, Ulysses as voyager). However, Ulysses’ failure and condemnation on both counts means that his figure also represents a threat to both the poet’s and the pilgrim’s self-image, in terms of the emblematic actions that constitute their respective identities (writing or speaking; travelling), as well as their relative success or failure in carrying out those actions. From the poet’s perspective, Ulysses’ function as a negative exemplum lies in his misleading rhetorical ‘guidance’ of his charges to a transgressive, fatal kind of exploration. The pilgrim, for his part, compares himself with his Ulyssean double on at least two different levels. First, Ulysses mirrors the ‘traveller’ component of the pilgrim’s identity, and the success (defined exclusively, as Boitani shows in his chapters 2 and 3, by the hero’s safe return) of their respective voyages becomes a significant element of their comparison. Secondly, Ulysses’ experience stands as a model to the pilgrim of how not to carry out this voyage in such a way that might transgress the predetermined divine limits that Ulysses’ journey seems to flout. This is a very real danger for the pilgrim, who often ‘protests too much’ in his efforts to prove that he would not dare to set his sights on the very transgressive goal that he is, in fact, in the process of pursuing. As we have seen, this episode is illustrative of a number of connections between narrative and transgression: in terms of a guide’s potential for giving fraudulent counsel to his charges; in terms of the dangers inherent in making a literary ‘voyage’ to the beyond and

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‘utter[ing] the words that Paul said could not be uttered’ (Barolini 126); in terms of Dante’s unfaithful translation of the Ulysses myth and the transgression against literary canons that it represents.15 But Ulysses’ importance as orator is not the only aspect of Homer’s figure that Dante exploits for his own allegorical ends, as Dante’s Ulysses reveals in his extended response to Virgil’s query. Though Ulysses’ contrappasso and Virgil’s words to the pilgrim16 certainly seem to imply otherwise, Ulysses’ own narrative tells us that his sin is related to an abuse of his rhetorical skill, to the transgressive exploration of divinely imposed boundaries, or to some intersection of the two. It is precisely in the nature of those boundaries, in the allegorization of Ulysses’ excess, that we may find yet another point of contact between Dante and his Ulyssean double, and one that will prove to have particular resonance with Levi’s further translation of the episode: Ulysses’ intellectual curiosity. Freccero and Thompson view Ulysses ‘folle volo’ as an allegory of Dante’s ‘own previous intellectual adventurism, especially as represented by the philosophical detour of the Convivio’17– specifically, Dante’s declaration in that work that ‘la scienza è l’ultima perfezione de la nostra anima, ne la quale sta la nostra ultima felicitade’ (I.I.1) (knowledge is the ultimate perfection of our soul, in which resides our ultimate happiness).18 Using this citation as a point of departure, Nardi demonstrates the link between Dante’s (negatively marked, from the point of view of the Commedia) ‘pre-conversion’ stance regarding the role of scientific pursuits in the perfection of the soul and Ulysses’ value as a symbol of those same pursuits.19 Also instructive in this regard are studies by Iannucci, Barolini, as well as Nardi, which bolster this view of Ulysses’ excessive quest for knowledge with strong textual connections between Ulysses and the Adamic fall from grace: It is difficult not to see in Ulysses’ ‘mad flight’, a conscious act of rebellion against a Divine law, and, more specifically, a re-enactment of the Fall. Like Adam’s, Ulysses’ sin is an overstepping of the bounds, a ‘trapassar del segno …’ (Iannucci 426)

Dante-pilgrim is thus cast as a corrective double for Ulysses, who transgresses against divinely set limits of exploration and discovery by attempting to cross them alone, while Dante’s own transgressive voyage has been ordained from on high. At the same time, the poet comes ever closer to the dangers presented by Ulysses’ intellectual transgression:

106 Arduous Tasks [I]f the pilgrim learns to be not like Ulysses, the poet is conscious of having to be ever more like him. The Paradiso, if it is to exist at all, cannot fail to be transgressive; its poet cannot fail to be a Ulysses, since only a trapassar del segno will be able to render the experience of transumanar. (Barolini 119; author’s emphasis)

The rhetorical nature of these limits, explicit in Dante’s case and more ambiguous in Ulysses’, creates a clear link between interpretation and sin, translation and transgression. Dante’s inverse comparison with Ulysses’ tragic death and damnation is meant to point unequivocally to his own transcendence, the redemption that awaits both pilgrim and poet on the other side of the ‘trespassed sign’ (Barolini 119). Transcendence is developed by Dante as one term in the dichotomy between himself and his Ulysses figure, contrasting his own successful and transcendent voyage with Ulysses’ failed quest for science. For Dante, the success of return and the failure of death are mutually exclusive, polar opposites that he attributes to himself and to Ulysses, respectively, as a means to the simultaneous creation of a negative exemplum and his own correction of it. For Levi, however, the mutually exclusive binary of return and death is collapsed by the events of the Holocaust and his survival of it.20 As we saw in chapter 2, after Auschwitz, after Hiroshima, after the collective traumas of modern existence, it is possible to return, but often only under the sign of death, where life in the ambiguous zone of survival is marked at once by return and non-return, success and death.21 ‘Acciò che l’uom più oltre non si metta’: Levi’s Dante, Levi’s Ulysses Dante’s appropriation of Ulysses will prove to form striking parallels with Primo Levi’s own understanding and use of the Dantean episode, particularly in terms of the elements that motivate each writer’s affinity for his source; both Dante’s and Levi’s foregrounding of intermediary figures such as translators, interpreters, and guides; and the transgressive aspects of transmission and translation of ineffable and sacred texts. The ‘Canto di Ulisse’ is the eleventh of seventeen chapters of Se questo è un uomo. In the context of Levi’s narration of his camp experience, the episode from which the title takes its name occurs soon after Levi obtains a post in the Chemical Kommando, where he benefits from more regular meals, less strenuous physical activity, and the shelter of the laboratory. One day Levi is chosen by the Pikolo (the Kommando’s messenger boy,

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inevitably a ‘prominent’), a young bilingual Alsatian named Jean Samuel, to accompany him on the daily food-fetching assignment. During their walk, Jean expresses a desire to learn Italian, and Levi, eschewing the few camp words that Jean picks up from an overheard conversation along the way (‘zuppa,’ ‘campo’) as pedagogical material, decides instead to use a segment of Dante’s Inferno as the basis for his Italian lesson. He then begins to recite in Italian – and then translate into French – as much as he can remember of the Inferno’s twenty-sixth canto. His use of this canonical text differs from other cases of remembered literature in the camps, as Petra Fiero has suggested. Far from the demoralizing experience of Jean Améry’s memory of Hölderlin, and the metronymic use that Ruth Klüger makes of poetry, Levi’s poetry memory is a lesson, and so takes place with another person, in community. As such, his translation from Italian into Jean’s native French creates Levi’s first reader, a prototype witness who is eager, open, and even an active co-participant in the translation.22 The timing of the episode is as significant as its content. As we have already mentioned, Levi has just begun his new ‘job’ in the Chemical Kommando, a job to which Levi attributes most of the luck of his survival. The salvific road to ‘ridiventare uomo’ clearly begins with his successful ‘esame di chimica,’ and then proceeds directly through Canto 26 of Dante’s Inferno. Jean’s statement that ‘[a]ujourd’hui c’est Primo qui viendra avec moi chercher la soupe’ (SQ I.107) ([t]oday it is Primo’s turn to come with me to get the soup) is, in fact, the first mention of Primo’s name in the entire memoir. Gail Gilliland attributes this to Levi’s recuperation of the name that was taken from him at the moment that he was ‘baptized’ with his new camp number. For Gilliland, the newly recovered ability to do relatively meaningful work represents the prisoner’s rediscovered identity and thus humanity. But this first ‘signature’ (to be repeated only in the ‘Storia di dieci giorni’ when Levi and his French companions truly rediscover their humanity at the abandonment of the camp) also strikingly announces the Dantean subtext of the episode to come, putting the protagonist’s name in the mouth of a salvific figure, exactly as Dante-poet does with Beatrice in the thirtieth canto of the Purgatorio. In Levi’s case, however, this salvatore does not utter his name in rebuke, as does Beatrice, but rather restores his humanity by addressing him directly by his given name. Jean represents nothing less than a conflation of two of Dante’s guides: he figures Virgil insofar as he co-creates (with the author) a new ‘translation’ of the Ulysses figure, and Beatrice in his role as mouthpiece for the newly re-created subject’s first and most striking textual signature.

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Jean is thus doubly marked early on as Primo’s guide and, not surprisingly, also mirrors the specifically linguistic elements of Virgil’s tutelage of his own pilgrim. Just as Virgil figures the translator in his intervention between Dante and Ulysses, so the overabundance of linguistic issues surrounding Jean’s character in the episode underscores Jean’s figuring of the translator as guide. Jean’s request for language lessons acts as counterpoint to Levi’s own arrangement with a campmate to learn German.23 However, this latter exchange is couched in terms of the camp’s economic system, while Jean’s desire to learn Italian is rather a function of his direct experience with the country (‘È stato in Liguiria un mese’ [SQ I.107]) and of his curiosity to learn its language (‘vorrebbe imparare l’italiano’ [SQ I.107]) for ‘mere intellectual satisfaction’ (Patruno 22), two decidedly Ulyssean traits. Jean’s significance as a translator is further underscored by the linguistic virtuosity afforded him by his Alsatian origins: Passò una SS in bicicletta. È Rudi, il Blockführer. Alt, sull’attenti, togliersi il beretto. – Sale brute, celui-là. Ein ganz gemeiner Hund – . Per lui è indifferente parlare francese o tedesco? È indifferente, può pensare in entrambe le lingue. (SQ I.107) An SS passed by on a bicycle. It is Rudi, the Blockführer. Halt! Attention! Take off your beret! ‘Sale brute, celui-là. Ein ganz gemeiner Hund.’ Is speaking French or German the same for him? Yes, it’s the same either way, he is able to think in both languages.24

Levi explains in the annotated scholastic edition of Se questo è un uomo that ‘[l]a frase di Pikolo è per metà in francese e per metà in tedesco, e vale all’incirca: “È un maledetto bruto, quello lì. Un cane vigliacco”’ (148) (Pikolo’s comment is half French and half German, and means roughly: ‘He’s a damn brute, that guy. A cowardly dog’), showing the two halves of Jean’s utterance to be mirror images – in effect, a selftranslation – of the same thought. As Levi himself states within the text of the episode, the act of remembering and teaching Dante to Jean ‘gli sta facendo del bene’ (is doing him some good); his ability to remember this literary passage is directly linked to his ability to remember his former self, the free man who loved books and could be moved by their beauty, who wasn’t limited to the brutal and concrete realm that forbade the symbolism and transcendence that poetry can bring in the real world outside of

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Auschwitz. But the juxtaposition of the Primo Levi who finds himself imprisoned in Auschwitz and his cultured, educated, and free double of just a year before also results in a dangerous realization: the great distance that lies between Primo the man, who once learned Dante, and Primo the prisoner, whose survival depends on finding in Dante what remains of his former self.25 Jean’s co-creation of this memory, which is in effect a translation of Levi’s former self to the diegetic present of Auschwitz, eventually prompts a revelation on Levi’s part that discloses to him ‘forse il perché del nostro destino, del nostro essere qui oggi’ (SQ I.111) (perhaps the reason for our fate, for our being here today). Jean’s participation in this transgressive act casts him more in the Ulysses mould of transgressive counsel than in Virgil’s mould of humble faith. The issue of Levi’s guides thus becomes complicated by the episode’s complex interweaving of linguistic and moral models, giving us our first indication that Levi’s value system, if for no other reason than that the very reality of his hell, and the absence of transcendent meaning in its aftermath, must deviate from Dante’s. As his value system deviates, so must his conception of an appropriate guide: Virgil’s submissive and dutiful Aeneas gives way to the individualism of Homer’s Ulysses, and Dante’s text becomes both formally and conceptually manhandled in the service of yet another ‘figure’ of Ulysses. Levi’s interpretive translation of the Dantean source text represents the transgression of a number of different boundary lines. Levi’s very choice of source text is, of course, a risky one. He himself woefully laments the state of source and target language alike as he shifts from the recitation of lines 85 to 90 to their translation: ‘Qui mi fermo e cerco di tradurre. Disastroso: povero Dante e povero francese!’ (SQ I.108) (Here I stop and try to translate. Disastrous: poor Dante and poor French!), and describes his translation with religious deference when he states that to render a terzina in prose is a ‘sacrilegio’ (SQ I.109). These comments amount to a translator’s commentary in nuce, a theory of translation that declares Levi’s ostensible intent to remain as faithful as possible to his versified Dantean source text and, by extension, to the experience – also implicitly marked as sacred, in the comparison – that he is simultaneously in the process of translating to his readers. We shall see that Levi’s manhandling of his source not only results in a renewed sense of subjecthood but also, paradoxically, in a return to the very source text – Homer’s – that Dante himself had manhandled in his own translation of the figure.

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Levi’s choice of canto is uniquely indicative of the transgressive nature of the entire episode, considering that Ulysses’ sin involves both a misguided use of rhetoric and an inappropriate crossing of the boundaries that govern human learning. Levi himself is aware of the similarities between Ulysses’ plight and his own: Di questo sì, di questo sono sicuro, sono in grado di spiegare a Pikolo, di distinguere perché ‘misi me’ non è ‘je me mis’, è molto più forte e più audace, è un vincolo infranto, è scagliare se stessi al di là di una barriera, noi conosciamo bene questo impulso. (SQ I.109; emphasis mine) Of this I am certain, I am sure, I can explain it to Pikolo, I can point out why ‘misi me’ is not ‘je me mis,’ it is much stronger and more audacious, it is a chain that has been broken, it is throwing oneself on the other side of a barrier, we know this impulse well.26

Levi, too, recognizes that he is in the act of crossing boundaries of propriety: both for his Nazi oppressors and for the surviving prisoners, poetry had no place in the realm of Auschwitz. The belief that the concreteness of the univers concentrationnaire had made poetry a moral impossibility is a common theme in survivors’ camp memories. As Jean Améry wrote, ‘To reach out beyond concrete reality with words became before our very eyes a game that was not only worthless and an impermissible luxury but also mocking and evil.’ In terms of the oppressors’ dehumanizing racial policy, poetry was seen as the exclusive realm of the cultured Aryan race, as were intellectual pursuits of all kinds. As such, the sort of intellectual curiosity exhibited by Jean and Primo in this episode, and by European Jewry in general, is thus figured as a Ulyssean trait, as transgressive and deadly as Ulysses’ crossing of the Pillars of Hercules. If Ulysses’ thirst for knowledge represented a flouting of the limits imposed on him by an absolutely powerful god, then Primo and Jean’s cooperative translatio of culture into the camps can be seen as an equally flagrant violation of an omnipotent authority that perverts and parodies Dante’s conception of divine justice. But particularly striking in this comparison between Ulysses’ and Levi’s respective transgressive acts – and central to our understanding of the construction of the empty code of ‘justice’ that was discussed in the context of the ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ in which punishment constitutes the facade of a moral system that is evacuated of motivating crimes – is that neither figure is aware of the boundary or the authority that governs it. In Ulysses’ case,

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this situation is the result of a fundamental anachronism: the classical hero is punished for a crime against a Christian God whom he could not have known, and thus whose power he could not have recognized. Much in the same way, Levi is the victim of an imperfect understanding of both the almighty power of the Nazi oppressors and the exact nature of the limits imposed on him by that power; like Ulysses, he is not made aware of the law against which he transgresses until after his punishment has been inflicted. This affinity between the two characters is conveyed textually when Primo’s lectura dantis arrives at Ulysses’ famous ‘orazion picciola’ to his men, and Levi comments on its relevance for him and his campmate: Ecco, attento Pikolo, apri gli orecchi e la mente, ho bisogno che tu capisca: Considerate la vosta semenza: Fatti non foste a viver come bruti, Ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza. Come se anch’io lo sentissi per la prima volta: come uno squillo di tromba, come la voce di Dio. Per un momento, ho dimenticato chi sono e dove sono. Picolo mi prega di ripetere. Come è buono Pikolo, si è accorto che mi sta facendo del bene. O forse è qualcosa di piú: forse, nonostante la traduzione scialba e il commento pedestre e frettoloso, ha ricevuto il messaggio, ha sentito che lo riguarda, che riguarda tutti gli uomini in travaglio, e noi in specie; e che riguarda noi due, che osiamo ragionare di queste cose con le stanghe della zuppa sulle spalle. (SQ I.109–10; emphasis mine) Here, listen Pikolo, open your ears and your mind, I need you to understand: ‘Consider well the seed that gave you birth: You were not made to live your lives as brutes, But to be followers of worth and knowledge.’ As if I were also hearing it for the first time: like a trumpet blast, like the voice of God. For a moment, I forgot who I am and where I am. Pikolo begs me to repeat it. How good Pikolo is, he’s figured out that it’s doing me some good. Or perhaps it is something more: perhaps, despite the lackluster translation and the pedestrian, rushed commentary, he has received the message, he has understood that it concerns him, that it concerns all men who toil, and us in particular; and that it concerns us two, who dare to reason of these things with the soup poles on our shoulders.27

Introduced to both Levi’s most immediate interlocutor, Jean, and his book’s eventual readers with a phrase that recalls Dante’s addresses to

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his readers,28 this passage is immediately marked as pertaining to the realm of the rhetorically ineffable and the conceptually difficult, and identifies Pikolo once again as Levi’s first and ideal reader by making him Levi’s most direct object of address. At the same time, the first word of his citation of Ulysses’ oration to his men (‘Considerate …’) momentarily redirects the reader’s attention to the epigraphic poem ‘Shemà,’ and Levi’s own interrogation of the possibility of man’s dignity after Auschwitz; Levi’s eloquent plea to his readers to consider the humanity of men so treated and Ulysses’ declaration to his men are associated from this point onward, implicitly signalling the importance of Ulysses as a rhetorical model for Levi and, more generally, for the condition of the camp prisoners. Levi’s immediate reaction to the citation contains a paradoxical shift in verbal tense: while the rest of this episode takes place in a historical present, the past tense of ‘ho dimenticato’ brusquely draws the reader’s attention to the immediacy of Levi’s past narration. This is further complicated by the verbs that follow: what Levi ‘forgot’ is where and who he ‘is.’ Is Levi describing that moment in the Lager, or a recent, more properly writerly instance? The idiomatic past-tense use of ‘dimenticare’ together with the twice-repeated ‘essere’ in the present tense is ambiguous in this regard. Levi’s tendency elsewhere to manipulate verb tense for narrative efficacy,29 however, gives us licence to assert that this is not merely the eternal present of the survivor’s trauma but rather a reflection of this particular experience – and specifically the revelation to come – which Levi relives as he writes of the episode. Levi will relive it yet again when he makes explicit the nature of his epiphany in the context of another rewriting of Se questo è un uomo, the scholastic edition of 1973, where his reinterpretation of Ulysses’ importance is not textual, as it is in his narration of the event itself, but instead paratextual, taking the form of an editorial annotation. Levi’s commentary on lines 119–21, then, explicitly reveals the previously implicit identification of Ulysses’ fate with the prisoners’ situation of slavery (‘gli uomini in travaglio’) and with the intellectual bondage that Levi puts into painful relief when he juxtaposes the boldness of his Dantean explication de texte and the demeaning task at hand. In the author’s 1980 interview with Daniela Amsallem, he further articulates Ulysses’ figuring of the imprisonment of Auschwitz within the context of German anti-Semitism and the intellectual identity of European Jewry: Auschwitz serait la punition des barbares, de l’Allemagne barbare, du nazisme barbare, contre la civilisation juive, c’est-à-dire la punition de

Transgression 113 l’audace, de la même manière que le naufrage d’Ulysse est la punition d’un dieu barbare contre l’audace de l’homme. Je pensais à cette veine de l’antisémitisme allemand, qui frappait principalement l’audace intellectuelle des Juifs, comme Freud, Marx, et tous les innovateurs, dans tous les domaines. C’était cela qui perturbait un certain philistinisme allemand, beaucoup plus que le fait du sang ou de la race. (cited in Anissimov 265) Auschwitz is the punishment of barbarians, of barbarous Germany, of barbarous Nazism, against the Jewish civilization, that is to say, of their audacity, in the same way that Ulysses’ shipwreck is the punishment of a barbarous god against the audacity of man. I was thinking of this vein of German anti-Semitism, which principally attacked the intellectual audacity of the Jews, such as Freud, Marx, and all of the innovators, in every field. It was this [audacity] that disturbed a certain German philistinism, much more than issues of blood or race.

In Levi’s conception, then, Ulysses’ death at the hand of ‘altrui,’ the harsh and omnipotent god whom Homer’s Ulysses does not even know, is akin to the punishment of European Jewry by a ‘barbarous’ and ‘philistine’ authority jealous of the Jews’ intellectual prowess. Levi thus paints himself a new Ulysses, a prisoner in hell punished – or better, punishable – for the crime of reasoning against the wishes of a cruelly harsh god. This distinction is a necessary one because the risk of transgression does not end with Levi’s pre-diegetic or diegetic intellectual pursuits. As was shown in chapter 1, the impossibility of cognitive processing and the negation of the victim’s subjecthood within the time and space of the camp system necessitated a translatio of the event’s language and experience to a later time and place more conducive to testimony. In this context, Levi’s now famous exchange with a camp guard in which he is told not to ask ‘why’ because ‘“Hier ist kein Warum” (qui non c’è perché)’ (SQ I.23) (here there is no why) undeniably echoes Virgil’s similar admonition to his charge in Purgatorio 3.37: ‘State contenti, umana gente, al quia.’ But the process of reasoning and understanding that takes place in the course of survivor narrative comes with its own dangers. Indeed, Levi’s survivor testimony runs the risk of committing yet another Ulyssean transgression even after the end of his confinement at the hands of Nazi Germany, that of misleading or fraudulent speech; in other words, the inaccurate representation of reality as it exists or existed.

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The claims of inexpressibility that have been used as literary topoi since the classical era develop into a real crisis of representation in the Holocaust context where, as Terrence des Pres has said, reality has surpassed our literary/aesthetic imaginative capacities … How much is a metaphor? How much is plain fact? Or is there any longer a difference? Archetypes have actualized in events so exaggerated, so melodramatic and patently symbolic, that no serious novelist, except perhaps in parody, would now attempt to treat them as art. (175–6; emphasis mine)

Levi’s literary memory is thus potentially transgressive on two levels: not only does he translate a canonical – sacred, in literary terms – text, carrying it over from the days of his elementary school lessons to a space – the Lager – in which Jews were expressly forbidden access to culture; he then does so again, carrying it over to an ostensibly more appropriate survival-oriented writing time, where it is nonetheless subject to the taboos of ineffability and moral propriety. The difficulty of expressing extreme situations, which Curtius terms the topos of inexpressibility (159), is part of the transgression that Dantepilgrim must commit as he travels through a hell where he does not belong, and that Dante-poet must commit as he moves closer and closer to the inexplicable beauty of the Paradiso. Dante makes the Pauline roots of his crisis quite clear from the beginning of his journey: ‘Io non Enëa, io non Paolo sono’ (Inferno 2.32), with a negative affirmation of Paul’s importance as a model of someone who faced divine interdiction on the expression of his own unique and divine experience. Levi’s struggle with ineffability also has recourse to the Pauline model, in terms both of his almost rapturous, but secular, epiphany at the end of the ‘Canto di Ulisse’ and of the difficulty of conveying its meaning after the fact. But this is one boundary that Levi does not transgress; his revelation remains in the Pauline realm of the unspoken: Trattengo Pikolo, è assolutamente necessario e urgente che ascolti, che comprenda questo ‘come altrui piaque,’ prima che sia troppo tardi, domani lui e io possiamo essere morti, o non vederci mai piú, devo dirgli, spiegargli del Medioeveo, del cosí umano e necessario e pure inaspettato anacronismo, e altro ancora, qualcosa di gigantesco che io stesso ho visto ora soltanto, nell’intuizione di un attimo, forse il perché del nostro destino, del nostro essere oggi qui … (SQ I.110–11; emphasis mine)

Transgression 115 I keep Pikolo back, it is absolutely necessary and urgent that he listen, that he understand this ‘as pleased Another’ before it is too late, tomorrow he and I could be dead, or never see each other again, I must tell him, explain to him about the Middle Ages, about the so human and so necessary and yet unexpected anachronism, and still more, something gigantic that I myself have only just seen, in a flash of intuition, perhaps the reason for our fate, for our being here today …30

What Levi understands in a flash of Dante-inspired revelation is precisely this connection between Ulysses’ fate and that of the prisoners.31 The Dantean source text, in this context, thus becomes an equally important subtext, offering both Levi and his readers a literary guide to the nature of his condition and serving as a universally recognizable roadmap to this utterly unprecedented event. In response to a crisis of representation resulting from the horrible realization, in Auschwitz, of the extremes of literary imagination, Levi accompanies his readers on a voyage from literary familiarity to experiential absurdity and traverses the distance between Ulysses’ plight and his own. So much of the transgressive nature of Levi’s use of the ‘Canto di Ulisse’ resides in Dante’s own translation of the Homeric story and in its importance as a transgressive translation in its own right. By changing the Homeric version of Ulysses’ story into one of failed rhetoric and voyages, Dante can better ‘correct’ it with his own successful and salvational one. In Jagendorf’s words, ‘in Dante, we have Ulysses’ story of disaster embedded in a narrative of salvation told by Dante’s persona who has, as it were, survived catastrophe to tell the tale of his life’ (48). Dante is thus an unfaithful translator of Homer – one who appropriates and reshapes his source text in the service of his own agenda. In much the same way, Levi appropriates the Dantean text, reuttering it in an assertion of his damaged subjecthood, in the service of survivor testimony. In the process, he echoes both Dante’s text and Dante’s strategy of textual borrowing, with all of the significance of the particular episode, and re-embeds Dante and Ulysses within his new, now twice-corrected version of the story. Though at first glance it would not seem that Levi’s version departs from its source to nearly the same degree as Dante’s does, Levi’s mnemonic lacunae make for a much briefer version of the episode than that found in the twenty-sixth canto of Dante’s poem. Moreover, his omissions, ostensibly chalked up to the pressures of day-to-day survival, in fact knowingly produce a text that is not only abridged but often flawed,

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and that is quite different in its overall tone and focus.32 Specifically, in his translation, Levi omitted those segments of Dante’s ‘Canto di Ulisse’ dealing with the potential for the discovery of evil on the other side of the Pillars of Hercules, the boundary marker for all human ventures. He renders lines 103–8 in prose to Jean, and mentions its content only in passing to his readers, flattening its transgressive import by omitting the geographical specificity of the voyage, even as he explicitly states his own transgression in not being faithful to the passage’s poetic form. He does manage to salvage and isolate the line ‘acció che l’uom più oltre non si metta’ (Inferno 26.109) (that men should not pass beyond [Singleton 279]) from the passage translated only in prose, which he then parses to the reader, noting the repetition of ‘si metta’ from the earlier ‘misi me,’ but not to Jean. Primo’s quick leap to the episode’s central lines 118–20 (‘Considerate la vostra semenza: / fatti non foste a viver come bruti, / ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza’ [Consider well the seed that gave you birth: / you were not made to live your lives as brutes, / but to be followers of worth and knowledge (Woolf 104)]), immediately following this observation has the effect of foregrounding the boundary and the audacity of its crossing while eliding all of the voyage’s negative connotations present in the Dantean text. With Primo’s citation of the next line, ‘Li miei compagni fec’io sí acuti’ (Inferno 26.121) (My little speech made everyone so keen [Woolf 104]), his story and Ulysses’ explicitly meet: just as Ulysses recounts his successful attempts to engage his companions in his transgressive action, so does Primo deploy his own rhetorical persuasion, both of Jean and of his reader: ‘e mi sforzo, ma invano, di spiegare quante cose vuol dire questo “acuti”’ (SQ I.110) (and I struggle, but in vain, to explain how many things this ‘keen’ means).33 The phrase’s use of the present tense emphasizes the survivor’s actual struggle to communicate, to engage an interlocutor, enlist his cooperation, and affect his understanding of the event; in short, the transformative power of rhetorical speech. For all of his concentration on the theme of transgression in the passage, Levi would rather that Ulysses’, Dante’s, and ultimately his own boundary crossing be couched in terms of positively marked transgression, that represented in the search for human truth, ‘virtute e canoscenza,’ and which leaves human artistic creation in its wake.34 Again skipping over a large segment of the canto (in particular lines 122–9), Levi elides still more of the geographical specifics of Ulysses’ voyage, as well as the hero’s characterization of it as a ‘folle volo,’ perhaps the clearest indication in the Dantean text of Ulysses’ awareness of and remorse for his own transgression. When Pikolo begs his companion to

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continue, Levi obliges with the terzina of lines 133–5 in which Ulysses describes the mountain of Earthly Paradise that appears before him just before his shipwreck. This is the same mountain that Dante-pilgrim attempts to climb in Inferno 1, the sign of death ‘che non lasciò già mai persona viva’ (27) (that never left anyone alive). But Levi’s interpretation of the passage erases the death that is a constituent part of the mountain – by definition, only the dead can arrive at its foot, just as only the dead can look back on the ‘acqua perigliosa’ of line 24 – and recodes the mountain as a symbol of home and return. This recoding, however, is never verbalized in the diegetic context of Primo’s lesson to Jean. In the univers concentrationnaire, the transgression of allowing oneself to think of home is tantamount to that committed by a living man trying to climb the mountain of the Earthly Paradise and, as such, is better left unspoken: E le montagne, quando si vedono di lontano … le montagne … oh Pikolo, Pikolo, di’ qualcosa, parla, non lasciarmi pensare alle mie montagne, che comparivano nel bruno della sera quando tornavo in treno da Milano a Torino! Basta, bisogna proseguire, queste sono cose che si pensano ma non si dicono … (SQ I.110; emphasis mine) And the mountains, when one sees them in the distance … the mountains … oh, Pikolo, Pikolo, say something, speak, do not let me think of my mountains, the ones that used to appear in the dusk of evening as I returned by train from Milan to Turin! Enough, I must go on, these are things that one thinks but does not say …35

Levi once again weighs in on the side of prudent behaviour, deciding that the camp law that demands the obliteration of personal identity and thus memory should, at least for the moment, be observed. Not so, however, in the survivor’s time and space of testimony; indeed, the transgression of juxtaposing the old self who could freely cross the boundary separating Milan and Turin with the prisoner whose every move is a wrong one is necessary in order to bridge the distance between them. Levi’s unfaithful translation of Dante’s text can be called a ‘correction’ in much the same sense that Dante’s version of the Ulysses story has been termed as such by most of its critical readers (Iannucci, Freccero, Barolini). Dante’s literary agenda necessitates a reduction of the Ulysses figure to a handful of emblematic characteristics that Dante sets in counterpoint to those of his own poetic persona to illustrate

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how close he came to death, but how he ultimately avoided Ulysses’ ‘graceless’ fate. Where Dante exaggerates Ulysses’ wanderlust and skill as a deceptive rhetor, Levi’s translation ‘corrects’ Dante’s own by mostly eliding both the voyage and the arrogance that Dante invented for his Greek hero and makes him into an explorer unjustly punished by the powers that be – a decidedly more Homeric Ulysses than the one portrayed by Dante. Levi’s emphasis on a more neutralized transgression of boundaries recodes Ulysses as the scientist that he epitomized in his Homeric incarnation and, in accordance with classical Greek values, Levi’s version privileges knowledge, ‘virtute,’ and ‘canoscenza.’ Ulysses is still a transgressor, but Levi’s neutralization of the Pillars’ negative significance masks a profound sympathy for the impulse to intellectual exploration, grounded in his identity as a scientist. For the scientist, limits such as those put up across the Strait of Gibraltar are unreasonable and even cruel, no less so than the legal, civic, and social restrictions that formed the roots of the Final Solution; it is here that the tragedy of Levi’s Ulysses lies. Ultimately, the line ‘Fatti non foste a viver come bruti’ (You were not made to live as brutes) is a call to transcend the animality of the Häftlinge’s condition through the vindication of intellect and culture, even in the Lager. Ulysses’ typology as scientist is by no means the only element of the Homeric figure that Levi brings to light in his translation to Pikolo. In Stanford’s study of the Ulysses theme and its main Homeric components, his first and most extensive comments are dedicated to ‘Odysseus’s unusually frank and realistic remarks on the importance of food in human life (67) … He showed that he understood the effects of appetite on men in general: how it drives men to war as well as to trade; how it moves the languid fingers of the courtier as well as the clutching fists of the starveling outcast’ (70). Though this characteristic was exaggerated by post-Homeric writers to brand the hero as greedy and gluttonous, Stanford interprets Ulysses’ understanding of the exigencies of hunger as a fundamentally human insight: ‘He simply accepted it as one of the inescapable elemental forces in human life’ (70). This element of the Ulysses figure, conspicuously absent in Dante’s treatment of it, is subtly woven into Levi’s episode in what seems at first glance to be merely a comparison between the lowliness of the camp conditions and the beauty of Dante’s high culture. Indeed, the fact that Primo and Jean are on their way to gather soup during their lectura dantis is also significant insofar as it iterates – even, or perhaps especially in this brief moment of reflection on the world of culture outside

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Auschwitz – the obsession with food and drink that has been so present throughout the entire book,36 and as such reveals yet another sense in which Homer’s Ulysses resonates so strongly with the prisoners’ sense of their own plight. Primo intersperses his commentary with progress reports and other references to the pair’s vicinity to the soup kitchen: ‘Darei la zuppa di oggi per saper saldare “non ne avevo alcuno”’ col finale’; ‘È tardi, è tardi, siamo arrivati alla cucina …’ (SQ I.110) (I would give today’s soup to know how to connect ‘had never seen’ with the last part; It’s late, it’s late, we’ve reached the kitchen [Woolf 104]). This passage culminates in the chapter’s dramatic finale, where a typographical break sets the ending paragraph apart from the rest of the narrative. Levi concludes: Siamo ormai nella fila per la zuppa, in mezzo all folla sordida e sbrindellata dei porta-zuppa degli altri Kommandos. I nuovi giunti ci si accalcano alle spalle. – Kraut und Rüben? – Kraut und Rüben – . Si annunzia ufficialmente che oggi la zuppa è di cavoli e rape: – Choux et navets. – Káposzta és répak. Infin che ‘l mar fu sopra noi rinchiuso. (SQ I.111) We’re now in the soup line, among the sordid, ragged crowd of soupcarriers from the other Kommandos. Those just arrived press against our backs: – Kraut und Rüben? – Kraut und Rüben – . The official announcement is made that the soup today is cabbage and turnip: ‘Choux et navets. Kaposzta és répak.’ … till the sea closed over us.37

The overabundance of linguistic signifiers in the announcement of the prisoners’ meal amounts to a virtual drowning in a sea of words and soup, representing the Babelic excess of the former, and parodying the concentrationary paucity of the latter. The effect of Levi’s ending is powerful, to say the least: the battle for sustenance that had up to that point been described in terms of a regressive return to animal-like behaviour is granted humanity and dignity in its association with a revalued Ulysses character. Ulysses’ importance as an icon of dignity in the face of death is further borne out by the strong lexical link between Dante’s introduction of the Ulysses episode and Levi’s introduction of a seemingly unrelated character. As we saw in chapter 1, Levi’s description of his encounter with ex-sergeant Steinlauf proves to be a significant example of Levi’s function as translator. It is also, if we begin to read Levi’s Se

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questo è un uomo in the non-linear fashion in which we must read Dante’s Commedia, a clear announcement of the Dantean translation to come.38 Lynn Gunzburg’s tentative statement that Levi’s recitation of the ‘Considerate la vostra semenza’ line to Jean ‘echo[es] the voice of Steinlauf from the early days of his own inexperience’ (22) fails to take into account the strong intertextuality between the two passages. While Dante’s ‘Allor mi dolsi, e ora mi ridoglio / quando drizzo la mente a ciò ch’io vidi’ (Inferno 26.19–20; emphasis mine) (I sorrowed then, and sorrow now again, when I turn my mind to what I saw [Singleton 273]) neatly encapsulates his claims to an authoritative representation of his experiences, Levi’s ‘Ho scordato ormai, e me ne duole, le sue parole diritte e chiare …’ (SQ I.35; emphasis mine) (I have since forgotten, and this sorrows me, his straightforward and clear words [my adaptation of Woolf 34]), with its repetition of Dante’s key word ‘dolere’ in the present tense but not in the past, points to the great distance between the prisoner and the survivor, between experience and its translation. At the same time, Levi’s Dantean citation also creates an explicit connection between the dignity preached to him by his campmate Steinlauf and that championed by Ulysses to his men and, by extension, to Primo and Jean as well. The dignity that Levi assigns to Ulysses does not alter his tragic end, however: now faithfully following Dante’s unfaithful translation of Homer, in SQ I.111 Levi cites, in their entirety, the last four lines of the canto: Tre volte il fe’ girar con tutte l’acque, Alla quarta levar la poppa in suso E la prora ire in giú, come altrui piacque … […] Infin che ’l mar fu sopra noi rinchiuso.

(Inferno 26.139–42)

Three times it whirled her round with all the waters, and the fourth time it lifted the stern aloft and plunged the prow below, as pleased Another, […] till the sea closed over us.

Levi ends his translation with a faithful rendition of Dante’s Ulysses, who ultimately dies his death at sea in the company of his men and does not return home. By casting himself as a Ulyssean figure, Levi explicitly compares his own fate with that of Ulysses. But this comparison is complicated by Levi’s creation of a positively marked Ulysses

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who nonetheless dies at the end of the story and suffers a punishment for which Levi has in effect erased the crime. To return to the issue of doubles, then, with which Ulyssean model are we to associate Levi’s survivor identity? With the Homeric Ulysses who returns from his visit to the underworld to narrate triumphantly that voyage to a host of welcoming interlocutors at a banquet, as Homer’s Ulysses does in the eleventh book of the Odyssey? Boitani characterizes this Ulysses in the following way: Nel Libro XI, quando egli narra ad Alcinoo le proprie avventure e il viaggio all’Ade … il re dei Feaci ne loda la ‘mente egregia’ non tessitrice di ‘storie false che uno non riece a vedere’, ma capace di dar ‘forma’ ai ‘racconti’ … Quando l’eroe termina il suo narrare di Ade e dei morti, i Feaci restano immobili in silenzio: ‘da incantesimo erano presi nella sala ombrosa’. E Alcinoo stesso vorrebbe vegliare tutta la notte lunga e indicibile per udire delle ‘imprese meravigliose’, delle sventure che Odisseo sa raccontare così bene.’ (15) In Book XI, when he tells Alcinous of his adventures and his visit to Hades … Alcinous praises his ‘sound sense’ which, instead of ‘making up lying stories, from which no one could learn anything’, gives ‘form’ to his ‘narration’ … When Ulysses ends his tale of Hades and the dead, the Phaeacians sit in stunned silence, ‘held in thrall by the story all through the shadowy chambers’: Alcinous wishes to stay awake for the whole night listening to the ‘wondrous deeds’ and misadventures Odysseus recounts so well. (Weston 5)

What we have in Homer’s Odyssey is essentially a positively inverted version of the recurrent dream with which this study began in chapter 1: Levi’s return nightmare in bono. Ulysses tells his stories of death to a stunned, silent, and most of all receptive audience. Not only does Alcinous not leave (as does Levi’s apathetic dream family), but, captivated by the stories’ truth, he demands an entire night of storytelling from the returning ‘survivor.’ Alternatively, we are left to identify Levi’s fate with that of Dante’s Ulysses, damned to an eternity of difficult expression: ‘gittò voce di fuori e disse …’ (Inferno 26.90; emphasis mine) (it flung forth a voice and said [Singleton 277]). Levi’s recitation of the canto to Jean does include this particular verse, but a remarkably erroneous version of it, ‘mise fuori la voce e disse …’ His replacement of ‘gittò’ (flung) with ‘mise’ (put, place) announces the ‘audacious’ phrases ‘misi me’ (Inferno

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26.100) (set forth [Singleton 277]) and ‘si metta’ (Inferno 26.109) (pass [Singleton 278]) that figure so prominently in Levi’s commentary, creating a veritable lexical motif that underpins the rhythmic force by which Levi’s understanding of the canto proceeds and accelerates. But more importantly, Levi’s change – one that precedes and thus conditions his translation into French for Jean – introduces an inexorable element of autonomy and control into even Dante’s Ulysses and his persona as raconteur. Ulysses’ speech, even in hell, is thus lexically aligned with his bold embarkation beyond the Pillars of Hercules and on the journey into the Southern Hemisphere. These details provide a conflicting picture of the role Ulysses plays as a model to Primo Levi as a witnessing survivor, and leaves us, as readers, with a central and fundamental question: will this Ulysses return or not? Or will his return rather be a qualified one, taking shape in the limbo zone between life and death, return and non-return – penance for the same sort of hollowed-out, undistinguishable ‘crime’ for which the Ancient Mariner wandered the earth and traumatically told his tale, plagued by narrative and psychological challenges? Perhaps, as is fitting for a discussion of translations, the answer lies in Levi’s text’s striking intertextuality, its undeniable dialogue with other texts. We shall conclude with some observations regarding Levi’s early interest in Ulysses, his later interest in the Ancient Mariner, and what significance we may glean from the triangulation among these three ‘figures of a myth.’ Refigurations of the Myth The most striking link between Levi’s Ulysses and the Ancient Mariner figure lies in their similar voyages to the Southern Hemisphere. This voyage has significant implications for the narrativization of Auschwitz’s otherworldly nature, insofar as it acts as a moral geography upon which Levi can project his experience. The passage through the Strait of Gibraltar is only the first element of this voyage’s transgression, though its explicit interdiction does, perhaps, provide the voyage’s most poignant and powerful emblem. What occurs after its crossing, Ulysses’ famous ‘left turn’39 down towards the African coast, in fact constitutes the real geographical transgression of the Dantean episode. His voyage to the unknown, to ‘[i]l mondo sanza gente’ (Inferno 26.117) becomes a symbol of that exploration of otherness, what Boitani calls a desire to ‘conoscere e vivere la morte’ (47) (know and experience death) that immediately comes to mind when the reader sees the Ancient Mariner follow the

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same course into the Southern Hemisphere in lines 25 to 54 of the ‘Rime.’ This voyage, in figuring the alterity of Levi’s experience, also proves to be quite an appropriate metaphor for the topsy-turvy nature of the univers concentrationnaire. As Levi himself states, ‘per tutti noi superstiti, il Lager, nel suo aspetto piú offensivo e imprevisto, era apparso proprio questo, un mondo alla rovescia, dove “fair is foul and foul is fair”, i professori lavorano di pala, gli assassini sono capisquadra, e nell’ospedale si uccide’ (cited in Tesio, ‘Ritratti critici’ 669) (for all of us survivors, the Lager, in its most offensive and unexpected sense, seemed to be exactly this, a world turned upside down, where ‘fair is foul and foul is fair,’ the professors do the digging, the assassins are the team leaders, and hospitals are places where people get killed). The reversal of normal laws of behaviour is a topos of Holocaust literature that runs through Se questo è un uomo as well as Levi’s other testimonial writings. But this reversal finds its fullest expression in the character of Ulysses, who casts his long shadow both over Levi’s later interpretation of the Ancient Mariner and indeed over Levi himself.40 As we have seen, Levi ends his translation of the Ulysses episode by explicitly juxtaposing Ulysses’ death at the hands of the Christian God with his own metaphorical death, his ‘drowning’ as a victim of the satanic Nazi system. In the process, good and evil, the divine justice that dictates Ulysses’ fate and the evil cruelty that determines Levi’s, are placed on an equal footing, making Levi’s imprisonment by the omnipotent Nazi authority tantamount to a reversal of the very poles of human morality. Ulysses’ transgressive voyage to the Southern Hemisphere thus enacts geographically the reversal of absolute poles deployed by the Final Solution on a moral level. The Ancient Mariner’s voyage further completes this symbolism by depicting that character’s involuntary exploration of what lies beyond the boundaries of human understanding as drift, as disorientation. As Boitani notes, [i]l viaggio del Vecchio Marinaio non ha né motivazione né meta. Come nella vita di ciascuno di noi, come nel sogno … al marinaio tutto accade … un Odisseo congelato nell’immagine che di lui offrono i Libri IX-XII del poema omerico, quando gli dei e gli elementi gli fanno patire le prove più dure, trasportandolo di terra in terra per questo e per l’altro mondo … (100; author’s emphasis) [t]he Ancient Mariner’s journey has neither destination nor motivation. As in the real life of each of us, and as in dream, everything happens to the

124 Arduous Tasks Mariner … an Odysseus frozen in the image projected through Books IXXII of the Odyssey, when the gods are putting him to the severest tests, driving him from land to land in this world and the next … (Weston 79)

Levi’s filtered view of the Ulysses myth through the more modern and oneiric Ancient Mariner also brings to fulfilment Ulysses’ already complex figuring of a topsy-turvy moral world. Though Ulysses’ sin is still the object of considerable disagreement, the system of crime and punishment in which he is judged is an ordered one. The crime committed by the Ancient Mariner, however, is not subject to any discernible code. He seems to be punished out of hand and made to do penance for a sin that neither he, nor we, can understand. Levi’s shift from one model of survival to the other – a shift that takes place over time, as Levi begins to grapple with the new issues that temporal and psychological distance bring – is indicative of Levi’s changing exigencies for appropriate doubles in relation to which he can construct a truly representative survivor identity. At the same time, however, it reveals the Ulysses figure’s continued relevance to Levi as an expressive model for his experience, insofar as the Ancient Mariner merely represents a more modern, more traumatized, but equally adaptable ‘figure’ of Ulysses. As we have seen in the case of the Ancient Mariner, the texts that Levi chooses to translate are often marked by a preoccupation with issues of transmission and communicability. As such, they represent Levi’s own concern with these matters, not only by virtue of their adoption as a source text but also in the sense that they hold up a mirror to the examination of the transmission of cultural texts from one format to another, showing it en abyme, as an endless reproduction of experience and its expression in speech. Translations such as this also serve to mimic the Holocaust survivor’s mission of continuous and consecutive transmission of testimony from witness to witness, even while they foreground some of the more difficult and challenging aspects of these testimonial acts. Levi’s translation of Dante’s ‘Canto di Ulisse’ certainly participates in this process, revealing much about Levi’s conception of himself as a survivor, as a voyager to an ‘other’ world who has audaciously ‘flung forth his voice’ to bear witness.

4 Infinite Transaction: Testimonial Numismatics and the Narrative Exchange

The translator, the exegetist, the reader is faithful to his text, makes his response responsible, only when he endeavours to restore the balance of forces, of integral presence, which his appropriative comprehension has disrupted. Fidelity is ethical, but also, in the full sense, economic. By virtue of tact, and tact intensified is moral vision, the translator-interpreter creates a condition of significant exchange. The arrows of meaning, of cultural, psychological benefaction, move both ways. There is, ideally, exchange without loss. (George Steiner, After Babel)

Introduction If Levi’s fragmentary use of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and the twenty-sixth canto of Dante’s Inferno shows us how translation might be understood as a metaphor for processes of representational transmission, then Levi’s translation of the Dutch historian Jacob Presser’s De nacht der Girondijnen offers us our first indication of how a full-fledged narrative translation project might be read as a testimonial utterance in its own right.1 Primo Levi already listed the co-translation of a four-volume chemistry textbook,2 some minor projects for Edizioni Scientifiche Einaudi, and the translation of English anthropologist Mary Douglas’s Natural Symbols3 among his ‘official’ translation credits when he approached Luciano Foà, the founder of the Adelphi publishing house, about a literary translation project in the summer of 1975.4 While Foà was secretary general of Einaudi’s ‘Struzzo’ line, his voice had been instrumental in

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the decision finally to accept Levi’s Se questo è un uomo for republication in 1955,5 which goes a long way both to explain Levi’s circumvention of the Einaudi publishing house, with which he had since developed an almost exclusive publishing relationship,6 and to indicate the importance of the particular text that prompted Levi’s proposal. Grossly under-studied, this text comprises a textual site where Levi foregrounds issues proper to survival, from the assertion of subjecthood denied in the camps to issues of survivor guilt; Levi’s La notte dei Girondini is not only a rich microcosm of the themes in Levi’s constellation of survivorhood issues but also a primer of the literary tropes he uses to explore them: translation, transmission, and economies both narrative and moral. By the time he published his translation of Presser’s De nacht der Girondijnen in 1976, Levi had ‘letto, riletto molte volte, e non [gli era] più uscito di mente’ (Levi, Preface to La notte dei Girondini 11) (read it, re-read it many times, and [hadn’t] gotten it out of [his] head since).7 His attraction to the piece, he goes on to explain, was probably not related to the way in which the story was narrated, flawed and uneven as it was. Rather, Levi attributes it to the particular and unique care that Presser was able to give to the topics of selfhatred and identity crisis among the assimilated Western European Jewry. What Levi doesn’t say is that this novella also contained, in nuce, many of the elements that characterized his own ‘original’ writings: the infernal and specifically Dantesque nature of the univers concentrationnaire; the importance of diegetic guides as figures for his own literary models; a preoccupation with source texts in translation that serve as exempla, both in bono and in malo (in the latter case, to be corrected); the doubles that allowed Levi to define himself against literary and camp ‘others’; the traumatic nature of both survival and its representation, here seen in Jacques/Jacob’s numerous narrative false starts; the sacrality of the testimonial word; and the dynamics of camp economies, narrative and moral alike. But the central issue of Presser’s novella is the guilt of survival and of having inhabited that ambiguous, complex, moral terrain that Levi called the ‘grey zone.’ Not surprisingly, this translation project is an interesting alloy, on the one hand, of Levi’s ‘original’ writings on the topic of the grey zone, and on the other, of his utterance through translation of the same theme: his preface to the Italian edition represents his first published comments on the matter, and the project is in fact contemporaneous with those interviews, poems, and essays that would eventually form the nucleus of Levi’s fundamental ‘La zona grigia’ essay in his last published work,

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I sommersi e i salvati. As Levi himself states in his preface to the translation, his interest in Presser’s work was reflective of the growing interest in the issue of the grey zone, and not just on his own part: Non è un caso che proprio in questi ultimi anni, in Italia ed all’estero, siano stati pubblicati libri come Menschen in Auschwitz di H. Langbein (non tradotto finora in italiano) e In quelle tenebre di Gitta Sereny: da molti segni, pare che sia giunto il tempo di esplorare lo spazio che separa le vittime dai carnefici, e di farlo con mano più leggera, e con spirito meno torbido, di quanto non si sia fatto ad esempio in alcuni recenti film ben noti. Solo una retorica manichea può sostenere che quello spazio sia vuoto; non lo è, è costellato di figure turpi, miserevoli o patetiche (talora posseggono le tre qualità ad un tempo), che è indispensabile conoscere se vogliamo conoscere la specie umana, se vogliamo saper difendere le nostre anime quando una simile prova dovesse ritornare. (PS I.1210) It is not a coincidence that precisely in the last few years, in Italy and abroad, books like H. Langbein’s Menschen in Auschwitz (not yet translated in Italian) and Gitta Sereny’s Into that Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder have been published: many signs indicate that perhaps the time has come to explore the space that separates the victims from the executioners, and to do so with a lighter touch, and with a less troubled spirit, than has been done, for example, in some recent well-known films. Only a Manichean rhetoric can claim that that space is an empty one; it is not, it is populated by ugly, miserable, and pathetic figures (who often possess all three characteristics at once) whom we must get to know if we want to understand the human race, if we want to know how to defend our souls when a similar challenge should come again.

The consonance of this translation project with what was to become the central element of Levi’s thought for the last ten years of his life (Levi in fact quoted this passage liberally in the opening pages of the ‘La zona grigia’ essay)8 demonstrates that the link between Levi’s translation work and his ‘original’ production is a strong one, and that we can talk about both kinds of writing as components of a coherent, integrated whole. Nowhere is this link confirmed more emphatically than in the pages of Levi’s own interlinguistic translation work, where his analysis of Presser’s text seeps into his specific translation decisions in complex ways. In describing a particularly wrenching episode in the protagonist’s moral journey – he recognizes his favourite student on her arrival

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at the camp and must help her onto the transport train – Presser writes, ‘“Zullen ze me heus wegsturen, meneer?” “Flink zijn, Ninon, dat is je enige kans.” In dat donkere Inferno: taciti, soli, senza compagnia9 – ach Dante, wat was dat helemaal voor een hel?’ (40) (‘Will they really send me away, sir?’ ‘Being brave, Ninon, that is your only hope.’ Into that dark Inferno: taciti, soli, senza compagnia – oh, Dante, really, what sort of hell was yours?).10 Levi’s translation of this passage is an emblematic and remarkable example of this ‘seepage’: ‘“Vuole davvero mandarmi via signor Henriques?”. “Coraggio, Ninon, non hai altra via”. In quelle tenebre: taciti, soli, senza compagnia … ah, Dante, che inferno era il tuo?’ (55). The principal challenge that Levi came up against in this part of Presser’s text was a lexical one: Presser is able, through the borrowing of Dante’s title, to add a synonym for ‘hell’ (‘hel’) and thus avoid a stylistically unappealing repetition of the same word, as well as maintain the foreignness of Presser’s original (Italian) reference. Levi cannot reproduce this lexical diversification in Italian and so must find another solution if he is to avoid redundancy. His solution lies, in fact, in the very title of Gitta Sereny’s ‘grey zone’ account of Treblinka commandant Franz Stangl11 that Levi mentions in his introductory comments, In quelle tenebre. By substituting this title for that of Dante’s Inferno, Levi both eschews the Dantean vocabulary that served him so well in the first years of his survivorhood and elides one of Presser’s two explicit source references to his ‘taciti, soli, senza compagnia’ citation. In the process, Presser’s intertextuality is woven anew, with the addition of a recognizable and – with respect to the original publication date of De nacht der Girondijnen – anachronistic ‘grey zone’ thread. This strengthening of the grey-zone theme continues with what we can justly call a clear mistranslation on Levi’s part. His rendering of Ninon’s plea ‘Zullen ze me heus wegsturen, meneer?’ as ‘Vuole davvero mandarmi via, signor Henriques?’ changes her third-person query regarding an ambiguous plural ‘they’ (‘ze’) to a third-person singular (‘Vuole’) formal direct address to her former teacher; Levi thus inscribes this exchange with Ninon’s moral implication and direct accusation of the protagonist. With this grammatical shift Levi refocuses the text on his own preoccupation with individual responsibility and the protagonist’s specific moral struggle. As these brief introductory comments suggest, Levi’s translation of Presser’s novella cannot be considered apart from his larger theoretical consideration of the grey zone and its mechanisms. This chapter explores Levi’s translation of Presser alongside the more properly ‘original’ writings with which it is clearly in dialogue: the ‘Al di

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qua del bene e del male’ chapter of Se questo è un uomo and his 1977 essay on ‘Il re dei Giudei,’12 which, like the passage cited above, was later grafted onto the ‘La zona grigia’ chapter of I sommersi e i salvati. As is true of Levi’s 1983 translation of Franz Kafka’s Der Prozeß, translation projects such as this warrant consideration on a par with the survivor’s other published writings. Far from exemplifying the conventional relegation of translation to the realm of unmarked, subjectless13 transfer from one linguistic system to another, Levi’s literary translations constitute their own mode of testimony, affording him both the shield of a source text and a position of authorial agency from which to explore issues relevant to the survivor’s condition. In the case of Kafka’s Prozeß, this entailed the problematic transmission of a dense, difficult, ur-Holocaust text that Levi was to struggle against on both stylistic and philosophical grounds. In Presser’s De nacht der Girondijnen, by contrast, Levi found a font of themes and tropes for the broad philosophical issues of the grey zone that he would explore for the next ten years, and a liminal project that allowed him to cross into increasingly difficult territory via the ostensibly safe mode of translation, protected by Presser’s story, his text, and his name. As Levi would write a scant four years after the publication of his translation of Presser, the translator, [q]uando gli riesce di trovare, o anche di inventare, la soluzione di un nodo, si sente ‘sicut deus’ senza per questo dover reggere il carico della responsabilità che grava sulla schiena dell’autore: in questo senso, le gioie e le fatiche del tradurre stanno a quelle dello scrivere creativo come quelle dei nonni stanno a quelle dei genitori. (‘Tradurre ed essere tradotti,’ AM II.734) [w]hen he manages to find, or to invent, the answer to a problem, he feels ‘sicut deus’ without having to carry the burden of responsibility that weighs on the author’s shoulders: in this sense, the joys and pains of translation are comparable to those of writing in the same way that those of the grandparents are analogous to those of the parents.

In addition to uncovering a fundamental and organic consonance between Levi’s translation of Presser’s novella and other components of his testimonial oeuvre, this study will link Levi’s treatment of the grey zone with economic principles and images, showing the exploration of exchange – through all of its processes, symbolic acts and objects, and circuits of movement – to be yet another figure of the translation theme that has been examined throughout this study.

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Levi’s translation of this novella thus further enacts the reversal of closed concentrationary systems – most notably symbolic orders such as narrative and economic meaning – through testimony. As always, the mode of translation brings all of this into clearer focus, as economic tropes are foregrounded in a text – De nacht der Girondijnen – that is a mise en abyme of transmissions, transactions, and translations that transcend experiential and narrative modes, emplotments, and languages. Between Fiction and History: Jacob Presser’s De nacht der Girondijnen At the suggestion of his friends and fellow historians Philo Bregstein and Lou (Loe) de Jong, Jacob Presser wrote De nacht der Girondijnen14 to achieve a sense of at least partial mastery over both his own Holocaust experience and that of Dutch Jewry. Submitted anonymously to a national literary contest in 1956, the novella was immediately published as the reward for winning the competition’s grand prize.15 Almost a decade later, with the 1965 publication of his state-commissioned Ondergang,16 Presser would receive widespread recognition as one of the most authoritative historians of the Dutch Holocaust. For this reason, even though his 1957 novella preceded his production of the Ondergang text in crucial ways, Presser’s fictional work is little studied,17 overshadowed in both Dutch and international circles by the importance of his contribution to Holocaust historiography. But, in keeping with one of the major themes of De nacht der Girondijnen, the historical and the figurative are often very closely intertwined; even a cursory reading of Presser’s story reveals its claim to participate in the realm of history, despite its fictional facade. As Presser would later say in comparing the two works: for me, there’s very little distance between literature like The Night of the Girondists and history like Ondergang … Yes … there is reality in the fable of the Night of the Girondists … just as the reality of Ondergang is … a fable. It goes beyond dry description … it has something to do with literature.’18

The porosity with which the literary and historical interact in Presser’s world constitutes one of his oeuvre’s most interesting problematics, and offers a framework through which Levi’s encounter with this particular source text may be organized and understood. Presser transmits a ‘real’ fable that he has learned through his own experiences

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and through the testimony of his research sources, partly those used in the course of his preparation for the drafting of Ondergang, and partly those consulted in his obsessive search for answers about his wife’s deportation to the Westerbork camp in 1943. As Philo Bregstein wrote in his Afterword to De nacht der Girondijnen, And here is an indication of why Presser, before he could begin Ondergang, first had to write this story about Westerbork: compelled by his sense of personal co-responsibility and in despair over the loss of his first wife, he had searched in this historical material for the place where his wife had last been before all traces of her were lost: that was Westerbork. It was for this reason that Presser knew so much about this subject, even though he had survived the war by going into hiding and had never set foot in Westerbork.19

Presser’s ‘fable’ thus occupies an ambiguous terrain between history and fiction, but also between personal expression and detached analysis; it was only after writing the novella that he was able to begin to conceptualize and organize Ondergang. Though Sidra Ezrahi argues in her By Words Alone that ‘Documentary literature can be seen as an intermediate stage between testimony and imaginative literature’ (14), Presser’s production presents a more complicated chronology.20 After spending six years researching the Holocaust in the Netherlands, Presser found himself blocked until his friend and historian Lou de Jong urged him to ‘just start writing about something that you know a lot about, just like that, write something about it’ (cited in Van der Zee 237).21 Presser explains: ‘exactly then I received an invitation in the mail to write something for the Boekenweek contest. And all of a sudden I felt it, I took the white paper and wrote it down in one go. And then I was free, then I could start my book.’22 At the end of her own discussion, Ezrahi tries to incorporate Presser’s example into her paradigm (which forms the basis of By Words Alone’s thesis) in the following way: ‘[t]he authority of [Presser’s] historical work derives from the accretion of comprehensive data and testimonial material; as a novelist he distills the conflicts and the agonies into one man’s battle with his conscience.’ Like Ezrahi, Presser often completely elides the matter of writing order in addressing the interrelationship between De nacht der Girondijnen and, Ondergang and, indeed, between fiction and history in general. Philo Bregstein cites his own interview with Presser, entitled Gesprekken met Jacques Presser, in his above-cited Afterword:

132 Arduous Tasks And in Talking [with Jacob Presser] (p. 121), regarding The Night of the Girondists: ‘Of everything that is written there, except naturally for a few trivial details, I must say that it is a completely historical fact. It happened exactly that way.’ And (p. 132): ‘… the other question, why The Night of the Girondists was written as a story and my book Ondergang as a history. My answer to you, as I search deep within myself, I want to say that my story is to a very high degree, history. The Night of the Girondists is even much more history than one can know and I immediately want to just clarify that “can.” It brings us yet again to another – perhaps literary-historical – important matter. In any story that I ever read, by much greater writers than myself, the question always comes to me: which of the author’s built-in signs can the reader not even note, let alone explain?’23

Presser’s claims to veracity pose a potential problem for the reader of literary representation of the Holocaust and for Holocaust historiography alike, as so much of the theoretical debate over the nature of Holocaust representation attests.24 Though both Ezrahi’s and Presser’s comments address the intertwined issues of genre and authority, Presser elsewhere makes reference to the freedom he felt after writing the novella (Van der Zee 237), giving additional insight into the crucial matter of writing order. In its liberatory function, the novella in fact constitutes a border zone lying between experience and its subsequent refraction into history. This quasi-creative space is one where the author’s allegorization – simultaneously therapeutic and corrective – of his personal experience allows him to explore his own testimonial position and survivor guilt in preparation for a more detached treatment of the Holocaust under the sign of historical analysis. As Van der Zee has noted, this exploration takes place through a complex process of diegetical and extra-diegetical doubling: ‘The most incisive figure present [in De nacht der Girondijnen], however, is the man Presser himself: Presser the Jew in all his fragmentation’ (240).25 The novella tells the first-person story of Jacques Suasso Henriques,26 an assimilated Dutch Jew who staves off his own inevitable deportation by accepting a job as an assistant to the Westerbork transit camp administrator, also a Jewish grey zoner. Jacques’s movement towards greater moral awareness is represented through his interaction with a series of alter egos and doubles who consistently put Jacques’s failings in strong relief. Perhaps the most textually present pair is to be found in the protagonist’s divided and conflicted self, whose two identities – the secular and assimilated Jacques and the Jewish Jacob – engage in a battle for

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primacy that is resolved only at the novella’s end. Faced with the overwhelming guilt of collaboration, and guided by the religiously observant prisoner Hirsch, Jacques/Jacob eventually embraces his own fate by slapping his boss in a gesture of moral conversion. He is, of course, immediately imprisoned and marked for deportation on the very transport he had until then managed; it is the isolation and reflectiveness of this transitional incarceration that forces Jacques’s story to make its painful voyage towards the realm of testimony. Beset by the fits and starts of the testimonial process, Jacques/Jacob initially suffers from a writer’s block that mirrors Presser’s own in a mise en abyme of laboured writing. These difficulties eventually give way to a coherent written record of events, and the protagonist begins to imagine the dissemination of his testimonial text to other diegetical readers and, eventually, its circulation beyond camp walls. Jacques’s achievement of narrative coherence is precipitated by a gesture – the slap – that allows him to overcome concretely his position of collaboration. In like fashion, Presser’s De nacht der Girondijnen constitutes a speech-act that overcomes the author’s own writing difficulties and survival guilt, laying the foundations for the coherent historiographical narrative to follow.27 As the story’s narrative fulcrum and the only invented element in a novella that otherwise lays claim to ‘total’ historical veracity, the slap can be considered a corrective to both Jacques/Jacob’s collaborative guilt and Presser’s block-inducing survivor guilt. As Presser commented, ‘The Night of the Girondists is true in every detail, everything happened exactly in that way … except for the slap in Cohn’s face, that no! … that force that rises forth from the deepest depths, when everything is destroyed, that is a rebirth!’ (Nacht 88).28 In effect, the slap and the testimonial text that it generates set in motion a ‘rebirth’ for protagonist and author alike. For the protagonist, the text becomes a vehicle for transmitting the story of the camp beyond its confining walls, bringing Jacques/Jacob’s personal narrative into the realm of history. For Presser, the novella is a liminal space in which he achieves mastery of the narrative terrain (both topographically, of the Westerbork camp, and psychologically, in terms of bearing witness to his wife’s own deportation narrative) before moving on to a broader historiographical understanding of the Dutch Holocaust. In considering the formal differences between Presser’s literary and more properly historiographical representations of the Dutch Holocaust, we might use Hayden White’s famously elaborated and polemical notion of historical emplotment, which echoes Presser’s own comments on

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the interrelationship between his two works. For White, all narrative modes of historical storytelling are subject to the linguistic conventions that constrain them. As such, any pretentions to ‘naturalness’ (or, we might say, transparency) in historical discourse must be disregarded: ‘[s]tories, like factual statements, are linguistic entities and belong to the order of discourse’ (‘Historical Emplotment’ 37). With respect to the emplotment of the Holocaust, this leads White to interrogate whether the very nature of these events might impose limits on emplotment, or story telling, of any kind. Does our society have at its disposal the entire gamut of possible emplotment modes in our attempts to ‘make sense’ of historical events? Or must we respect certain conventional codes of signification and interpretation? Ultimately, White concludes that any narrative representation of the Holocaust – to wit, any ‘attempt to represent the Holocaust as a story’ (ibid. 47; author’s emphasis), including ostensibly ‘factual’ or ‘literal’ ones – will rely on authorial tactics of figuration, interpretation, and the like. As White famously wrote in 1973, ‘History is no less a form of fiction than the novel is a form of historical representation’ (Tropics 122). This novella foregrounds the very problems of emplotment that faced Jacob Presser as he explored the range of representational modes open to him as a historian and survivor of the Holocaust. Most notable among these is trauma, made manifest in the circularity of De nacht der Girondijnen’s textual fabric: here, the protagonist’s traumatic experiences engender diegetic writing conventions that mirror that trauma and constitute a repetitive, circuitous narrative process that proceeds by fits and starts. While representations of the traumatic nature of testimonial narrative are nothing less than a bona fide commonplace in Holocaust literature, in Presser’s novella their prominence puts into relief precisely that tension that inheres in the historian’s attempt to emplot an event of which he himself is a survivor. As Eric Santer wrote in his essay ‘History beyond the Pleasure Principle,’ Historians … strive for intellectual and not psychic mastery of events … As [Domenick] LaCapra’s reading of the historians’ debate suggests, one might argue that because of the kinds and intensities of transferential dynamics it calls forth, a traumatic event is by definition one that implicates the historian in labors of psychic mastery. Any historical account of such an event will, in other words, include, explicitly or implicitly, an elaboration of what might be called the historian’s own context of survivorship. (145)29

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Presser’s novella, then, constituted a textual exorcism of his traumatic and repetitive relationship to the historical ‘facts’ of his research, and allowed him to master the terrain psychically before moving on to a more properly intellectual mastery of the same material. As one might guess from the similarities between Presser’s and White’s positions, Ondergang is notably informed by Presser’s storytelling impulse, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, even though its emplotment is characterized by the weaving of first-person documentation and testimony into an ostensibly historical (collective and analytical) account of events. Even beyond their interest for students of Holocaust historiography and its challenges, Presser’s semi-fictional novella and his historical text bear on each other in intriguing ways. Ultimately, what makes the novella such an important liminal text with regard to Presser’s later, more factually authoritative and broadly based testimony is its ability to emplot the trauma and guilt of the surviving witness in ways not proper to historical narrative. Inversely, once Presser’s Ondergang is published, it retroactively comes to bear on his De nacht der Girondijnen, reconstructing its enunciatory circumstance and adding the authority of analytical historical mastery to the weight of his own personal story and all of the other stories that it subsumes. Despite Presser’s disclaimer that his story’s characters are not to be identified with any living person, the similarities between Jacob Presser and his protagonist, Jacques/Jacob Suasso Henriques, are too uncanny to go unexplored. Jacob and Jacques are used interchangeably as Presser’s first name in Dutch, English, and Italian editions of his works, granting the diegetical onomastic shift between Jacques and Jacob in the last segments of the novella all that much more significance; Presser himself admitted in the documentary film The Past That Lives to having lent his protagonist his own birthday. Both Presser and Henriques were appointed as history teachers in Jewish schools – Presser in Amsterdam’s Jewish Lyceum and Henriques in the Jewish Gymnasium (Nacht 12) – set up by the Dutch government in the aftermath of German occupation.30 Presser, like the fictionalized Jacques/Jacob, also admits in the same Dutch documentary to having felt increasingly demoralized to find fewer and fewer students each day in his Jewish school. But perhaps the most telling similarity, if we are to read De nacht der Girondijnen not only as a rendering of his interviewees’ experience but as an allegory for Presser’s own survival guilt, is the latecoming character of Dé. Though far from a diegetic or even chronological31 fulcrum in Jacques/Jacob’s conversion from assimilated grey zoner to committed

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Jew – Dé is introduced only in the third-to-last segment of the novella – this character is unique and foregrounded in its status as Jacques/ Jacob’s text’s only diegetic reader, and thus the only textually present figuration of the process of active and willing testimonial reception. Jacques/Jacob’s only validation of the now sacred (a point to which we shall have opportunity to return) testimonial text that he explicitly hopes to circulate beyond the confines of the Westerbork transit camp is thus provided by a character who not only shares the author’s wife’s name32 but who was also ‘gepakt in de trein tussen Amersfoort en Lunteren, bij een persoonsbewijscontrole’ (70) (arrested on the train between Amersfoort and Lunteren, during a document check) and carried the same signs of attempted suicide that Presser and his wife did after an ill-fated escape attempt on the day after the Dutch capitulation to German occupying forces: ‘zij, evenals haar man, nog altoos de littekens op de polsen draagt van een mislukte poging anno 1940’ (75) (she, like her husband, still bore the scars on her wrists of a failed attempt from 1940).33 This is where the similarities end, though. While Presser’s guilt – and subsequent writer’s block – ostensibly is linked to his guilt over his wife’s death, the grey-zone nature of the fictionalized protagonist of Jacques/Jacob stems from his unique relationship with Georg Cohn, one of his students. This relationship, and the access that it allows Jacques/Jacob to Georg’s father, ends Jacques/Jacob’s deportation anxiety and ultimately seals his fate by sending him to the transit camp in an administrative capacity – helping Georg’s father to organize the weekly deportation trains – to avoid his own deportation there as a prisoner. Thus, Jacques the assimilated Dutch Jew, and Jacob, a mental figure that Jacques constructs as his internal double and conscience, begin their struggle for the protagonist’s soul and for the clarity of right and wrong, black and white. But no such moral fixity exists, as Jacques’s position in the grey zone becomes more and more difficult to negotiate and his self-hatred creates a series of proliferating doubles, Abels to his – in his own guilty conscience – murderous Cain and Cains to his own oppressed Abel. Presser and the Authority to Bear Witness Primo Levi’s translation of Presser’s text and the testimonial story that it transmits is only the most visible link in a chain of acts of textual transfer that characterizes De nacht der Girondijnen and ultimately

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guides its passage to Levi’s Italian. The central ‘text,’ of course, is the source text of the Holocaust experience, rendered by Jacob Presser first in the figured and fictionalized mode of the novella34 and then in the historiographical mode of Ondergang. Levi’s 1976 translation of De nacht der Girondijnen and its 1997 reissue are, then, merely the last links of transmission in a more than fifty-year chain, one that subsumes not only multiple experiential and textual translations but their attendant authorial positions as well. At issue here are the various kinds of authority from which a writer might transmit the Holocaust source text to an uninitiated reader. Presser, a Dutch Jew who escaped persecution by going into hiding with false documentation, might be considered an atypical Holocaust survivor in the sense that, as an internal exile, he did not ever experience at first hand either the transit camp or the larger Nazi camp system that he describes in the novella.35 He addresses this situation by calling forth at least two distinct kinds of vicarious authority. To the extent that Presser survived his wife’s deportation (via precisely the very Westerbork camp that is as much the protagonist of the novella as any character) and murder in Auschwitz, he also literally ‘survives’ her death. This position is in and of itself one of survivorhood, complete with the survival guilt that Presser allegorizes in the ethical struggles of the novella’s protagonist. Indeed, the novella’s entire last movement, which focuses on the protagonist’s narrativity, the sacrality of his writing, and his accompaniment of his campmate Dé to a certain death in Auschwitz, is nothing if not a reflection and correction of Presser’s own wartime situation. But this position also grants him the authority to translate – and appropriate – the camp experience on his wife, Dé’s behalf, and paradoxically to bear witness from the perspective of one who did not survive. The novella’s setting in the Dutch transit camp of Westerbork (as opposed to the Auschwitz extermination camp to which the novella’s protagonists are en route at the text’s end) permits this view of the system, as does Presser’s second source of vicarious authority: his role as statesanctioned historian of the Dutch Holocaust. Though the historical text that he eventually produced was both diachronic and synchronic in its coverage of historical developments and the entire Dutch camp system, respectively, it was on the specific aspect of the Westerbork camp that Presser’s research yielded the most detailed and complete results. His role as a historian put him in the essentially intermediary position

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necessary to give voice vicariously to survivors and victims alike, while the transit camp, by definition, is a liminal setting whose perspective on the Final Solution lies just outside of its central arena. Clearly, mediating processes are essential to Jacob Presser’s rendering of the Holocaust: from the transit camp that provides the setting of his novella, to the novella’s role in allowing him to write his history of the Holocaust; from his private role as witness to his wife’s death in Auschwitz to his public role as witness to the destruction of hundreds of voiceless Dutch Jews. It can be much more accurately said of Presser than of Levi that writers of Holocaust testimony speak ‘per delega’ (SS II.1056) (by proxy). Presser thus witnesses the Holocaust from a number of positions of authority – internally exiled Jew, surviving spouse, expert historian – that can best be described as vicarious but that affirm the source text’s authenticity in a variety of ways. Levi’s interlinguistic translation of the novella participates in this same process by rendering the diegetic story of Jacques/Jacob for an Italian audience, in effect appropriating its testimony from his own unique subject position. This is a position that grants the text a new kind of authority, that of a survivor who implicitly guarantees the accuracy and authenticity of the text through its very utterance, and through his express desire to initiate a recirculation of the testimony – on behalf of Presser, his wife, and the Dutch survivors whose stories lie beneath the story’s surface – in new testimonial markets.36 As Levi wrote in his preface to the novella, despite De nacht der Girondijnen’s stylistic defects and tendency towards a certain intellectualism, ‘[è] tuttavia palesemente veridica, punto per punto, episodio per episodio’ (11) ([it is] nonetheless plainly true, point by point, episode by episode). Vicarious testimony, such as that performed by Presser on his wife’s behalf, and by Levi in his re-uttering of Presser, by definition deploys its products in different, newer, and more open testimonial circuits than those of the ‘sommersi.’ Not coincidentally, these authorial processes of appropriation and recirculation are intrinsically linked to the economic tropes of exchange, both human and narrative, that are so fundamental to Presser’s novella; in a text so preoccupied with the economies of camp life and morality, as well as its own story’s production and circulation, it is appropriate that we consider the ways in which Levi’s taking up and re-uttering of the text through translation constitute a new testimonial commodity (La notte dei Girondini) that may then circulate beyond the limits of the finite economic space of the camp’s corrupt and corrupting marketplace, and even beyond

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Presser’s Holland, granting an expanded audience to both the text and the testimony that it carries. Furthermore, in a fine example of Presser’s employment of multiple representational modes, it is Jacob Presser, author and historian, who is able to carry out the wishes of Jacob the protagonist that his story be circulated beyond the limits of Westerbork’s camp walls, and literally ‘carry out’ the narrative as well, in both De nacht der Girondijnen and Ondergang. Levi’s mediation of the text takes this process of circulation a few steps farther, by authenticating the texts – historical and testimonial alike – in new ways that allow them to circulate under new signs and in expanded cultural and linguistic spaces. Levi’s very participation is the most visible ‘value added’ of his mediation; but what he brings to bear on the text is not only the authority of his public image but also the aggregate textual remainder37 that resides in the space between Presser’s source text and Levi’s translation. Taking up the Testimony: Levi’s La notte dei Girondini Primo Levi, in re-uttering the novella through the act of translation, re-enacts Presser’s encounter between first-person and vicarious testimony, between the authority of survivorhood and that enjoyed by the public intellectual-cum-Holocaust historian, a position that Levi increasingly took up in the last years of his life. When he explicitly guarantees the testimonial content of Presser’s work (‘è … palesemente veredica’), Levi lends the text his persona and all the personal authenticity and public authority that it commands. This is made strikingly clear by the comments of Mario Baudino, writing in La Stampa upon the translation’s 1997 reissue: ‘Benché il traduttore insista nella prefazione sui difetti “letterari” del libro, il risultato è poi talmente “bello” e “firmato,” talmente d’autore, che a tratti sembra di leggere un romanzo dello stesso Levi’ (Even though the translator insists in the preface on the ‘literary’ flaws of the book, the result so clearly bears Levi’s signature, is so ‘beautiful’ and so distinctly Levi’s, that at times it feels like reading a novel by Levi himself). Baudino’s assessment suggests that Levi’s translation of Presser’s novella was of a kind with his later activist translation of Kafka’s Der Prozeß, in which Levi famously stated that he had ‘corrected’ Kafka’s text; however, paratextual and epitextual aspects of La notte dei Girondini elide this similarity. Indeed, far from using the rhetoric of conflict and ensuing translational revisionism with which his interviews on the

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Kafka project are rife,38 Levi describes his encounter with the Presser text in terms of its emotional, psychological, and factual homogeneity with his own time in the univers concentrationnaire. What we know about how Levi actually felt about the process of re-uttering Presser’s novel is the fruit of scarce information, but Levi did address his translation of the novella on at least one occasion, with friend and journalist Gabriella Poli of La Stampa. In what must have amounted to a private conversation later published in Poli’s Echi di una voce perduta: Incontri, interviste e conversazioni con Primo Levi, Levi portrays the project’s effect on him as an essentially traumatic one: Per tutto il tempo [della traduzione de La notte dei Girondini] ho provato un’emozione violenta. Westerbork era il campo che gli olandesi avevano fatto per gli ebrei scappati dalla Polonia; sotto l’occupazione nazista era diventato un campo di smistamento da cui partivano i convogli per l’Est. Traducendo, ho rivissuto Auschwitz. (Poli and Calcagno 75; emphasis mine) For the whole time [that I was translating De nacht der Girondijnen] I experienced violent emotions. Westerbork was the camp that the Dutch had created for the Jews who had escaped from Poland; under the Nazi occupation it had become a transit camp from which the convoys left, heading East. In translating, I relived Auschwitz.

Levi’s psychological return to Auschwitz by route of Presser’s Westerbork foregrounds the effect of the De nacht der Girondijnen text on him rather than his impact on – or even mediation of – the text, his need to change it, or his reaction against it, as would later be true of his characterizations of his encounter with Kafka’s text in 1983.39 The dearth of epitextual material (statements, essays, and interviews produced by the author outside of the textual space) surrounding Levi’s translation reflects a scarcity in another area as well: that of peritextual material, or materials ‘officially’ generated by the publication machine. To wit, Adelphi’s 1976 edition of Notte bears little or no mark of Levi’s mediation. Indeed, much of the paratextual apparatus that one would expect to address Levi’s position as translator vis-à-vis his text and its author is lacking: Levi’s five-page preface to the text is not expressly billed as a ‘translator’s note,’ nor does he mention the fact of his translation of the text – or any mediation of the text, for that matter – in his comments. Levi’s prose, instead, focuses exclusively on his impressions of the book, which are especially important to the extent that Presser’s ‘fable’

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serves as a kind of springboard for Levi’s elaboration of the ‘grey zone.’ The only traces that Levi leaves on the novella’s paratextual apparatus are the thirteen footnoted ‘note del traduttore’ [N.d.T.] – mostly historical and contextual in nature – that pepper the text’s pages. Typographically, the original cover gave no indication of Primo Levi’s involvement with the project: only Presser’s name is listed at the top of the page, with the title in Italian below the cover art and the publisher’s insignia at the very bottom. This 1976 paratextual situation and the minimal epitextual traces of Levi’s mediation of the text combine to suppress the translation fact, reflecting a broader translation culture that prefers to propagate the myth of translatorly transparency and ignore the artefacts that translators and their processes leave on the text. It also lent support to Levi’s later characterization of the translation process, published a few years after the publication of La notte dei Girondini, as one in which the translator ideally is able to ‘calarsi nella personalità dell’autore del testo tradotto, di identificarsi con lui’ (‘Tradurre ed essere tradotti,’ AM II.733) (lower himself into the personality of the author of the translated text, identify with him). Despite all of these attempts to present Levi’s 1976 translation of the novella in as transparent a way as possible, however, the textual evidence points in quite a different direction. Levi’s guarantee of the story’s veracity was so complete, his own preoccupations so in line with Presser’s, that he in fact appropriated Presser’s story, but enveloped it in his own ‘beautiful’ style, reformulating paragraph and segment configurations within the novella and even creating causal links where Presser’s text is elliptical, at best. Where Presser’s Dutch is lexically repetitive, Levi’s Italian employs pronouns and relative clauses to create a more flowing style.40 Where Presser’s text is characterized by fragmentariness and choppy turns of phrase, Levi’s Italian translation fills in the gaps (most typically verbal ones) and is downright elegant. If Jacques Suasso Henriques remains Presser’s creation (and, in some respects, alter ego) there’s no question that, in La notte dei Girondini, he speaks Primo Levi’s language. Levi’s ‘beautiful’ style in rendering Jacob Presser’s novella tempts us to associate this translation with his approach to his later translation of Kafka, where he was compelled to ‘have pity on his Italian readers’ in various ways. But the beautification of Presser’s text was no translatorly manifesto of Levi’s stance against ‘lo scrivere oscuro’ of the source text, as it was to become with Kafka. Rather, it is evidence of Levi’s wholesale appropriation of the story of Jacques/Jacob as a vital

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component of the modern European Jewish condition that he, too, wanted to recount, even above and beyond the text’s effect of bringing him to relive Auschwitz. The occulting of Levi’s translatorly position would eventually be redressed – at least in part – when Levi’s death solidified his status in the Italian literary landscape and when his public persona came to constitute its own ‘value added’ to the text: by the time of the translation’s reissue in 1997, Levi’s very persona was a remainder to the text and a factor in its (renewed) reception in Italy. As is clear from the timing of Baudino’s comments in La Stampa, the perceived transparency of Levi’s role as translator and mediator had undergone a decisive change. When the translation was originally published in 1976, the start-up Adelphi publishing house was not interested in marketing Levi’s role as a particularly strong one, or in underscoring the harmony inherent in the novella’s themes and Levi’s own preoccupations; indeed, I have unearthed next to no reaction to the initial publication of the translation on the part of either the Italian press or Levi scholars. More than twenty years later, however, when Adelphi reissued the translation to observe the tenth anniversary of Levi’s death (1987), both the translation’s revised paratextual apparatus and the publication of Baudino’s comments in the mainstream press reflected the text’s changed value within a domestic cultural economy. On the occasion of the translation’s reprinting in 1997, Adelphi added two important paratextual elements. The first was a paragraph on the rear cover flap describing Levi’s active involvement with the translation of the text (his proposal of the project to Adelphi) and announcing Adelphi’s explicit intention to use the text to mark both Levi’s passing – they explicitly billed the reprinting as a commemoration of the tenth anniversary of Levi’s death – and the emergence of issues surrounding the Holocaust that had not yet gained currency when Levi first translated the book in 1976. This last point was also made by way of explaining the original edition’s ‘scarsa eco, forse perché soltanto negli anni successivi si sarebbe affinata e approfondita la riflessione sugli aspetti più oscuri e laceranti della persecuzione contro gli ebrei’ (faint echo, perhaps because only in the years to follow would reflections on the darkest and most searing aspects of Jewish persecution develop and deepen). The second element was a ‘band’ that stated, in white block letters, ‘Traduzione e prefazione di Primo Levi’ (Translation and Introduction by Primo Levi). As Gérard Genette states in his discussion of ‘The cover and its appendages,’ the band shares

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‘the function served by the epigraph, but here an epigraph both fleeting and more monumental’ (Paratexts 29). In this particular case, the band’s epigraphic status is supported by its linguistic content: in letters bolder and larger than those used to spell out Jacob Presser’s name, the band serves to reintroduce the translation under a new set of reading circumstances, to make Levi’s re-uttering of Presser’s text – as opposed to the original text itself – the (newly constructed) central fact of its appeal. Genette’s observation regarding the monumentality of the band’s presence is particularly relevant to our discussion of this text: by memorializing Levi’s close involvement with the text (he ‘introduces’ the text to the reader – in his translating mediation and introduction – just as he originally introduced it to the publisher) in a mode as ‘fleeting’ as the band, Adelphi suddenly made the fact of Levi’s translation both centrally important and transparently natural. Only with the memorializing act of these new paratextual elements does the fact of Levi’s persona as a public figure come to bear explicitly on his translation of the text, as opposed to his mere interpretation of the text, as it emerges in the space of his original preface. It was now clear that far from simply – and transparently – transmitting Presser’s greyzoner novella, Levi’s re-utterance raised Presser’s ‘fable,’ in effect, to the level of first-person camp survivor testimony. Adelphi’s revised editorial practices in 1997 attempted to create a new public narrative – a more usable past, in editorial terms – to describe Levi’s mediation of Presser’s text, conditioning the public reception of the novella in the process.41 Already in 1976, Levi’s admitted obsession with the story and his guarantee of its truth-value furnished the gold standard against which Presser’s representation of events could be effectively measured by the reader. This process of authentication is only amplified by the force of Levi’s persona in 1997, ten years after his death: Levi’s reissued utterances now take on the contours of the recovery of a lost voice, the dissemination of a lost coin. Levi’s imprimatur on this text, much like the posthumous publication of an unpublished manuscript, allows it to circulate in editorially and culturally privileged ways. Towards an Economics of the Univers Concentrationnaire The remaining sections of this chapter will enlist notions of circulation and the ‘value’ of the testimonial text to explore Levi’s translation of Presser’s De nacht der Girondijnen and to situate this translation within a Levian predilection for employing economic metaphors to illuminate

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various aspects of the Holocaust and his survival of it. We will attempt to understand both source texts and their translations in economic terms, in order to show that the translation’s existence, its rendering of one text for another, is reflective of the translator’s participation in an economic system of narrative exchange. The economic metaphor is central to an understanding of Levi’s other writings – most notably on camp life and the grey zone – which so often have recourse to tropes of currency and exchange. Not coincidentally, it is also fundamental to an understanding of Levi’s translation of this work, as it places en abyme the dynamics of the exchange and circulation of goods, people, and, ultimately, testimonial words, that lie at the heart of Presser’s original novella. As the linguistic and cultural mediator of the passage from De nacht der Girondijnen to La notte dei Girondini, we see Levi cast first not in his typical role of surviving witness and victim of the offence but in that of the willing listener and interlocutor who allows the victim’s story to be heard, and who transmits that testimony to a new audience of witnesses. Presser’s novella explicitly invites this kind of transmission, not least through its protagonist’s anxious musings about his text’s eventual fate: ‘Twee strepen zet ik onder die woorden, niet alleen voor mezelf; ik richt me tevens tot een meelezer, die over mijn schouder heen kijkt. Wie, week ik niet. Als dit document naar mijn wil het kamp uitgesmokkeld wordt, zal er eens, ergens zo iemand wezen’ (Nacht 12) (I underline these words twice, not only for myself; I am also addressing a fellow reader, who is looking over my shoulder. Who it is, I don’t know. When this document, as I wish, will be smuggled out of the camp, someday, there will be someone, somewhere). Presser’s focus on textual transmission in this passage takes the form of an ideal reader who not only looks over Jacques/Jacob’s shoulder, implying his physical and ethical oversight of the writing process, but is also described as a ‘meelezer,’ one who literally reads with the protagonist as he writes.42 The wish that a real reader will somehow materialize – ’someday … someone, somewhere’ – once the text has emerged from the closed camp space, is expressed in vague, ambiguous terms: Jacques/Jacob is not able to imagine his real interlocutors as concretely as his implied one, who remains more a companion during the writing process than a viable witness after the fact. Indeed, as Barbara Foley writes of authentic ghetto and camp diaries of the Holocaust, ‘the diary projects a self whose principal performance is the act of testimony and whose sense of identity hinges upon the recoverability of the text’

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(337). What happens in Levi’s translation of this passage, however, is remarkably revealing of Levi’s translation strategies and his gloss of Presser’s commentary on textual and testimonial transfer: ‘Sottolineo due volte queste parole, non solo per me: anche per qualcuno che mi legge mentre scrivo, da sopra la mia spalla. Chi sia, non lo so: ma se, come voglio, questo documento sarà contrabbandato fuori del campo, verrà pure un tempo e un luogo in cui sarà letto, e qualcuno che lo leggerà’ (Notte 23). The ambiguity of Presser’s original forces the reader to flesh out the connection between the ‘meelezer’ and the ‘iemand,’ and to concretize the ambiguities of time, place, and person with his own reading situation; Levi’s translation does its own filling in, adding the verb ‘leggere’ no less than twice (‘in cui sarà letto’; ‘qualcuno che lo leggerà’) where it does not exist at all in Presser’s source text. Levi’s new text also shifts from the ambiguity of ‘eens,’ ‘ergens,’ and ‘iemand’ to the more specific ‘un tempo’ and ‘un luogo’: an activist particularizing strategy that textually concretizes the reception situation of Jacques/ Jacob’s testimony, much as does Levi’s own translation in practice. As in Levi’s embedded translation of S.T. Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ in ‘Il superstite,’ Levi’s particularizing decisions here render a text’s concern with the mechanics of transmission as anxiety about that transmission’s potential for reception or exchange on the other side of the barbed-wire fence. In the space between Presser’s original and Levi’s translation lies a rich remainder that marks the distance between Presser’s focus on the drive to write and Levi’s growing preoccupation with what happens – or does not – after the fact of the testimonial utterance. In other words, what Levi is able to imagine and inscribe within the existing imaginary of Presser’s source text is the circulation of testimonial writing. Presser’s De nacht der Girondijnen represents the Westerbork camp as a corrupt human economy, imagery that must have resonated strongly with Levi, whose own penchant for describing the camp in decidedly economic terms is clear in the ‘Al di qua del bene e del male’ chapter of Se questo è un uomo, and in his essay on Chaim Rumkowski in Lilít. Like Levi, Presser seeks to correct the corrupt economic systems of the concentrationary universe through the circulation of testimonial narrative; this correction is most notable in Presser’s tale when Jacques/Jacob’s pivotal slap removes him from the realm of the camp economy and places him into physical confinement. Taken out of the camp’s circulation of lives and bribes (both in money and in kind), he retreats to the more abstract realm of narrative exchange, where what is at stake is no

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longer physical safety or a few more days of life but rather the search for a more transcendent moral code. Jacques’s initial promissory ‘word’ to Cohn assures his position within the closed circuit of privileged Westerbork functionaries whose ultimate goal it was to avoid participation in the larger camp system that, by definition, terminated in Auschwitz. His passage into the limbo zone of solitary confinement as a result of his tragic gesture against the camp’s leadership, however, allows him to enter into a very different kind of contract, one promising his narrative, now the ‘word’ of testimony, to his diegetic and imagined (extra-diegetic) readers. That this shift is preceded by a striking and analogous shift from literary to sacred quotation by the story’s protagonist is not a coincidence: both the change in the symbolic value of Jacques/Jacob’s ‘word’ and the nature of his diegetical citations are indicative of a growing understanding of the sacred nature of the testimonial word and of its power. Ultimately, the desire to protect this sacred currency as an outgrowth of Jacques/Jacob’s renewed awareness of his own Jewishness culminates in the slap at the novella’s end. The result is no less than the reconfiguration of this currency’s circuit of exchange: no longer confined to either the stagnant circularity of the transit camp’s weekly round-up and departure schedule or the fatal linearity of travel to Auschwitz, the new narrative contract made by Jacques/Jacob allows both protagonist and author to enter into the more productive economy of dynamic witnessing. ‘Al di qua del bene e del male’: The Symbolic Marketplace Levi’s ability to further engage Presser’s text in his own translation of it, and to authorize Presser’s text as quasi-survivor testimony is due, in no small measure, to the consonance between the economic images and metaphors by which Presser’s story proceeds and those present in Levi’s testimonial and essay work. Levi’s use of economic metaphors to explore the concentrationary morality dates back to the eighth chapter of Se questo è un uomo. Entitled ‘Al di qua del bene e del male’ (This side of good and evil), the extraordinary chapter evokes Friedrich Nietzsche’s Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil),43 the German philosopher’s seminal work on the notion of perspectivism and on the Übermensch’s ability to move beyond culturally constructed JudaeoChristian dichotomies such as that of ‘good’ and ‘evil.’ For Nietzsche, this capacity to overcome the slave morality and forge his own moral values stems from the Übermensch’s noble status. Levi’s title, however,

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deftly parodies the unique and elite nature of this moral code: the privileged moral perspective claimed by Nazi social ‘policies’ such as the Final Solution – largely on the back of modern philosophical frameworks such as Nietzsche’s – is reconceptualized from the point of view of the Lager slave. At the same time, in his detailed description of the camp’s economic system Levi stakes out the terrain of this particular moral code in terms that explicitly claim to be at once more proximate and concrete (‘Al di qua del bene e del male’) than Nietzsche’s (Jenseits …): this is how Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ realizes itself in practical terms. Levi’s chapter thus operates on the conspicuous shift from the moral imperative of Nietzsche’s self-actualized noble elite to the radical moral alterity that confronts the Lager slave, a ‘subject’ whose moral challenge is not to overcome the terms of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ but rather to address those terms’ unmooring from themselves and each other in the Lager, and to discover where she or he lies in relationship to those moral touchstones in the practical context of daily economic transactions. As Levi concludes the chapter, In conclusione: il furto in Buna, punito dalla Direzione civile, è autorizzato e incoraggiato dalle SS; il furto in campo, represso severamente dalle SS, è considerato dai civili una normale operazione di scambio; il furto tra Häftlinge viene generalmente punito, ma la punizione colpisce con uguale gravità il ladro e il derubato. Vorremmo ora invitare il lettore a riflettere, che cosa potessero significare in Lager le nostre parole ‘bene’ e ‘male’, ‘giusto’ e ‘ingiusto’; giudichi ognuno, in base al quadro che abbiamo delineato e agli esempi sopra esposti, quanto del nostro comune mondo morale potesse sussistere al di qua del filo spinato. (SQ I.82) In conclusion: theft in Buna, punished by the civil direction, is authorized and encouraged by the SS; theft in camp, severely repressed by the SS, is considered by the civilians as a normal exchange operation; theft among Häftlinge is generally punished, but the punishment strikes the thief and the victim with equal gravity. We now invite the reader to contemplate the possible meaning in the Lager of the words ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ ‘just’ and ‘unjust’; let everybody judge, on the basis of the picture we have just outlined and of the examples given above, how much of our ordinary moral world could survive on this side of the barbed wire. (Woolf 78)

As this passage clearly suggests, Levi’s project in this chapter is to underscore the radical otherness of the univers and its systems. As a map of the sui generis economic relations in the camp, Levi’s analysis

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is detailed, exhaustive, and insightful. But this exploration of the exchange and circulation of goods within the univers also functions as an implicit commentary on other kinds of economies – moral, symbolic, juridical, linguistic, narrative – and the conventions that govern them. Specifically regarding issues such as the open or closed nature of a circuit of exchange and the possibility of correcting the functioning of a corrupt market, the imagery and commentary contained within ‘Al di qua …’ not only illustrate the importance of economic tropes in Levi’s general thought on the moral system of the Lager but also underscore the commonality between Levi’s ‘original’ testimonial work and the themes contained in De nacht der Girondijnen. Levi begins his nine-page consideration of camp economies in ‘Al di qua …’ with a dizzying array of commodities and signs in circulation within various systems at the Buna-Monowitz facility, constructing a camp-specific system of meaning and measurement. This system plays itself out through the almost simultaneous circulation of personal linens and rumours, or ‘voci,’ signifiers that constitute parallel economies of signification regarding the motivation and outcome of how shirts are (or are not) being circulated among the prisoner population. These are to be understood not merely as tropes but rather as interrelated economies that influence each other’s functioning within a larger but always self-contained system: Avevamo una incorreggibile tendenza a vedere in ogni avvenimento un simbolo e un segno. Da ormai settanta giorni si faceva attendere il Wäschetauschen, che è la ceremonia del cambio della biancheria, e già circolava insistente la voce che mancava biancheria di ricambio perché, a causa dell’avanzare del fronte, era preclusa ai tedeschi la possibilità di fare affluire ad Auschwitz nuovi trasporti, e ‘perciò,’ la liberazione era prossima; e parallelamente, la interpretazione opposta, che il ritardo nel cambio era segno sicuro di una prossima integrale liquidazione del campo. Invece il cambio venne, e, come al solito, la direzione del Lager pose ogni cura perché avvenisse improvvisamente, e ad un tempo in tutte le baracche. (SQ I.73; emphasis mine) We had the incorrigible tendency to see a symbol and a sign in every event. There had been no Wächetauschen, which is the linens exchange, for seventy days now, and already persistent rumours were circulating that there were no replacement linens to exchange because, due to the advance of the front, the Germans were unable to bring new transports to Auschwitz, and ‘therefore,’ liberation was near; and in parallel fashion,

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An economy of signs about the future of the camp and its inmates (to be circulated, exchanged, and interpreted) thus operates side by side with an economy of goods – in this case, shirts – that circulate within the camp space. Notably, both economies are marked by interruptions, or corruptions, in their respective functioning: the signifiers that come to be interpreted by various camp ‘voci’ are not, in fact, anchored to one single meaning within the camp system of signification; rather, they are just as easily interpretable in one key as in its exact opposite, resulting in the existence of assumed ‘truths’ that may or may not back up their interpretation(s). In purely numismatic terms, we have a classic example of a gold standard represented by, simultaneously, a valid coin and a counterfeit one, without any possibility of knowing, at the time of their minting and circulation, exactly which is which. The circulation of shirts, meanwhile, is corrupted both in the imperfect commodity status of its goods’ exchange value and in the restricted limits within which it must operate. Constantly revalued by factors that go far beyond the invisible hand of the free market, the prisoners’ shirts are regularly dismantled and mined for secondary commodities (handkerchiefs, bandages), resulting in a diminution of the value of the original item. Similarly, the regular but unannounced introduction of newly obtained shirts from outside the univers in the form of new transports renders the older shirts almost worthless on this particular market, like a coin that must be taken out of circulation because of a newly minted replacement. The Nazis’ attempts to thwart exchange by delimiting the conditions of trade (to wit, through the improvisational nature of alterations to the market) and by artificially – that is, through non-economic events – tampering with the criteria of open competition44 is reflective of a larger agenda on their part that aims to control and contain symbolic exchange of all kinds. Indeed, it is not by chance that Levi embeds his introduction of the venerated figure of the civil worker45 – including issues of commerce between ‘i civili’ and the prisoners – in this economic analysis of the camp: Il traffico coi civili è un elemento caratteristico dell’Arbeitslager, e, come si è visto, ne determina la vita economica. È d’altronde un reato, esplicitamente

150 Arduous Tasks contemplato dal regolamento del campo e assimilato ai reati ‘politici’; viene perciò punito con particolare severità … [I lavoratori civili l]avorano in Kommandos particolari, e non hanno contatti di alcun genere con i comuni Häftlinge. Infatti per loro il Lager costituisce una punizione, ed essi, se non morranno di fatica o di malattia, hanno molte probabilità di ritornare fra gli uomini; se potessero comunicare con noi, ciò costituerebbe una breccia nel muro che ci rende morti al mondo … (SQ I.78; emphasis mine) Traffic with civilians is typical in the Arbeitslager, and as we have seen, it shapes its economic life. On the other hand, it is a crime, explicitly addressed by the camp’s regulations and considered to be tantamount to a ‘political’ crime; it is therefore punished with particular severity … [The civilian workers] work in separate Kommandos, and they have no contact of any sort with common Häftlinge. In fact, for them the Lager constitutes a punishment, and if they don’t die of fatigue or illness, have a good chance of returning among men; if they could communicate with us, it would constitute a breach of the wall that makes us dead to the world …

In this explicit context of trade, exchange, and the punishment46 inflicted on civilians who break prohibitions on commerce with the Lager’s permanent prisoner population, Levi’s use of the word ‘comunicare’ is striking in its bivalence: this usage of the term refers not only to the exchange of words between the civilians and the prisoners, who inhabit otherwise unconnected spaces, but to that of goods and services as well, and in so doing leverages the reader’s understanding of the linguistic properties of ‘communication’ to describe the ramifications of this economic ‘commuting.’ The shirts described by Levi, much like the bread, soup, tobacco, and even the coin and scrip47 that circulate through the camp and specifically in the ‘Borsa’ (SQ I.74) that Levi describes, occupy an ambiguous space between commodity and currency that recalls Marc Shell’s discussion of the material value of the earliest coins: ‘“The true inscription,” writes Gotthold Lessing in Über das epigramm, “is not to be thought of apart from that whereon it stands or might stand.” According to Lessing’s definition, we cannot properly consider an inscription (for example, the writing on a coin) without considering the material or thing (for example, an ingot) on which it stands’ (Economy 65). In this context, the shirts of Auschwitz are simultaneously consumable objects and valid economic and symbolic intermediaries that have a

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somewhat stable value vis-à-vis other tradable items within the closed and isolated exchange system of the camp. This means, in Marxist terms, that this is a system in which commodities have not yet achieved a sufficient level of abstraction as to allow for a universal currency to develop among them. The only item of this nature described by Levi that approximates the symbolic function of currency is the ubiquitous daily ration of bread, which acquires symbolic and ‘sacred’ (SQ I.33) value in addition to its functions as alimentary product and universal currency. Note, for example, Levi’s use of it within the ‘Al di qua …’ chapter as a kind of measuring stick against which other items present on the black market may be weighed: shirts (SQ I.77), tobacco coupons (SQ I.76), tobacco (SQ I.77), dental gold (SQ I.77), ‘tools, utensils, materials, products, etc.’ that are stolen from the Buna work camp (SQ I.79), even the vital ‘knife-spoon’ necessary to efficient alimentation (SQ I.81). Bread is, of course, the object-trope that Levi uses to establish his need for human communication and expression as a fundamental one, on a par with the need for alimentary sustenance,48 and is also the currency mentioned in his famous claim49 to have ‘purchased’ German lessons in the camp with bread rations, through which Levi in effect elevates this currency to the high, almost luxury, value of the commodity of communication for which it is exchanged. This example also suggests that, in the concentrationary universe, the distance between precious materials, such as those normally used for the minting of coin, and objects of immediate, concrete value to the camp inmates is greatly diminished, if not abolished altogether, and can only be re-established in the more economically ‘normal’ world of Levi’s post-survival writing. With Levi’s description of the economics of the daily soup ration (in ‘Una buona giornata’ and in ‘Al di qua …’) and of the ‘Mahorca’ tobacco product (in ‘Al di qua …’), we learn still more about the camp’s commodity-currencies, unique in their vast potential for mining and economic speculation. As Levi tells us, the ability to choose between consuming a given possession and using it as currency for the purchase of other goods or even for some far-sighted speculative activity marks some inmates as uniquely able to interpret and navigate the economic terrain of the camp. Embedded in Levi’s discussion of the economic status of ‘Mahorca,’ the low-quality camp tobacco used as both commodity and currency, is a reference to exactly this kind of astute speculation, peppered with common market jargon terms like ‘il margine di guadagno’ (profit margin) and economically oriented elements

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of the Lagerjargon like ‘kombinacja.’ We learn that Mahorca, ‘un tobacco di scarto, in forma di schegge legnose’ (SQ I.76) (a scrap tobacco, made of wooden splinters), is legally purchasable only with the coupons (‘buonipremio’) that are distributed, in theory, to reward the best workers in the camp. These coupons were issued to participate in an almost hermetically sealed economic system where neither the commodity (the Mahorca) nor the unique currency with which it was to be legally purchased (the ‘buoni-premio’) was meant to be available or even valid outside of the camp system. In practice, however, the coupons most typically end up in the hands of the Kapos and the camp ‘prominenti,’ creating a situation in which both the tobacco and the coupon-currency not only enter the camp’s black market, becoming subject to a wider-range of (illegal) exchange possibilities, but also come under the pressure of external factors, such as the influx of new economic actors and objects. Systems such as this, where currencies are either de jure (because they are only guaranteed by a camp authority) or de facto (because the importance of bread, soup, and pristine shirts, for example, does not ‘translate’ to other cultures and thus would not allow those commodities to function in the same way in them) unavailable for exchange with foreign currencies or even with a generally accepted ‘gold standard,’ are typically defined as ‘inconvertible.’ The Oxford English Dictionary’s primary and secondary definitions of this economic term are particularly illuminating in the context of this project’s larger focus, insofar as ‘not interchangeable’ and ‘incapable of being assimilated, digested’ both convey a sense of the untranslatability of such a system of signification into, or from, other systems. The intended inconvertibility of currencies such as campissued tobacco coupons and even shirts that become devalued the moment a new ‘shipment’ comes into the camp both participates in and reflects the intended linguistic untranslatability of camp signification in more general terms. The economic circumstances of the camp thus represent another facet of the symbolic stagnation of the univers, and, as has already been amply demonstrated in other moments of this study, Se questo è un uomo is a first step in Levi’s reversal of this dynamic. Levi’s description of even tentative forays into more open circulation of economic signs and dynamics – in particular, the imports and exports effected through trafficking with agreeable civil workers – works against the Lager’s closed, oppressive systems, both economic and linguistic, by translating the untranslatable, by transgressing the limits on economic and linguistic signification imposed by the Nazi regime. Levi notes in his description of the Mahorca ‘currency’ that ‘speculazioni [con l’aiuto di contatti con

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“amatori” civili] stabiliscono un legame fra l’economia interna del Lager e la vita economica del mondo esterno …’ (SS I.76) (speculations [effected with the help of contacts with civilian ‘friends’] establish a link between the internal economy of the Lager and the economic life of the outside world). Together with his characterization, one page on, of the dangers of linguistic and economic ‘communication’ between the two worlds, and of the Lager’s attempt to contain and control circulation of all kinds, this statement implicitly announces the salvific figure of Lorenzo Perrone, who makes his explicit textual appearance four chapters later.50 Levi’s chapter on ‘I fatti dell’estate’ focuses on the two main developments of the summer of 1944: first, the shifting tide of the war – the Allied landing in Normandy, the advance of the Russian front, and the attempt on Hitler’s life – and the effects of that situation on the prisoners and on camp life in general. This is followed by the beginning of Levi’s relationship with the Piedmontese civilian worker to whom, as Levi himself puts it at the end of the chapter, he believed he owed his life: io credo che proprio a Lorenzo debbo di essere vivo oggi; e non tanto per il suo aiuto materiale, quanto per avermi costantemente rammentato, con la sua presenza, con il suo modo cosí piano e facile di essere buono, che ancora esisteva un mondo giusto al di fuori del nostro, qualcosa e qualcuno di ancora puro e intero, di non corrotto e non selvaggio, estraneo all’odio e alla paura. (SQ I.117; emphasis mine) I think that I owe the fact that I’m alive today precisely to Lorenzo; and not so much for his material help, as for his having constantly reminded me, with his presence, with his steady and easy way of being good, that a just world still existed outside of our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt and not savage, alien to hate and fear.

Levi’s initial description of Lorenzo is striking for what it shares with the passages in ‘Al di qua …’ in which the general issue of relations with civilian workers is introduced. What links the two chapters is above all a preoccupation with describing the exchange relationships of the Lager society – or, in this case between the Lager society and the normal world that exists ‘al di fuori’ of the univers concentrationnaire, that which is ‘estraneo’51 to the dysfunction of what lies within its walls. Twice in his brief description of Lorenzo’s life-saving acts, Levi uses the word ‘compenso,’ compensation, to express the exemplary nature of Lorenzo’s moral code, the reason for which a laundry list of behaviours that might

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otherwise be reducible ‘a poca cosa’ (to a matter of small import), in truth ‘non deve sembrare poco’ (should not seem such a small matter): un operaio civile italiano mi portò un pezzo di pane e gli avanzi del suo rancio ogni giorno per sei mesi; mi donò una sua maglia piena di toppe; scrisse per me in Italia una cartolina, e mi fece avere la risposta. Per tutto questo, non chiese né accettò alcun compenso, perché era buono e semplice, e non pensava che si dovesse fare il bene per un compenso. (SQ I.115; emphasis mine) an Italian civilian worker brought me a piece of bread and his leftover mess ration every day for six months; he gave me his hole-riddled shirt; he wrote a postcard on my behalf to Italy, and arranged for me to get its reply. For all of this, he neither asked nor accepted anything in return, because he was good and simple, and he didn’t think that one should do good to get something in return.

A mere four chapters after describing in minute detail the intricate and inflexible economic conventions to which the prisoners’ dealings with civilian workers are subject – most notably regarding the trafficking of shirts – Levi here clearly states that Lorenzo simply gives him his own shirt as a gift (‘donare’). He refuses all compensation for this and other acts of kindness, including the daily supplement to Levi’s meagre food ration. Levi’s list also includes the notable gesture of both exporting and importing correspondence with Levi’s family in Italy, a complete circuit of exchange in its own right that, however, generates its own added value in the familial contact and resulting humanizing effects that it had on Levi. At the same time, however, that this passage echoes the language and tropes of his comments in the ‘Al di qua …’ chapter, it reverses and negates that same economic imagery in the interest of a description of Lorenzo that does justice to his essential foreignness to the corrupt camp economies of signification, morality, and commodity exchange. Despite the strong textual presence of the twice-used term ‘compenso,’ it is a trope in fact used only in the negative. Furthermore, far from the social science approach of much of Levi’s study of camp conventions, Levi here feels the need to have recourse (for his own and his readers’ part) to precisely that which is not reducible to economic formulas and relationships of exchange: La storia della mia relazione con Lorenzo è insieme lunga e breve, piana ed enigmatica; essa è una storia di un tempo e di una condizione ormai

Infinite Transaction 155 cancellati da ogni realtà presente, e perciò non credo che potrà essere compresa altrimenti di come si comprendono oggi i fatti della leggenda e della storia piú remota. (SQ I.115; emphasis mine) The story of my relationship with Lorenzo is at once long and short, straightforward and enigmatic; it is a story from a time and a condition that have by now been erased from any reality that we know, and therefore I don’t believe it can be understood unless in the way that we now understand matters of legend and the most remote history.

In other words, Levi engages in a negation of the very economic mechanisms that he has established in his examination both of fundamental camp dynamics and of the position of the civilian worker within those dynamics, at the same time that an economic vocabulary is both invoked (through the quickly negated notion of ‘compenso’) and then surpassed (by the narrative and symbolic mode of legend). Lorenzo and his moral position are thus shown to be foreign, or ‘estraneo,’ to the closed world of camp exchange, allowing Levi to explore the possibility of moral ‘good’ within – or at least at the edges of – the camp space. In this case, Levi and Lorenzo’s transgressions of the intended economic isolation of the camp dovetail with transgressions of its closed moral system. Exchange transactions effected by the various inhabitants of the Auschwitz complex have clear moral valence and can either mirror and confirm the moral code imposed on the Lager prisoners or point up the fatal and corrupt insularity that lies ‘al di qua’ of the walls of the univers. But the breach in the wire must ultimately be narrativized in order to be complete. Levi’s ability to articulate those transgressions allows him to figure an aperture to more open, convertible, translatable dynamic symbolic exchanges through contact with the world beyond the barbed-wire fence. Despite the chapter’s parodic title, Levi’s goals here are as much about the space beyond the camp’s unique economic situation as they are about the univers concentrationnaire, or the ‘al di qua.’ In other words, the exploration of corrupt and closed camp economies allows Levi to reverse those very conditions in order to better circulate his testimon – and Presser’s – ‘al di là.’ La notte dei Girondini and the Human Economy Jacob Presser’s alter ego and protagonist is a quite conventional outsider character and as such aids in the reader’s understanding of and

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assimilation to the camp world and its rules. Principal among these is a whole set of economic exchange practices within the closed system of Westerbork, access to which is quickly granted to Jacques/Jacob upon his initiation into the camp. In the sections that follow, I would like to briefly explore three of these economies, those most relevant to our understanding of the role of symbolic exchange in this text, and ultimately their connection with testimonial transmission or translation: economies of sex and time, themselves intrinsically linked within the camp polisystem, and the economic principles that govern the circulation of information and testimony. The Sexual Economy Immediately upon his entry into Cohn’s service, Jacques/Jacob is informed that his new position grants him not only relative safety but access to camp-defined systems of power. Though Cohn couches this revelation in terms of a necessary psychological salve, access to sexual favours quickly emerges as foremost among the perks of camp authority. Also clear in the rich passage that follows are the complex contours of the relationship that is to emerge between Cohn and his ‘Mameluke’: Je weet, wat Napoleon riep tegen zijn Mameluk, als hij de geest kreeg? Niet? Dat noemt zich historicus godbetert. Nou, die riep: ‘Roustan, une femme!’ Dacht je dat ik dit leven uithield, zonder morgen, overmorgen, week ik veel, uit te reopen, Suasso: une femme? Niet negen, maar zes op de tien kan ik krijgen, gratis, als ik ze maar uit de trein hou. Wat zouden ze heir anders kunnen offeren? De mannen geld, de vrouwen … (28; emphasis mine) Do you know what Napoleon called to his Mameluke, when he got the itch? No? You call yourself a historian, God help us. Well, he yelled this: ‘Roustan, une femme!’ Do you think that I could endure this life without summoning you, tomorrow, or the day after, I don’t know when: Suasso: une femme? Not as many as nine, but I can get six out of ten, for nothing, if I can only keep them off the train. What else can they offer here? The men, money; the women …52

In the explicit comparison of the relationship between Napoleon and Roustan, his ‘Mameluke,’53 and that between Cohn and Jacques/Jacob, the protagonist of De nacht der Girondijnen emerges as a right-hand man of military stature, a companion in battle, a trusted aide who is

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nonetheless ‘owned,’ much as the Mameluke slave soldiers were. Furthermore, in Roustan’s – and Jacques/Jacob’s – particular task to procure women on behalf of his superior, the relationship takes on pander-client contours, which are then explicitly established in the sexfor-time exchange outlined at the end of the passage. Cohn thus puts Jacques/Jacob in a situation that is analogous to that of the camp’s women, desperately trading sexual favours for an extra week of time: by proxy, in his role as Cohn’s fleshmonger, Jacques/Jacob, too, is placed in the position of having to procure sexual favours in exchange for his own safety and security. This last point is echoed on the level of interlingual translation from Dutch to Italian, as an interesting remainder is acquired by way of the secondary Italian definition of ‘mammalucco.’ As listed in the Zanichelli Italian dictionary, the term is not only used to mean a ‘mercenario al servizio del sovrano d’Egitto’ (mercenary in the service of the sovereign of Egypt) but also ‘sciocco, stupido’ (foolish, stupid). Levi’s Italian passage thus contains an implicit indictment of Jacques/Jacob’s grey-zone character in his foolish attempt to gain salvation through his morally questionable service to Cohn.54 Soon afterwards, however, this ostensibly gratis fringe benefit of positions of authority in the camp undergoes a subtle shift to a form of remuneration for services rendered to the camp. As Cohn tells Jacques/ Jacob, ‘je hoeft hier niet voor niets te werken. Je hebt een van de veiligste baantjes hier, dat is één. Ik zal, dat heb ik met Georg afgesproken, een man van je maken; dat is twee. En verder (hij grinnikte): wat ik uit de wachtkamer niet aankan, staat tot je beschikking’ (30) (you don’t have to work for free here. First of all, you have one of the safest little posts around here. Second, as Georg and I agreed, I’ll make a man of you. And besides [he sniggered]: whatever I can’t manage to keep up with from the waiting room is at your disposal). Jacques/Jacob’s compensation for his work in the camp is to be strongly tied, then, to his forced development into a ‘man’ at the hands of Cohn. Though the reader has not been explicitly told what the nature of this link is, Cohn’s ‘snigger’ implies that the passage from a vaguely defined youth to a definitive manhood is to be one not only of jaded moral regression but with sexual undertones as well. This is confirmed when Cohn continues, explaining the specific economic mechanism by which functionaries such as Jacques/Jacob may be remunerated: Kijk niet zo stom, Suasso. Denk je dat mijn hoofd naar sprookjes staat? Je weet: tareif één week uitstel. Dat noem ik Naturalwirtschaft; dat is het toch,

158 Arduous Tasks niet? De vroonhoeve Westerbork! Zou je geloven dat ik ook eens economie heb gustudeerd, dat ik bankier, dat ik íéts heb willen worden? Nee, dat geloof je niet, hè? Maar het is zo. (30) Don’t look so dumb, Suasso. Do you think that I’m in the mood for telling fairy tales? You know already: the rate is one week’s deferral. I call this the natural economy; isn’t that so? The Westerbork seignory! Would you believe that I once studied economics, that I wanted to be a banker, that I wanted to be something? No, you don’t believe it, do you? But it’s true.55

By now, the link between sexual ‘payment’ and the deportation ‘work’ of the camp has taken its position in an even more complicated exchange of labour, sexual favours, and time. A female prisoner’s offer of sex is no longer simply a perk of the office, an end in itself, or a vaguely defined term of exchange, but rather a commodity whose exchange can command its own fixed return: that of an extra week of life in the camp. The camp economy of Westerbork – and perhaps of the entire Nazi labour, concentrationary, and extermination system – is thus described as a Naturalwirtschaft, a naturally occurring, premodern barter economy where the rule is distribution in kind, and the female prisoner’s main object of barter is her own body, desired by camp officials and trafficked on the camp marketplace in exchange for the precious commodity of time. As Roland Barthes has famously noted in his S/Z, Scheherazade’s model of prolonged life in exchange for a tale well told and the desire generated by the anticipation of an ending are part of the value inherent in the narrative situation: Narrative: legal tender, subject to contract, economic stakes, in short, merchandise, barter which, as in Sarrasine [the object of Barthes’s essay], can turn into haggling, no longer restricted to the publisher’s office but represented, en abyme, in the narrative. This is the theory Sarrasine offers as a fable. This is the question raised, perhaps, by every narrative. What should the narrative be exchanged for? What is the narrative ‘worth’? Here, the narrative is exchange for a body (a contract of prostitution); elsewhere it can purchase life itself (in The Thousand and One Nights, one story of Scheherazade equals one day of continued life) … (S/Z 89; author’s emphasis)

In Presser’s De nacht der Girondijnen, however, this model is perverted as a ‘desire’ for the text is replaced by mere physical lust, and only sexual favours are acceptable payment for the valuable and singular commodity

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of extra time. This relationship between time and desire – whether it be textual or carnal – will undergo yet another shift at the end of Presser’s novella: the text reveals, once more, its value as the exchange currency of time, allowing Jacob (who by now has abandoned his morally compromised alter ego, Jacques) to participate in an economy of narrative exchange by disseminating his textual testimony. In this way, Jacob gains testimonial immortality just as he is poised to leave both the camp and this life, setting in motion the complex and theoretically infinite transmission and translation of testimony from witness to witness. The movement of Jacob’s written testimony from within the camp walls to the space beyond them is tantamount to a physical translation – in the Latin sense of translatio – of a now sacred text, echoing the figurative movement of silenced prisoners’ sacred remains that we have already traced in chapter 1. Though translatio normally implies the movement of these remains to a more appropriate resting place, here the very locus of the sacred ‘resting’ ground is paradoxically defined by its infinite motion, in that the sacred text is demonstrably transmitted through its projection beyond even diegetic walls, to Levi’s Italian audience and his new testimonial circumstance. Cohn’s elementary economics lesson to Jacques/Jacob on the implicit meaning of the ‘natural economy’ ends with his confession that he, at one time, had studied economics formally at university, establishing his authority as a concentrationary economist in at least two senses. First, his comments mark him quite early on in the text as a theorist of economic exchange and as one who sees the camp’s various human dynamics in decidedly economic terms. Furthermore, Cohn’s treatment of the natural economy both in his exposition of it to Jacques/Jacob and in his own participation in it paints him as a savvy profiteer, one who understands the camp economy to such an extent that he can position himself within the system to his own maximum benefit. The ‘natural economy,’ interestingly, is only discussed in De nacht der Girondijnen in terms of this sexual subset of barter exchanges. As the narrator tells us a few segments after his initiation to the camp economy, ‘dat leven bestaat uit de jacht op een schoenveter, uit de ruzie om een plaatsje bij de kachel, uit de vluchtige, naturalwirtschaftliche ontmoeting met een vrouw, uit ondraaglijke eenzaamheid in ondraaglijke volte’ (46) (that life [in Westerbork] consists of the pursuit of a shoelace, of the fight over a place near the fire, of a fleeting barter-like encounter with a woman, of unbearable loneliness in the unbearable crowd). Levi’s translation of this passage further underscores this sexual specificity. Where Presser’s description of Jacques/

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Jacob’s life in the Westerbork camp hierarchy is made up of a list of four syntactically similar components, Levi links the last two (fleeting sexual barter and unbearable loneliness) in one, decidedly causal, phrase: ‘la vita consiste nella caccia ad una stringa da scarpe, nel litigio per un posticino vicino alla stufa, nel contatto fugace e zoologico (l’“economia naturale” di Cohn!) con una donna, per sfuggire alla intollerabile solitudine in mezzo all’affollamento intollerabile’ (Notte 62). Levi’s combination of these last two components entails the addition of a verb and a structure of purpose (‘per sfuggire alla intollerabile solitudine’), justifying and therefore mitigating the moral gravity of Jacques/Jacob’s participation in the sexual naturalwirtschaft. Further complicating the moral landscape of the novella with respect to Presser’s already intense exploration of the grey zone is Levi’s particularizing rendering of naturalwirtschaft’s adverbial form. The addition of ‘zoologico’ to further describe the ‘economia naturale’ and, above all, the proprietary projection of that system onto Cohn where in the source text no attribution is given reveal a subtle shift of moral weight from implicit acceptance on the part of the protagonist (in the source text) to the overarching authority of his ‘boss’ (in Levi’s translation). As in the example of Jacques/ Jacob’s encounter with Ninon, Levi’s particularizing decisions ultimately have the effect of foregrounding the protagonist’s personal moral struggle, in the first case by turning Ninon’s accusation directly to Jacques/Jacob, and in the second by reiterating Cohn’s gravitational moral pull on the protagonist. This idiosyncratic specificity – the implied exclusively sexual nature of the natural economy – with respect to the accepted usage of the term reflects the general rule of camp signification systems that we have already outlined above: the rules that govern the camp economy and even the objects that circulate within it are unique to that system and do not pass beyond its walls unchanged. Presser’s narrator reiterates this when he comments on his own participation in the exchange of sex for ‘borrowed’ time: van relaties moet veelal de redding komen, zeker, wanneer een stempel het niet doet of een lijst platzt. Vooral Cohn is dan heel gezocht, maar ook zijn nederige adjudant heeft meermalen aanbiedingen gekregen, in geld of in natura, waar zijn oren van tuitten, tot een record, in geld dan, van veertigduizend gulden: alleen maar om een voorspraak bij de machtige. Er zijn wel een paar dames, die hun hoofd zullen afwenden, wanneer ze me ooit nog eens tegenkomen in Amsterdam-Zuid – de kans is maar klein. (66; emphasis mine)

Infinite Transaction 161 one’s salvation must often come from connections, whenever a stamp isn’t enough or a list goes up in smoke. Cohn is especially sought after in these cases, but many times even his humble aide de camp has gotten special offers, in money or in barter, that made his ears ring; the record, in cash, was an offer of forty thousand guilders, just for an intercession with that powerful man. And there are probably a few ladies who will look the other way if they ever bump into me in South Amsterdam – but that’s very unlikely.

Once again addressing the specific category of payment ‘in barter’ to which Jacques/Jacob is entitled for his ‘work,’ we learn that should his economic and sexual partners emerge from the camp system to circulate again in the normal world of Amsterdam – which here acquires a kind of symbolic power as it is juxtaposed with the perverted world of the camp – the rules of moral comportment would revert back to those in force on extramural terrain. In a similar way, when Sonja Ptaznik, the ‘kampslet’ (72) (camp slut) volunteers to accompany a group of orphans on a transport to Auschwitz, she removes herself from circulation within the camp economy of sex, favours, and week-long timeunits of reprieve, instead initiating a new circuit of fatal movement within the larger concentrationary system. The Human Economy Above and beyond the specific exchange value – a week of time – established between the work of Jacques/Jacob and Cohn on the one hand and the sexual favours of the female prisoners on the other, the ‘invisible hand’ of the camp’s dynamic does function to establish certain exchange values within its own confines. One of the most striking examples of this occurs, not coincidentally, in the very context of the circulation of gossip that we have already seen in Levi’s introduction to his ‘Al di qua del bene e del male’ analysis of the camp’s economic dynamic.56 Jacques/Jacob’s description of the camp’s active rumour mill and the unique weekly cycle that the transport schedule imposes on its activities moves from the general focus (the train schedule) of most of the week’s rumour noise to a more specific gaze on the prisoners’ destiny, and thus their potential relationship to the world ‘outside’: Op zondagmiddag dus richt [de geruchten-projector] zich om en wel naar binnen, op ons, op de eerstkomende dagen en uren en wordt dan inderdaad kinderlijk onnauwkeurig. De trein komt noot: hij komt altijd.

162 Arduous Tasks Schaufinger is er niet; Schaufinger is er ook altijd … Men zal ons uitwisselen: Joden zijn blijkbaar te kostbaar of te waardeloos om tegen iets, tegen wat ook ter wereld, te worden uitgewisseld. De regering in Londen moet …, Zweden mag …, Stalin wil …, Rossevelt kan …, Churchill zal … Van al die zekerheden leidt minstens één causale lijn naar de volgende: er komt déze week geen transport. Het transport komt toch, natuurlijk, altijd. Een klok kan nog stilstaan, maar de trein komt. (63; emphasis mine) On Sunday afternoon, then, [the rumour mill] is directed inward, on us, on the coming days and hours, and becomes childishly inaccurate. The train isn’t coming: it always comes. Schaufinger isn’t there: Schaufinger is always there … They are going to exchange us: apparently Jews are either too valuable or too worthless to be exchanged against anything, against anything in the world. The government in London must … Sweden may … Stalin wants … Roosevelt can … Churchill will … Of all these certainties at least one logical line leads to the following conclusion: the transport won’t come this week. The transport comes all the same, always. The clock may stop, but the train comes.

With the climax of this extended description of the ebb and flow of the collective camp psychology comes speculation that perhaps all of the prisoners will be exchanged for other prisoners of war. In other words, their hope is that they may be put into the greater circulation of a much more open wartime human prisoner economy, thus bringing the ‘value’ of the Westerbork prisoner population in line with that of the rest of the world and breaking the economic insularity of the univers concentrationnaire. But these hopes are thwarted with the realization that the Jews of the camp have a value that is not commensurate – perhaps too valuable, perhaps not valuable enough – with other possible units of exchange and thus cannot enter into open circulation within the same symbolic system. While Presser is emphatically ambiguous in his description of potential units of corresponding value – ’iets,’ ‘wat’ – Levi characteristically specifies the ‘oggetti’ and the ‘creature’ with which Westerbork’s Jews cannot be exchanged: ‘Ci scambieranno: ma, a quanto pare, gli ebrei valgono troppo, o troppo poco, per poter essere scambiati contro qualsiasi oggetto o creatura sulla faccia della terra’ (Notte 80; emphasis mine). Levi’s particularizing strategy, his decision to explicitly imagine human and nonhuman objects that exist outside the closed symbolic human economy of Westerbork, suggests a much broader perspective than that inherent in Presser’s source text, in temporal but also in conceptual terms. In other

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words, where Presser’s novella often underscores the challenges of testimonial narrative, Levi’s translation seeks – and sees – specificity beyond camp walls. This tendency is not only a hallmark of the distance and breadth (the realm of theory or the critical, as Paul de Man would say)57 that Levi’s translatorly position brings, but also reveals a preoccupation with exactly how and on what terms Holocaust testimony will circulate in broader circuits of signification. Even within the closed exchange dynamic of the Westerbork camp, there exists a hierarchy of human value, one governed by more general economic principles. In an interesting moment in the development of the pious Hirsch (the observant Jew who eventually leads Jacob to a deeper understanding of his own ethical position and whose deportation prompts Jacob’s ‘liberatory’ slap of Cohn), we see him emerge not only as a general foil to the character of Cohn, a competing guide and mentor to the still-split character of Jacques/Jacob, but also, like Cohn, as a theorist of economics. Not surprisingly, as we see in the following passage, political economy, circulation, and morality are tightly bound up with each other: ‘Maar zelfs hier, wat nóg erger is dan Sodom en Gomorra bijelkaar, zelfs hier vind je nog een paar rechtvaardigen. Niet zo erg veel, maar in elk geval meer dan jij en jouw soort …’ ‘Mijn soort?’ ‘Ja, Henriques, jij en jouw soort. Kijk maar kwaad; ik weet heus wel wat ik zeg. Onder jouw sóórt (hoor je goed?) kijken ze altijd neer op het volk. Jouw soort immers is het die dat volk laat vóórgaan naar Polen; eerst de mensen met de petten en daarna pas de mensen met de hoeden. Als jijzelf geen halve fascist was, had je dat al uit Marx kunnen beredeneren; ik heb helemaal geen economie gehad en behelp me maar met een ander boek, dat je ook niet kent. Toch staat daar precies in, niet alleen, hoe verleidelijk zo iets kan wezen, maar ook, hoe verschrikkelijk erg het is.’ (Nacht 59–60; emphasis mine) ‘But even here, a worse place than Sodom and Gomorrah put together, even here you find a few just men. Not many, to be sure, but in any case more than among you and your kind …’ ‘My kind?’ ‘Yes, Henriques, you and your kind. Go ahead, look angry; I know exactly what I’m saying. Your kind (are you hearing me?) always look down at the common people. Your kind, after all, are the ones that let those people go first to Poland; first the men with caps and only then the men with hats. If

164 Arduous Tasks you weren’t half fascist yourself, you could have figured it out from Marx; I never studied economics, and so I make do with another book that you don’t know. All the same, there you’ll find precisely not only how tempting such a thing can be, but also, how very destructive it is.’

Hirsch seizes on the unjust circulation of human beings within the camp economy (the poor are selected first) and holds this practice up to Marx’s economic critique of capital’s exploitation of society’s weakest members. The irony of Hirsch’s juxtaposition of these two different defences of poverty – Judaeo-Christian and Marxist – lies in the locus of its occurrence: the camp. Though both philosophies stem from a critique of any society that cannot see the individual beyond his or her role as an agent of economic production, this unique society happens to bill itself as a transit camp whose population is eternally en route to fill the voracious ‘labour’ needs of its destination camp. Of course, it is precisely the weakest members of the camp society (the disabled, the elderly, children) – who do not productively work according to modern notions of the term – who are euphemistically selected for ‘labour duty’ and deported. As such, the camp’s logic further perverts an already aberrant selection process by masquerading the deportation of the weakest as precisely what it is not. When Levi translates Hirsch’s musings on the tempting and corrupting danger inherent in inequalities of power, he is compelled, again, to particularize Presser’s ambiguity. In Marx, Hirsch contends, ‘ci troveresti descritto con precisione non solo quanto una posizione come la tua possa sedurre e perveritire, ma anche la sua spaventosa malvagità’ (Notte 77; emphasis mine). Thus ‘zo iets’ (that sort of thing) becomes ‘una posizione come la tua’ (a position such as yours); and ‘verleidelijk’ (tempting, seductive) is rendered not merely with the verb ‘sedurre’ (to seduce) but additionally with ‘pervertire’ (to pervert). What starts out as Presser’s indictment of Jewish self-loathing and class conflict is strikingly refocused, in Levi’s translation, on the potential of individual power in such a society to pervert one’s personal moral code. Also of note in this passage is Hirsch’s explicit comparison of Marx’s ‘sacred’ book of economic principles with his own sacred book, the book of scripture. This is only the beginning of the establishment of ‘Hirsch’s book’ – the Bible – as the benchmark for sacred writing and reading, and of a series of texts that will be duly validated in their comparison to it: from Marx’s Kapital to Jacques/ Jacob’s own diary, the very text that has breached the walls of the

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camp in order to be disseminated to reader-witnesses such as Primo Levi and, in turn, us. The Textual Economy Hirsch’s focus on the circulation of sacred texts, especially in the closed circuit of his relationship with Jacques/Jacob, is emblematic of a broader preoccupation with this same issue on both the extradiegetic level of Presser’s historiography and the diegetic level of Jacques/Jacob’s story. The protagonist’s awareness of the materiality of his own testimonial document is established as a matter of textual importance from the novella’s very first lines: ‘Nog eenmaal wil ik het proberen. Misschien mislukt het ook nu en weigert de som wéér uit te komen, net als veertien dagen geleden, net als de vorige week’ (Nacht 9) (I want to give it another try. Maybe I’ll fail again now, and it won’t add up any more than it did two weeks ago, any more than last week). The novella that we hold in our hands is nothing less than the textual manifestation of Jacques/ Jacob’s eventual narrative success, and his two previous failed attempts – one in each of two weeks – in fact mirror and parody the brutal punctuality of the camp’s once-weekly transport departures for Auschwitz. Indeed, the narrative and textual conduit that emerges from this first passage is essentially traumatic and circular,58 not only echoing camp time but also following the closed, repetitive pattern of his own traumatic memory59 and mocking the kind of open circulation that Jacques/ Jacob’s testimony truly demands. In the following passage, which has already been cited in part and amply commented on in the context of this text’s transmissive impulse, this traumatic anxiety is abundantly clear: Ik herlees de vorige alinea en stel vast: zo, zó was het. Poe zou dit anders verteld hebben, maar nog eens: ZO WAS HET. Twee strepen zet ik onder die woorden, niet alleen voor mezelf; ik richt me tevens tot een meelezer, die over mijn schouder heen kijkt. Wie, week ik niet. Als dit document naar mijn wil het kamp uitgesmokkeld wordt, zal er eens, ergens zo iemand wezen. (12) I’ve reread the last paragraph and affirm: it was exactly like this. Poe would have told it differently, but once again: IT WAS LIKE THIS. I underline these words twice, not only for myself; I am also addressing a fellow reader, who is looking over my shoulder. Who it is, I don’t know. When this document, as I wish, will be smuggled out of the camp, someday, there will be someone, somewhere.

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Jacques/Jacob writes with the hope – indeed, the knowledge – that his text will circulate outside the camp, transmitted by illegal means, and probably to a non-Jewish audience. Interestingly, Levi translates Jacques/Jacob’s ‘uitgesmokkeld wordt’ as ‘sarà contrabbandato’: his use of ‘contrabbando’ (instead of phrases associated with the semantic field of hiding, such as ‘passare clandestinamente’ or ‘di nascosto’) to describe this illicit passage from zone to zone underscores illegal transfer in trade, and suggests that some legally required duty for the smuggled text in money or in kind has gone unpaid. The use on Presser’s and Levi’s part of such a transgressive and economically charged model of transmission once again prompts us to ask, with Roland Barthes, what is this particular text ‘worth’? Just as does Levi’s epigraphic poem ‘Shemà,’ this novella and Levi’s translation of it participate in the dynamic model of interactive testimonial transmission being described throughout the present study: it too represents, en abyme, the very narrative contract that it diegetically describes: ‘one narrates in order to obtain by exchanging; and it is this exchange that is represented in the narrative itself: narrative is both product and production, merchandise and commerce, a stake and the bearer of that stake ...’ (S/Z 89). We should recall, in this key, that when Levi initiates his engagement with Presser’s text, his own reading practices mimic the same circular and traumatic behaviour that we see in Jacques/Jacob’s writing: ‘Su questo racconto sono caduto per caso, parecchi anni fa; l’ho letto, riletto molte volte, e non mi è più uscito di mente’ (I came upon this story by chance, a number of years ago; I’ve read it, reread it many times and haven’t gotten it out of my head since). Until, that is, he is able to break out of the closed circuit of trauma to produce a translation that may circulate in a more open textual and symbolic economy. In the complex chain of interpretation, writing, and transmission that embraces both Presser’s and Levi’s involvement with this story, it is precisely this traumatic return to the scene of memory and writing that produces the text and spurs on its circulation. Diegetically, Jacques/Jacob’s written testimony does not circulate at all as text until the novella’s penultimate segment when Jacob, having finally completed the text we hold in our hands and facing deportation the next day with Dé, gives his text to her to read: Dat is alles, alles, ik heb niets weggelaten, ik heb er niets aan toegevoegd; het is alles; dit is, wat ik heb gedaan, of wat door mij, mét mij gedaan is: alles. …

Infinite Transaction 167 En zo ben ik er nu toch. Zelfs heeft Dé het nog kunnen lezen, voordat het straks de barak uitgaat. De som is gemaakt en er staat een uitkomst, goed of verkeerd. (80–1) That is everything, everything, I haven’t omitted anything, I haven’t added anything; it is everything; this is what I have done, or what has been done through me, with me: everything. … And so I’m really there. Dé has even been able to read it, before it leaves the barracks in a little while. The tally has been made and there is an outcome, for better or worse.

The textual translatio sketched out in De nacht der Girondijnen’s last pages is in fact realized historiographically seven years later in Ondergang, when Presser uses the diary of a young Jewish functionary – notably similar to Jacques/Jacob’s text in duration and characteristics – as a resource for his emplotment of the Dutch Holocaust. Presser tells us in the chapter dedicated to the Westerbork camp that [o]ne of the Jews who was forced to help the Germans in this ghastly work [of ‘processing’ Jews before transport to Poland] has left an extremely valuable legacy, in the form of his diary. He was an FK [Fliegende Kolonne, or Flying Column] man in Westerbork, one of those whose task it was to deal with the victims’ luggage. His account covers that whole week of October 1–7, 1942. (Ondergang 410)

Later, in his description of the organization of the typical transit camp, Presser goes into detail about two very similar components of the Jewish camp hierarchy, the aforementioned Fliegende Kolonne (FK) and the OD, or Ordendienst (Special Service), explicitly linking them textually in an extended comparison and contrast section (422–3) and noting that both were inhabitants of the camp’s complex moral grey zone.60 The OD was known as the ‘“Jewish SS” … “The whole camp hated them like the plague.” The FK was little better; though mainly concerned with the baggage, they were only too often assigned the sort of jobs which allowed them to lord it over their fellows’ (424). While I am not suggesting that Presser based his Jacques/Jacob character entirely on the model of his FK diary source, it is plausible to see Jacques/Jacob as a composite character: created with the outline of the FK man’s diary, but fleshed out with the moral dilemmas of a teacher whom

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Presser actually knew and, of course, those lived by Presser himself.61 In the light of this illumination from Presser’s Ondergang it is clear that in Presser’s capacity as historian, he succeeds in literally transmitting a number of testimonies – the diary of his FK man, the story of his teacher acquaintance, his own experience, and his wife’s – over the walls of both concentrationary and figured literary spaces. Out of these passages, then, emerges a striking parallelism between story and history: as readers of Presser’s novella, we know that the story’s protagonist did, in fact, succeed in smuggling his pages outside the camp walls; at the same time, as students of Holocaust historiography, we know that Jacob Presser used this novella as a springboard to the completion of his history of the Dutch Holocaust. As such, he too was able to ‘smuggle’ the stories of his friends and interviewees outside the confining limits of camp experience to the larger audience of the Dutch reading public. Presser’s translation of the text of Holocaust experience in Ondergang is thus already figured in Jacques/Jacob’s projection of his text, first to Dé, its ideal internal reader, and then beyond the camp’s walls, in the transgressive and ‘contraband’ textual crossing of that threshold, and eventually in the realization of Jacques/Jacob’s hopes for a reader (‘someone, somewhere’) on the other side. Levi, as the translator of La notte dei Girondini, participates in the fulfilment of Jacques/Jacob’s testimonial project. Not surprisingly, Levi’s presence on this scene of (finally) successful writing and hoped-for transmission is marked by his characteristic assertion of translatorly agency in terms of textual macrostructure and detailed translation decisions. Levi’s general tendency to alter both the paragraph and the segment configurations of Presser’s source novella is particularly striking in these last pages of the translation, where he ‘borrows’ the first few sentences of the last segment and shifts them to the end of the penultimate one: Ho finito. Ho detto tutto, non ho tralasciato niente, non ho aggiunto niente. È tutto: quello che ho fatto, quello che si è fatto per mio mezzo, quello che è stato fatto davanti a me. Tutto. Ci sono riuscito, dunque: e anche Dé ha potuto leggerle, queste pagine, prima che io le faccia uscire dalla baracca. Il conto è fatto, e qui c’è il risultato, giusto o sbagliato che sia. (Notte 99–100; emphasis mine) …

While Presser’s source text organization reserves the entire matter of transmission to Dé and her reaction to the text for the very last paragraphs,

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Levi’s configuration places Dé’s reception of the text in the penultimate segment, making her reaction to it in the last segment – after the noticeable suspense of a full-page typographical break – all that much more dramatic. As is his custom, Levi also makes significant particularizing changes to the source text; in this example, as in others, in the space between source and target lie precisely the artefacts of Levi’s mediation of the text. First, he renders Presser’s somewhat redundant ‘Dat is alles, alles …’ with two different active verbs (‘Ho finito,’ ‘Ho detto’) in the perfect tense, adding a definitive finality to the source text’s claims to a totalizing narrative. Secondly, what Presser’s Dutch expresses with the pronoun ‘het,’ referring to the story’s textual representation, is expressed in decidedly more concrete terms in Levi’s Italian, which underscores the text’s materiality: ‘anche Dé ha potuto leggerle, queste pagine.’ Levi’s rendering further foregrounds this element in the last sentence, where he translates ‘en er staat een uitkomst’ as ‘e qui c’è il risultato,’ emphasizing the physical presence of the material text with the addition of the adverb ‘qui’ to add emphasis to ‘c’è.’ Perhaps the most emblematic shift in this passage, however, is Levi’s version of Presser’s ‘voordat het straks de barak uitgaat,’ or his description of the text’s movement out of the camp barracks. Where Presser’s subject is the text itself, which will actively ‘go out’ of the barracks, Levi projects the action of the movement onto the protagonist – or better, the writer – of the text himself: ‘prima che io le faccia uscire dalla baracca.’ It is in this gesture of writerly autonomy that Levi makes his translatorly presence most clear: by granting the protagonist as writing witness the agency to explicitly make the text circulate, he simultaneously claims that same power for himself as translator of the text in question, now ‘fatto uscire’ into even broader testimonial circuits. ‘Il re dei Giudei’: Recirculating the Coin The various morally charged economies that inhere in the camp’s logic – human, moral, testimonial, and textual – suggest that this study of De nacht der Girondijen would not be complete without some consideration of Holocaust numismatics: the circulation of minted currency within concentrationary spaces. Coins that are minted for use specifically within a particular political or economic jurisdiction are much like the words of a pidgin language such as the Lagerjargon of the Nazi camps: if a coin loses its capacity for exchange in more broadly defined economies, it also surrenders its symbolic value and returns to the realm of commodity, where its value is no more and no less than what it is

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worth in kind. Such a coin loses its ability to measure, in abstraction, another reality, as do specifically ‘minted’ terms that can only describe a Lager reality, so that no effort is made to convert them – or translate them, as the case may be – to more open forms of currency. The close relationship between signification, exchange, and morality was not lost on Primo Levi. Indeed, Levi’s preoccupation with these issues seeped out of ‘Al di qua del bene e del male’ and De nacht der Girondijnen into a traumatically repeating essay that takes Holocaust numismatics as its visual emblem, point of departure, and organizing principle. Levi’s moral portrait of the infamous grey zoner Chaim Rumkowski was published as ‘Il re dei Giudei’ a scant year after the publication of La notte dei Girondini; the essay’s debt to Levi’s engagement with Presser’s novella and its economic frameworks is more than clear. This concluding section examines the matter of Holocaust numismatics, Levi’s essay on ‘Il re dei Giudei,’ and what they might tell us about the morality of narrative exchange. The following anecdote about the currency of De nacht der Girondijnen’s Westerbork is an illuminating point of departure. The Westerbork transit camp was, according to Arnold L. Shay, one of only two Dutch camps with its own camp money (46). Once thought rare, the currency of Westerbork is now one of the most commonly found after the discovery of a large sum of notes in the attic of a surviving prisoner in the late 1960s. As Alan York writes, ‘This collector had held on to them in despair, not knowing what to do with them: To destroy them or release them. They were brought in to the numismatic market by a prominent Dutch stamp dealer whose effort made it possible for today’s collectors and museums to have a set of these historically important numismatic documents’ (25–6). Much as survivors are in the difficult position of not knowing whether to treat their tales of survival with silence or narration – in other words, ‘destroy them or release them’ – this Westerbork survivor was at an impasse regarding the circulation of his coins. The decision to put the various currencies of the Nazi camps into wider circulation is often undertaken by figures, like the ‘prominent Dutch stamp dealer,’ who recognize the value that the coin has acquired as an artefact of its specific historical situation and who assume the role of custodian and agent. The circuit of ‘collections and museums’ in which the Westerbork notes now move constitutes a new market and a resulting revaluation of the currency. No longer hoarded by a traumatized inmate frozen between the destruction or reissue of a once valueless signifier, this

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currency can now acquire new meaning, and new value, by dint of the markets and circuits in which it now travels. This story is illustrative of the inherent potential of camp-issued currencies to figure the processes and challenges of testimonial narrative, both about and outside of the Lager. Another example of this process is to be found in Primo Levi’s 1977 essay ‘Il re dei Giudei.’ Introduced not only narratively but graphically by a materially present Lodz ghetto coin,62 Levi’s essay recounts the tale of Chaim Rumkowski and the destruction of the Lodz ghetto, making explicit his own connection to the coin in a quite conventional introductory framing gesture: Al mio ritorno da Auschwitz mi sono trovato in tasca una curiosa moneta in lega leggera, quella che si vede qui riprodotta. È graffiata e corrosa; reca su una faccia la stella ebraica (Lo ‘Scudo di Davide’), la data 1943, e la parola getto, che alla tedesca si legge ghetto; sull’altra faccia, le scritte Quittung über 10 Mark e Der Aelteste der Juden in Litzmannstadt, e cioè rispettivamente ‘Quietanza su 10 marchi’ e ‘Il decano degli ebrei in Litzmannstadt’. Per molti anni non me ne sono curato; ho portato la moneta per qualche tempo nel portamonete, forse attribuendole inavvertitamente il valore di un portafortuna, poi l’ho lasciata a giacere in fondo ad un cassetto. Di recente, notizie che ho trovate presso varie fonti mi hanno permesso di ricostruirne almeno in parte la storia, ed è una storia non comune, affascinante e sinistra. (‘Il re dei Giudei,’ LI II.67)63 Upon my return from Auschwitz, I discovered a curious aluminum coin in my pocket, the one reproduced here. It’s scratched and corroded, on one face it has the Jewish star (the ‘Star of David’), the date 1943, and the word getto, which in German is read ghetto; on the other face, the words Quittung über 10 Mark and Der Aelteste der Juden in Litzmannstadt, that is, respectively ‘Acquittance of 10 marks’ and ‘The elder of the Jews in Litzmannstadt.’ For many years I paid no attention to it; I carried the coin in my wallet for some time, maybe inadvertently attributing to it the value of a good-luck charm, then I let it sit at the bottom of a drawer. Recently, I have found information from a number of sources that has allowed me to reconstruct its story, at least in part; it is singular, fascinating, and sinister.

First printed on 20 November 1977 under Levi’s weekly rubric in La Stampa, the piece was republished tale quale in the 1981 collection Lilít, and then as the second of two extended case studies that make up

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Levi’s fundamental essay on ‘La zona grigia’ (‘The Grey Zone’) in I sommersi e i salvati.64 I shall have reason to return to the almost ten-year duration of this story’s reformulation in Levi’s oeuvre: not only does this extended and repeated republication of the ‘Re dei Giudei’ story thematically resonate with the traumatic mode of testimony that pervades this entire study, from Levi’s translations of Dante and Coleridge to his translation of Kafka’s Prozeß; but it will also bear upon the consideration of the circulation of Rumkowski’s story and the numismatic testimony that it contains. For now, however, it is precisely this essay’s numismatic nature that will occupy our attention, insofar as the greyzone theme and the economic trope that were juxtaposed to such powerful effect in Presser’s novella are here inextricably and explicitly bound together in Levi’s essay – much as message and precious metal are bound together – precisely in the form of the minted coinage of the Lodz ghetto. We have discussed at some length the essentially ‘inconvertible’ or untranslatable nature of the ad hoc economic system of Auschwitz, based on the trade of tobacco and coupons created by the issuing authority for internal camp purposes but in fact traded to greater benefit with the civilian workers who represented a forbidden, foreign, importexport zone beyond the barbed-wire fence; and of alimentary items that occupied an ambiguous zone between currency and commodity. Joel Forman, in his article ‘Holocaust Numismatics,’ explains that ‘the concept of money issued specifically for Jews began in 1933 with the emergence of “conversion money.” Forced to sell their property at extremely low prices, the Jews were paid with this conversion money and not in German marks. This money was good only outside Germany’ (1; emphasis mine). Jews were thus made, in effect, to subsidize their own internment with the exchange of legal national moneys for campspecific currencies that were only valid within the space and time of the univers concentrationnaire. Similarly, as a rule, Jews were ‘paid’ for their work in labour camps and ghettos in camp money that they were then forced to use to purchase food rations and basic sustenance needs. These practices contributed, in large measure, to the creation of individual camp autarkies, closed economies whose currencies were ‘convertible’ only in one direction: that of Nazi coffers. Created for purposes of real and psychological isolation by removing a tool of survival on the ‘outside’ for potential escapees and denying prisoners ‘a financial relationship to the outside world’ (Forman 1), the minting of monetary coinage and scrip in labour and concentration camps was

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also part of an elaborate Nazi strategy for the containment both of Jews and of their material belongings; as such, Nazi monetary practices extended back to the very origins of forced concentration, the ghettos that represented the first step in the ‘Final Solution.’ The Lodz ghetto described by Levi as part of his research of the 10 Mark coin that he found in his pocket upon returning from Auschwitz65 after the war was precisely one of these ghetto economies, this one unique, according to Forman, for its issue of coin monies. Forman also provides another striking detail that Levi does not in his own discussion of the Lodz monetary system: in an inversion of the evolution from mostly alimentary commodity to currency that we trace in Levi’s ‘Al di qua …’ description of the camp black-market economy, this coinage eventually reverted to commodity status when economic conditions dictated: ‘After being redesigned, the coins went into production toward the end of 1942. They were made of magnesium, a flammable metallic element that became a source of heat when ghetto inhabitants burned them instead of the virtually nonexistent fuel’ (7; emphasis mine). This inversion of the normal development of modern monetary systems is more than a mere rehearsal of the topsy-turvy inversions inherent in the camp universe. Rather, it represents a negation of the creation of symbolic meaning and its exchange that the minting of a coin performs.66 The numismatic circuits of the Third Reich’s concentrationary universe were indeed as corrupt as other vehicles of symbolic meaning. According to Forman, despite the fact that the existence of a monetary system was typical of all Nazi ghettos and camps, the participation of idiosyncratic leadership in the persons of Nazi governors and Jewish Council leaders ensured that these camp systems did not interact with each other: even within the larger Nazi system of economic flow and exchange, the individual camp currencies were unconvertible, untranslatable.67 Levi’s possession of the Lodz ghetto coin would seem to simultaneously confirm and challenge the status of camp currency that we have sketched out here. Despite the presence of the Lodz ghetto coin on Auschwitz territory and Levi’s material possession of it, implying at least a physical circulation of the Lodz currency beyond its intended boundaries, it had no value as legal tender in its new environment, that in which it was ostensibly found by Levi. But Levi’s testimonial repossession of the coin, his ability to turn this icon of the corruption of economic and moral economies alike into a talisman – a ‘portafortuna,’ in his words – exacts new meaning from it, minting it anew in a kind of testimonial alchemy.

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Complete with its textual reproduction-cum-reinscription, Levi’s numismatic analysis of his Auschwitz souvenir constitutes a performative enactment of the coin’s new value, now tied to Levi’s testimony in at least three different published sites. As we have already seen, camp numismatic systems differ from those in more open symbolic systems in their untranslatability. This condition is the result not only of the insulated nature of camp activity and the production of meaning within it, but also of the counterfeit nature of much of the symbolic material circulated within the camp’s various economies. In Levi’s introduction to ‘Al di qua …’ he underscores the existence of opposing representations of an unknown referent, showing how both true and counterfeit interpretations circulate as functional equivalents. In the same way, circulating versions of Chaim Rumkowski’s ultimate end or ‘meaning’ are also characterized by Levi as bivalent. Offering competing versions of Rumkowski’s fate in the following excerpt, Levi implies once again a de facto equivalency in the ghetto system between true and counterfeit signs that results in a devaluation of all signs, and thus the system in which they participate. As Levi tells us, Sul destino finale di Chaim Rumkowski esistono due versioni, come se l’ambiguità sotto il cui segno era vissuto si fosse prolungata ad avvolgere la sua morte. Secondo la prima, durante la liquidazione del ghetto egli avrebbe cercato di opporsi alla deportazione di suo fratello, da cui non voleva separarsi; un ufficiale tedesco gli avrebbe allora proposto di partire volontariamente insieme con lui, e Rumkowski avrebbe accettato. Secondo un’altra versione, il salvataggio di Rumkowski dalla morte tedesca sarebbe stato tentato da Hans Biebow, altro personaggio cinto dalla nube della doppiezza … Biebow … avrebbe voluto dilazionare lo scioglimento del ghetto, che per lui era un ottimo affare, e preservare dalla deportazione Rumkowski, suo amico e socio: dove si vede come ben spesso un realista sia migliore di un teorico. Ma i teorici delle SS erano di parere contrario, ed erano i piú forti. Erano gründlich, radicali: via il ghetto e via Rumkowski. (‘Il re dei Giudei,’ LI II.71; emphasis mine) There are two versions of Chaim Rumkowski’s fate, as if the ambiguity under whose sign he had lived had extended itself to his death. According to the first version, during the camp’s liquidation, he tried to protest the deportation of his brother, from whom he did not want to be separated; a German official then reportedly proposed that he voluntarily leave with him,

Infinite Transaction 175 and Rumkowski reportedly accepted. According to another version, Hans Biebow, another character enveloped in the cloud of duplicity, tried to gain Rumkowski’s safety … Biebow … would have preferred to postpone the liquidation of the ghetto, which was quite profitable for him, and save Rumkowski, his friend and partner, from deportation: proof that a realist is often better than a theoretician. But the SS theoreticians were against this, and were stronger than he. They were gründlich, radical: away with the ghetto and away with Rumkowski.

When these representations or signs circulate within a more open field of signification – our own, for example – the possibility for more valid signification is expanded. Levi allows his conclusion of the Rumkowski exemplum to stand as a conclusion to I sommersi e i salvati’s entire grey-zone chapter, and he does so by returning to the juxtaposition of closed and open signification. Perhaps most striking in the paragraph that follows is Levi’s tendency consistently to cast the grey zone in terms of its multiplicity of meaning and its often frustrating demand for interpretation or, better, translation. Here Levi substitutes the concentrationnaire corruption of counterfeit signs with the fullness and multiplicity of interpretive possibility by subjecting those signs to the interpretation of more open systems: Una storia come questa non è chiusa in sé. È pregna, pone piú domande di quante ne soddisfaccia, e lascia sospesi; grida e chiama per essere interpretata, perché vi si intravvede un simbolo, come nei sogni e nei segni del cielo, ma interpretarla non è facile. (‘Il re dei Giudei,’ LI II.72; emphasis mine)68 A story like this one is not closed unto itself. It’s fraught, poses more questions than it satisfies, and leaves us waiting for answers. It screams and calls out to be interpreted, because a symbol can be seen in it, as in the dreams and the signs of the heavens, but interpreting it isn’t easy.

Levi’s involvement in the story, his translation of an inconvertible and possibly counterfeit sign, re-instils the Lodz ghetto coin with its symbolic, translatable, interpretable value. The coin’s origin and resistance to economic abstraction (and, by extension, its status as a trope of the typically concentrationnaire resistance to signification in general) render it materially and monetarily valueless outside the Lodz ghetto walls. However, the pretence of the coin’s ‘rediscovery’ in 1977 Turin gives Levi his point of departure for an extended discussion of the grey zone, performatively granting it new value as a testimonial talisman.

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This mechanism echoes Levi’s translation of De nacht der Girondijnen and the double movement of revaluation that it sets into motion. In his re-uttering of Presser’s little-known novella, Levi lent the text the authority of his experience and survivor persona. At the same time, Levi’s testimonial project is enriched by De nacht der Girondijnen’s incorporation into it as a vehicle for his preoccupations about the survivor’s condition and as a site of the translatorly artefacts of his engagement with the moral problematic of the grey zone. This was not to be the case for Levi’s best-known translation project, his 1983 translation of Franz Kafka’s Der Prozeß and the topic of the next chapter. Though Levi’s mediation of this latter text certainly recontexted Kafka’s tale of modern bureaucracy’s darker side in terms of post-Holocaust Italy and his own survivor persona, the effect of Der Prozeß on Levi’s thought was neither positive nor enriching, and ultimately came to represent Levi’s trauma in much more threatening ways than De nacht der Girondijnen’s literary – and relatively safe – abstractions ever could.

5 Palinodic Reversal: The Trials of Translation

Could it be said that Kafka’s trial is, indeed – above all legal trials – the ultimate trial of the century (the one that truly puts the century on trial)? … I offer this as food for thought: Great trials are perhaps specifically those trials whose very failures have their own necessity and their own literary, cultural, and jurisprudential speaking power. (Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious) The experience which corresponds to that of Kafka, the private individual, will probably not become accessible to the masses until such time as they are being done away with. (Walter Benjamin, ‘Some Reflections on Kafka’)

Introduction Franz Kafka’s troubling representations of humankind’s encounters with modernity have long been considered harbingers of the Nazi Holocaust, with their tales of stifling bureaucracy, desolate alienation, and dehumanizing technology. As Sidra Ezrahi notes in the introduction to her landmark By Words Alone, ‘Kafka is the writer whose fiction so fully expressed the logic of modern technology, mechanized sadism, and bureaucratic depersonalization that Auschwitz appears almost as the realization of the fantastic world blueprinted in The Penal Colony’ (5). Though the theme of large-scale mechanized justice in this story gives way to more psychologically oriented persecution and alienation in Kafka’s 1925 Der Prozeß, the latter work is no less appropriate in a discussion of literary foreshadowings of the Nazi Holocaust.1 We are

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told in the first sentence of Der Prozeß that Joseph K., ‘without having done anything wrong, was arrested one day,’ and then proceed to follow him through the labyrinthine process of a ‘case’ marked by shifting parameters, priorities, and protocols. After roughly one year of trying to navigate this unsteady terrain with the help of personal allegiances and lawyers for hire, Joseph K. is executed, dying ‘like a dog’ at the hands of nameless, faceless agents of the law to which he is destined to succumb, if chapter 9’s metadiegetic parable is to be integrated into the main line of the story. It is little wonder that commentators on Holocaust literature from Steiner to Ezrahi to Langer have focused on Kafka’s oeuvre as a font for creative responses to the Holocaust, as well as for aid in understanding the cultural and sociological conditions into which the Holocaust was born. It is likewise not surprising that survivor-writers such as Primo Levi would hear in Kafka’s work a troubling and unexpected echo of the univers concentrationnaire, and in that echo the possibility that its properties could possibly have seeped beyond the confines of the barbed-wire fence. In short, Kafka’s proximity – if not temporal, then conceptual and philosophical – to the imaginary and thematic world of the Holocaust makes him simultaneously a very attractive and a very dangerous figure for the Holocaust survivor. In this chapter, I explore the complex relationship that emerged between Franz Kafka, his protagonist Joseph K., and Primo Levi’s various private and public personae when Levi agreed to read Kafka’s text in the most intimate and dangerous way possible: as its translator. Perilous Traps [L]a sensibilità linguistica … gli consente di calarsi nella personalità dell’autore del testo tradotto, di identificarsi con lui, e lo avvisa quando nel testo qualcosa non quadra, non va, è stonato, non ha un senso compiuto, sembra superfluo o sfasato. Quando questo avviene, può trattarsi di una colpa dell’autore, ma piú spesso è un segnale: qualcuna delle tagliole descritte è lí, invisibile, ma con le mascelle spalancate. (‘Tradurre ed essere tradotti,’ AM II.733; emphasis mine) [A] particular linguistic sensibility … allows [the translator] to lower himself into the personality of the author of the translated text, to identify with him, and alerts him when there’s something amiss in the text, when it’s off, doesn’t ring true, doesn’t have a clear meaning, seems superfluous

Palinodic Reversal 179 or confusing. When this happens, it can be the author’s fault, but more often it’s a sign: there’s a trap there somewhere, invisible, but with its jaws wide open.

So Primo Levi wrote in his essay ‘Tradurre ed essere tradotti,’ which originally appeared in November 1980 under Levi’s weekly rubric in the Italian daily La Stampa, as ‘Lasciapassare per Babele.’ There is much in this passage to illuminate and guide our study of Levi’s translation work and its relationship to his larger literary oeuvre and philosophical preoccupations; specifically, despite having been written two years prior to Levi’s translation of Franz Kafka’s Der Prozeß, the essay has an uncanny relevance to that project’s unique problematic and its place in Levi’s thought. At the beginning of the passage, Levi’s recourse to images of empathetic ‘investment’ in the skin of the original author gives us a clear point of entry in our search for a possible Levian theory of translation. It is no coincidence that the most extensive and splashy print media coverage of Levi’s translation of Franz Kafka’s Der Prozeß appeared in the Italian weekly L’Espresso under the title ‘Mi travesto da Kafka.’2 The article’s title is a felicitous one, as Levi consistently couches his discussion of the translation in the vocabulary of wearing, undressing, and disguising, defining the whole process of translation as one of ‘entrare nel corpo, nella pelle di un altro’ (Dentice 117 ) (going into the body, into the skin of another).3 This imagery of identity investment, which pervades the entire interview, at first glance seems to be in line with what Lawrence Venuti describes in his Translator’s Invisibility as the traditional and conservative stance of translators vis-à-vis the translated text, a stance that reflects translation’s historical relegation to derivative modes of writing: ‘the individualistic conception of authorship that devalues translation … is so pervasive that it shapes translators’ self-presentations, leading some to psychologize their relationship to the foreign text as a process of identification with the author’ (7). Levi tells us in the course of printmedia interviews for the translation’s publicity campaign that he has come to this identification with Kafka only during the process of translation,4 and against the wishes of the editorial machine that drove his translation project: ‘Il presupposto era che lo scrittore-traduttore avrebbe lasciato tracce di se stesso [sul testo]. Ma nel corso del lavoro ho cercato di spogliarmi più che potevo della mia identità’ (Dentice 117; emphasis mine) (the understanding was that the writer-translator would leave traces of himself [on the text]. But in the course of the work I sought to

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strip myself as much as possible of my identity). In the space of his almost page-long citation in the article, Levi’s divestment of his own identity remains constant, but interestingly shifts from an association with the author in the first line to inhabit a decidedly different skin in the last line: Davanti a Kafka mi scattavano delle difese inconscie: neppure l’avevo incluso nell’antologia delle mie ‘radici’ perché lo temevo, è cosi minaccioso. Queste difese sono crollate traducendolo, e mi sono trovato calato dentro il personaggio Joseph K., mi sono sentito processato come lui. (Dentice 118; emphasis mine) Faced with Kafka, my unconscious defences were set off: I hadn’t even included him in the anthology of my ‘roots’ because I feared him, he’s that threatening. These defences collapsed as I translated him, and I found myself lowered into the character of Joseph K., I felt myself being put on trial just as he was.

Levi’s relationship with Kafka’s text and its author manifests itself here in its greatest complexity, moving from disjunction to association, from defence to resignation and, ultimately, identification. But the association set up by Levi between Kafka’s relationship to Der Prozeß and his own is an inherently problematic one, insofar as the fundamental disjunction between the work of the author and that of the translator belies any translator’s attempt to ‘strip himself … of his identity.’ Furthermore, Levi’s desire to crawl into Kafka’s skin at the expense of his own identity is in tension with Levi’s feeling that, stylistically and thematically, the two men were ‘poco affini.’ This tension is emblematic of Levi’s relationship to Kafka and his text: even as he admitted to chafing under Kafka’s style and existential world view, he continued to describe his translation in terms of psychological identification and untroubled mediation. Levi’s identification with Kafka eventually undergoes a slippage when he begins to articulate a secondary identification with Kafka’s protagonist, making for a quite different association between the translator and the text’s diegetic characters. Moreover, this shift happens in a remarkably natural way, echoing not only the general tone of this interview but also Levi’s seemingly anachronistic 1980 essay. In its rhetoric of association through a physical penetration of another’s identity, and even in its repetition of the same verb – calarsi/calare – it almost explicitly recalls Levi’s earlier statement on the nature of successful translation. Most striking, however, are the ways in which this last citation – with its

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language of fear (‘temevo’) and threatening texts (‘minaccioso’) – reformulates the trap imagery of the 1980 ‘Tradurre’ essay, conflating both successful and unsuccessful translation situations in Levi’s identification with the protagonist, Joseph K. What is at stake in this slippage between Kafka and his protagonist? Just as he does in his poem ‘Il superstite,’ Levi transgresses narratological levels and conventions, in effect placing his autobiographical experience as Auschwitz prisoner (unjustified persecution, in the case of Joseph K.) and Holocaust survivor (survivor guilt, in the case of Branca Doria) on the level of the diegetic and rendering the poet-protagonist duality of autobiography all the more problematic and complex. As such, this slippage opens a clear critical path for more far-reaching and thematic studies of Levi’s relationship to Kafka (here intended as the whole complex of Kafkaesque language, texts, notions, style characters, etc.) than have heretofore been conducted. In other words, just as much as a self-proclaimed translation theory on Levi’s part (which would only extend to his translation work properly conceived or to his attitudes toward translations of his own ‘original’ works), his statements on translation can be understood in the much broader contexts of Levi’s philosophical thought on issues such as contagion and survivor guilt, and can illuminate our understanding of what Levi called the ‘impatto traumatizzante’ (as cited in his interview with writer Laura Mancinelli) of his encounter with Kafka’s universe. If Levi’s confrontation with Kafka – to be understood as both a confrontation in the English sense of the word and a ‘confronto’ in the Italian sense of comparison or a taking stock with respect to another like figure – is in fact situated on the diegetic level as well as the extradiegetic, then our critical review of his translation work has yet another avenue of enquiry open to it: a consideration of how Levi’s simultaneous investment in the skins of both Franz Kafka and his protagonist, Joseph K., might explain his comportment as a translator, how Levi the protagonist might have influenced Levi the translator’s lexical and stylistic decisions. This slippage in effect shifts the focus of both Levi’s work and this study. It is no longer simply a matter of a translating style that can be categorized as more or less transparent (as philological studies such as those published by Sandra Bosco Coletsos5 would have us believe); there is, rather, a real psychological investment in the construction and interpretation of this particular protagonist. As we can now see, even if Levi does not feel ‘affine’6 to Kafka, he certainly does to Joseph K. The possibility of an unarticulated affective relationship between Levi and

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the various components of his source text allows us to talk about his translation in terms of a translatorly unconscious: ‘the idea that the unconscious … might operate somehow in the translator’s choices and be visible in the translated text, available for reconstruction’ (Venuti, ‘The Difference That Translation Makes’ 215).7 Levi’s relationship to his source text must also be considered in the context of some very real domestic constituencies8 that can be defined as broadly as the loyal readership that Levi had developed by the early 1980s, the witnesses to his offence, and that can also focus inward to form concentric circles of ever-smaller constituencies, each with its own set of values, expectations, and demands: from the Italian literary establishment to the Einaudi editorial machine, and right on down to that most important domestic consumer of Kafka, Levi himself. It is in this framework of Levi as the translator of a text in which he vicariously and paradoxically recasts himself as both narrator and protagonist at the same time that we can begin to consider the presence of an autobiographical impulse behind translation. By conceiving of translation as an essentially creative act in which the identity of the translator comes to bear heavily on the project’s global and specific decisions, we can better understand Levi’s translation of Kafka’s Prozeß as a unique sort of utterance, a Levian text in its own right.9 The possibility of seeing in translation the artefacts of Levi’s larger testimonial agenda grants his various translation projects a certain added valence at the same time as it reveals the inherent dangers of such projects, where Levi’s inclination to identify with the text’s authorial and diegetical positions is particularly strong. The potential for personal crisis is highest in situations where the object of this identification in some way clashes with the polished and well-established veneer of Levi’s public persona, or with the apparently cohesive private persona that Levi seems to have constructed in his own head. To return once again to Levi’s essay ‘Tradurre ed essere tradotti’ and to the ‘traps’ of the translating process, it is clear that Levi was not unaware of translation’s potentially disruptive effects. In his curious combination of images of investment and traps, Levi at once finds solace in the author’s ‘skin’ (using it to alert him to potential problems) and sees its potential for danger (it is the translator’s investment in the skin of the author that makes him vulnerable to the traps in the first place). The ‘Tradurre’ essay’s rhetoric of traps, pitfalls, and conflict figures the translating act as nothing less than a perilous endeavour, pitting translator against a treacherous text, and even against the author who made

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it so. After all, as Levi tells us, it is often the ‘author’s fault’ when ‘something doesn’t have a clear meaning’ or ‘seems … confusing,’ but just as often the ‘trap’ is a function of the text itself. Ambiguity and ‘una densità sintattica’ (De Melis 189) being some of Kafka’s most noteworthy stylistic features,10 Levi eventually sought to inculpate Kafka for the obscurity of the text that he was translating, just before sensing the various traps that were lying in wait for him. This image in particular suggests that translation projects like Der Prozeß were exactly the kind of trap that Levi was talking about in 1980 (at least two years before he accepted the commission to translate Der Prozeß): an experience of identity investment in which both text and translator undergo a sort of trauma in the process. The ‘Tradurre’ essay also emblematizes Levi’s ambiguity as a translator of literary works, on the one hand stating a traditionally minded identificatory view of the translating process, and on the other describing translation as a fundamentally contentious enterprise in which the translator must take care not only to navigate the source text’s traps of ambiguity and confusion, but must also neutralize them by providing a definitive interpretation. Levi’s notorious concern with communicative efficacy was certainly no less strong in the context of the interlinguistic translation and international reception of his work. As a result, Levi was wont to hand-select his own translators – the German case is an especially well-documented one11 – and meticulously check their renditions of his source texts to prevent any deviation from his original intent.12 In his own translation work, however, despite frequent recourse to a rhetoric of transparency and identification (as was also the case with his translation of Presser’s De nacht der Girondijnen), Levi’s tendency was towards a certain translatorly intervention. Of course, each text conditioned its own response, and so Levi’s opacity as a translator spanned a spectrum ranging from subtle assimilation of the source text (Presser) to outright contention, as was true of his translations of Heinrich Heine’s poetry and of Franz Kafka’s Prozeß. These latter translations reveal a translation ethic that stands in stark contrast to any assimilationist rhetoric of authorial identification: Levi refers to his translations of Heine as ‘più musicali che filologiche’ (more musical than philological)13 and admits to the impulse of having to ‘correggere … di sovrapporre il mio modo di scrivere a quello di Kafka’ (‘Nota del traduttore,’ PS II.1209) (correct … to superimpose my way of writing on Kafka’s). The focus of the present chapter is precisely this oscillation between two very different stances and theories of translation, between a desire

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for – or acquiescence to – identification with the original text and its author on one hand, and on the other the staging of a battle in which Levi’s authorial persona performs an utterance of the text that vies for equality – at the very least – with the original. Within the context of Levi’s 1983 translation of Der Prozeß we will examine some of the reasons for this oscillation: Levi’s shifting philosophical and literary preoccupations; the specific editorial situation that conditioned Levi’s various translation projects; and lastly, the unique nature of Kafka’s masterpiece, a work that would unexpectedly act as a forum for a kind of personal ‘trial’ of Levi’s own, a reading and translation experience in which Levi would literally confront years of shifting positionalities vis-à-vis the very notion of the trial in its most traumatic Holocaust manifestations. A case study of the circumstances surrounding this translation project is really an exploration of the relationship between translator and author – in this case, a relationship that says much about the significance of Levi’s translations-as-testimonial utterances in a distinct moment of his life and writing. Furthermore, Levi’s presa di posizione visà-vis the authors he translated must be understood not only as a stance, but as a literal positioning as well. His stated philosophies of translation, both as translator and translated, advocate a ‘lowering oneself into’ the personality of the original author, implying a re-uttering of the text as if the transfer from language to language, culture to culture, time to time could take place transparently and without the existence of translational – and indeed, in this case, testimonial – artefacts. His encounter with Kafka’s Prozeß, however, confirms another side to Levi’s translation approach, one in which Levi’s own preoccupations, public persona, psychological needs, and literary style, helped along by editorial practices and expectations, leave paradoxical yet clear ‘remainders’14 that reveal Levi’s role in the translation process. Pressures from Within: Del Tradurre Oscuro As Gideon Toury declares in his book Descriptive Translation Studies, ‘translations are facts of target cultures; on occasion facts of a special status, sometimes even constituting identifiable (sub)systems of their own, but of the target culture in any event’ (29). Thus, matters such as who chooses to import the text, when, and for whom bear strongly on the scope of our discussion and force us to consider how the publication of a translation such as this is conditioned by the expectations and

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values of the target culture, in Levi’s case not only of the text but of the translator as well. In other words, how did the persona of Primo Levi, Italy’s most visible and prolific Holocaust survivor and Jewish voice, inform the circumstance of his translations? And how might our analysis of these matters benefit from a consideration of paratextual and editorial evidence, to my mind especially revelatory of the cultural practices that surrounded the facts of Levi’s translation? Toury’s observation also prompts questions about the specific languages involved in these particular translations; we might follow Deleuze and Guattari15 in questioning the political and hierarchical relationships between Kafka’s German and Levi’s Italian or, better, the cultural and historical implications of those languages. These theorists’ comments prompt us to consider how Italian notions of German culture might have informed the project of Levi’s translation and shaped its reception in the various domestic constituencies that had an interest in its outcome. Furthermore, we might ask whether there is space in Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of a langage mineur for an expansion of the term beyond purely national linguistic boundaries. That is to say, can Levi’s clear and direct style be said to occupy a minority or estranged place within the larger context of the wilfully obscure literary language that Levi perceived in Kafka’s difficult prose; in the language of the bureaucratic banality of Nazi crimes against humanity; and in the then-hegemonic language of critically acclaimed European letters?16 Lastly, Toury’s comment especially directs us to consider the ways in which the preoccupations of the translated texts intersect with the philosophical and literary concerns of Primo Levi as translator and so point out a fundamental constraint inherent in the domestic (translating) culture: the interests of the translator himself. As we have already seen, Levi’s translations, far from being an ancillary component of his oeuvre, can illuminate the other elements of his production (essays, poetry, fiction, memoir), a fact that is underscored by the translations’ chronological and thematic intersections with Levi’s preoccupations as both survivor and writer. In periods of heightened translation activity in the span of Levi’s literary career,17 we note concurrent shifts in the issues relevant to Levi’s survivor persona and his personal philosophy vis-à-vis those issues. Levi’s translation of Kafka, to wit, occurred in the early 1980s, when Levi’s documentary impulse had already ceded to concerns about survival guilt, the grey zone, a uniquely German culpability,18 and the contagion of Auschwitz. This chronological convergence, however, is only the tip of the iceberg, indicative of

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deeper thematic and philosophical affinities between Levi’s ‘original’ writings and the texts that he chose to re-utter through translation at particular points of his life. In taking Levi’s translatorly utterances to be part of a more overarching testimonial project, I understand the work of the translator to be fundamentally interpretive and decidedly visible, an active mediation of the translated text. This chapter’s work is predicated on the notion that the translator, as an utterer of the text he translates, inevitably leaves discernible traces of his mediation on the translated text. Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s notion of the ‘remainder’ is helpful in theorizing these traces, insofar as it attempts to account for those variables in linguistic, literary, and psychological schema that cannot be easily accounted for by a grammar or rule: ‘the remainder would be the linguistic equivalent of the Freudian unconscious, excluded or repressed by the rules of grammar, but trying to return in jokes, slips of the tongue, solecisms, and poetry’ (Lecercle 23). As applied to translation studies, we can understand the ‘remainder’ to stand for the totality of traces left by the translator’s uniquely heterogeneous interpretation of the text: this excess in the translated text, that for which the text can’t account within a fixed scheme or system, becomes an ensemble of artefacts marking the text’s passage from the source to the target culture, and between one set of values and another. In Levi’s case, the artefacts of his translation of Kafka represent a paradox. It is his domesticating strategies – precisely those decisions intended to obscure the fact of the text’s translation – that leave their greatest mark on Levi’s translation of Der Prozeß. In this way, Levi’s stated ‘pity on the Italian reader’ (‘Nota,’ PS II.1209) of Kafka and his desire to ‘portargli qualcosa che non avesse un sapore troppo forte di traduzione’ (De Melis 190) (bring him something that wouldn’t seem too much like a translation) results in specific strategies and decisions – briefly outlined in the ‘Nota del traduttore’ that introduces the piece – that make the resulting text as much Levi’s own as Kafka’s. All this despite Levi’s claims to have made ‘ogni sforzo per contemperare la fedeltà al testo con la fluidità del linguaggio. Dove nel testo, notoriamente tormentato e controverso, c’erano contraddizioni e ripetizioni, ce le ho lasciate’ (‘Nota,’ PS II.1209–10) (every attempt to temper fidelity to the text with linguistic fluidity. Where in the text, notoriously tortured and controversial, there were repetitions and contradictions, I’ve left them). In the end, Levi’s attempts to mask the fact of his translation and mediation of Der Prozeß point up his unique subject position and his socially and historically determined reading of that text.

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One case in point is the fact that Levi’s version of Der Prozeß does not include any paratextual references to or structural reflection of the fragments that make up Kafka’s incomplete text. This translation and editorial decision distinguishes the Einaudi edition from prior translations by Giorgio Zampa and Ervino Pocar;19 in particular, Zampa’s extensive use of translator’s notes prompted Oreste Del Buono to say of the Zampa translation that he pushed ‘il rigore filologico sino a restituire all’incompiuto romanzo di Kafka proprio l’incompiutezza, il carattere di composizione in frammenti’ (3) (philological rigour to the point of restoring precisely its incompleteness, its character of fragmentary composition to Kafka’s unfinished novel). In contrast, the absence of outlying elements in Levi’s translation works to conceal both the fundamental fragmentation of Der Prozeß and the role of Levi’s editorial mediation, even as it grants Levi’s Il processo its own unique structural integrity, one imposed by Levi himself. This domestication of Kafka’s text is also part of a larger discursive strategy on Levi’s part, mirroring the same clear and reasoned discourse that Levi employs within the context of the ‘scrivere oscuro’ that had come to characterize Holocaust testimonial literature and, indeed, European letters in general. In his ‘pity’ on the Italian reader who is not accustomed to such long, run-on sentences as Kafka permits himself; in his lexical variation of Kafka’s pounding repetition; and in his specific interpretations of Kafka’s infamous ambiguities, we see ample examples of a practicum of an earlier stylistic treatise by Levi. Here, however, the essay in question is not ‘Tradurre ed essere tradotti,’ but rather ‘Dello scrivere oscuro,’ Levi’s 1976 manifesto and protest against the then-current state of Holocaust testimony, a situation that he felt was mirrored in the Italian literary landscape. Levi develops the essay, which originally appeared under Levi’s rubric in the 11 December 1976 issue of La Stampa, in terms of judgment and juridical process, most notably with reference to the literary establishment’s opinions of transgressive writers: Flaubert, Baudelaire, Lawrence. Though Levi’s essay is framed by his apologia for sketching out narrative rules where they are, in fact, ‘almeno inutil[i]’ (at best, useless), the focus of the piece is indeed to criticize those authors who willingly fail to communicate with their readers. Levi does this by means of a number of negative exempla – Ezra Pound draws Levi’s strongest ire – and by stating that his own writing is done with an ideal and idealized reader ‘che ho la curiosa impressione di avere accanto quando scrivo’ (‘Oscuro,’ AM II.678) (whom I have the curious impression is sitting next to me as I write).

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This declaration of the reader’s almost physically palpable presence in Levi’s writing process supports my assertions regarding the constraints that Levi’s readership may have placed on his later literary production. Of most interest for the purposes of this chapter is Levi’s claim that ‘infatti scrivo per [questo lettore ideale], non per i critici né per i potenti della Terra né per me stesso. Se non mi capisse, lui si sentirebbe ingiustamente umiliato, ed io colpevole di inadempienza contrattuale’ (‘Oscuro,’ AM II.678) (in fact I write for [this ideal reader], not for the critics, not for the powers that be, and not for myself. If he were not to understand me, he would feel unjustly humiliated, and I would be guilty of breach of contract). Levi’s comments in his 4 December 1976 Tuttolibri interview with Gabriella Poli mirror his essay of a week later: ‘Fin da La tregua mi sono proposto un linguaggio più chiaro possibile nella speranza che l’informazione arrivi non degradata al lettore, il quale comprando i miei libri ha fatto un contratto con me. Mi sembrerebbe una frode in commercio non fornirgli quello che si aspetta …’ (12–13) (Ever since The Reawakening I have set out to write in the clearest language possible in the hope that the information would not reach the reader degraded, a reader who has made a contract with me in buying my books. It would seem to me consumer fraud to not give him what he expects). I argue that, taken together, this essay and interview may be considered not only an ars poetica for Levi’s ‘original’ and creative oeuvre but also an oblique theory of translation that may be applied to Levi’s attitudes towards ‘communicating’ other texts to readers through translation. Perhaps most striking is the fact that this essay was published only months after Levi completed his first major literary translation, of Presser’s De nacht der Girondijnen, and that his statement that ‘se [il lettore di buona volontà] non intende un testo, la colpa è dell’autore, non sua’ (AM II.678) (if the reader [in good faith] doesn’t understand a text, it’s the fault of the author, not his) strongly echoes the passage from ‘Tradurre ed essere tradotti’ that introduces the first section of this chapter (‘When this happens, it can be the author’s fault, but more often it’s a sign: there’s a trap there somewhere, invisible, but with its jaws wide open’). Finally, in Levi’s emphasis on the communicative nature of language, on the writer’s responsibility towards his reader to make himself understood, on the obscure writer’s ‘disprezzo’ for his reader, Levi seems to be repeating the more general Holocaust communication ethic that emerged over the course of his career. Given our

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hindsight with regard to Levi’s echoing of these same themes in the context of the Kafka translation, it is easy to see the affinities between the writerly problematic faced by Levi in trying to communicate Auschwitz and the translatorly problematic faced by Levi when translating Kafka: to create order out of chaos; to move from darkness to light and from obscurity to clarity. I would like to suggest that Levi’s experience and identity as a survivor – including his ideas about the clear interpretation of reality and texts – loomed so large over his entire production that even in his work as a translator, his Holocaust persona informed every aspect of the translation product: from the syntactical to the lexical, from particularizing to generalizing decisions, from the textual to the paratextual. The pressure that Levi’s Holocaust experience brought to bear on his translation of Kafka’s Prozeß was so strong because it was exerted just as much by external factors as by internal, psychological ones. Ultimately, as we will see, the most urgent elements of Levi’s world view in the early 1980s – his ideas on obscure writing, his fear of Holocaust contagion, his (only partially) repressed desire to impose juridical closure on his Holocaust experience – unconsciously played themselves out on the stage of his translation of Kafka’s Prozeß. As Venuti has written, ‘In the translator’s case, the foreign signifiers are the stage upon which desire is produced. The foreign text creates a lack in the translator who unconsciously demands that this text satisfy the lack and who alters it so as to achieve satisfaction’ (‘The Difference That Translation Makes’ 223). Pressures from Without: The Optimist and the Editorial Machine If the Holocaust experience and the communicative tenets that it engendered for Levi exerted psychological pressure on his translation of Kafka, societal and editorial elements of the translation circumstance were just as decisive in shaping Levi’s translation product. Venuti argues persuasively that the translation of a text has social effects on the domestic audience that constructs it, and these effects are determined by the nature of translation ideology and the choices made by the institutions and other agents of translation. In other words, translation can be a political act, either affirming or questioning domestic practices, beliefs, and values, in some cases assimilating the foreign text’s values through ‘[its] inscription … with domestic intelligibilities and interests’ (Scandals 11), and in other cases underscoring its very foreignness. These values

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can be domestic in the most general sense, or can refer specifically to the domestic culture’s view of the imported culture. Moreover, these values can also refer to smaller, more specific domestic constituencies within the national unit; for example, the community of readers to which Levi’s Holocaust memoirs were addressed: open, willing witnesses to Levi’s Holocaust testimony, in theory forming the most obvious audience for the translation of a text so closely thematically linked to his identity as a Holocaust survivor. An understanding of domestic translation communities along these lines prompts us to focus our thinking in particular directions when considering Levi’s translation work and the cultural, editorial, and marketing practices that invited and conditioned it. Most notably, we are forced to reflect on the ways in which editorial decisions made by Levi’s publishers informed Levi’s own construction of domestic constituencies and identities and, specifically, of a domestic subject that Venuti defines as a position of intelligibility that is also an ideological position, informed by the codes and canons, interests and agendas of certain domestic social groups … A calculated choice of foreign text and translation strategy can change or consolidate literary canons, conceptual paradigms, research methodologies, clinical techniques, and commercial practices in the domestic culture. Whether the effects of a translation prove to be conservative or transgressive depends fundamentally on the discursive strategies developed by the translator, but also on the various factors in their reception, including the page design and cover art of the printed book, the advertising copy, the opinions of reviewers, and the uses made of the translation in cultural and social institutions, how it is read and taught. (Scandals 68)

These factors were indeed decisive in conditioning the impact of Levi’s translation on the target culture, and they provide a useful roadmap in our reading of Levi’s Processo project as a cultural event. Specifically, these comments will lead us to consider the following matters throughout the remainder of this study: What were Einaudi’s perceptions of Levi’s public image and appeal in Italy? How did this play into their choices, from the choice of text to the marketing and publication of Levi’s translation? To what extent did the editorial machine compel Levi to translate (in other words, convey and propagate) specific cultural stereotypes relevant to his position as a Jew and a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust? What editorial and public perceptions went into the choice

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of a German-language text by a Jewish author on a topic that is widely read as an allegory for crises of modernity and a prefiguration of the Final Solution’s amalgam of efficiency and absurdity.20 And how might the selection of Der Prozeß over other Kafka texts such as ‘In der Strafkolonie’ (‘In the Penal Colony’) or ‘Die Verwandlung’ (‘The Metamorphosis’) reveal the importance of what Shoshana Felman terms ‘the juridical unconscious’21 in both Italian culture and Levi’s position in the Italian cultural landscape in the early 1980s? How central was Levi’s own ‘juridical unconscious’ in the development of the project? When the founder of the Einaudi publishing company approached Levi about doing the inaugural translation for the new Scrittori tradotti da scrittori (STS) series, Levi accepted ‘un po’ leggermente, perché non credevo che mi coinvolgesse così a fondo’ (De Melis 189) (a bit lightly, because I didn’t believe that it would draw me in so completely). The logic behind this pairing, on the editorial level, was clear: the attraction of asking Italy’s foremost voice of Jewish persecution under the Holocaust to translate the fictional and prophetic ur-Holocaust narrative par excellence must have been irresistible. Each of the pairings in the series had its own raison d’être: Einaudi’s perception of the marketability of the unique dynamic between original text, translator, and their meeting at a specific moment in the target culture of 1980s Italy.22 Natalia Ginzburg as the female translator of Flaubert’s Bovary, for example, would be interesting for its pairing of two very different views of the role of women in bourgeois society. The spin placed on Fruttero and Lucentini’s translation of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde played on obvious generic affinities, as well as the duality inherent in both the schizophrenic protagonist and the longtime mystery-writing pair.23 The plan amounted to nothing less than editorial alchemy: the creation of something new and valuable from the combination of preexisting elements, a sui generis product that would be creatively and economically greater than the sum of its constituent parts. The Levi-Kafka pairing’s logic was so obvious, so natural, that Italian literary critics could safely assume a great deal in terms of their readers’ expectations of both Levi and Der Prozeß.24 From the beginning of the spring 1983 publicity push for the introduction of the STS, the print media focused almost exclusively on the unique relationship between translator and translated in Levi’s new version of Kafka’s text. While the Espresso article placed its headline over a large (covering one-third of the page) photo of Levi with an inset photo of Kafka, other articles used their titles to draw readers’ attention to the pairing per se

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and the singular nature of Levi’s translating task: ‘Levi “traduce” Kafka’ (Il Giornale) (Levi ‘Translates’ Kafka); ‘Primo Levi ritraduce Kafka’ (La Stampa) (Primo Levi Retranslates Kafka); ‘Primo Levi alle prese con Franz Kafka’ (Il Messaggero Veneto) (Primo Levi up against Franz Kafka); ‘Se lo scrittore scava e traduce’ (La Gazzetta del Popolo) (If the Writer Excavates and Translates). These headlines reveal a number of assumptions (borne out by the reviews and interviews themselves) that the Italian editorial machine was comfortable in making. First was the natural draw of this translation even in comparison to the next translations in the series. Ginzburg, Fruttero, and Lucentini – whose translations were brought out later in the same year and announced during the initial publicity campaign – were all literary heavy-hitters in their own right, but these pairings neither prompted the same kind of intense personal scrutiny nor promised the same explicit narratological contamination as did that of Levi and Kafka. Moreover, titles such as Luciano Genta’s ‘Così ho rivissuto Il Processo di Kafka’ (So I Have Relived Kafka’s Trial)25 reveal the extent to which the nature of Levi’s assumed relationship with Kafka and his text conditioned the reviews of his translation: Levi’s status as Holocaust survivor is built into the reiterative form of ‘vivere,’ which implies some prior experience on Levi’s part with the text, or at least with Kafka’s oppressive universe. Though the average reader simply ‘lives’ Kafka’s world of omnipresent fear, unarticulated accusation, and sudden, random subjugation to unknown juridical authority, only a survivor of the Nazi camps would ‘relive’ it – the article seems to be suggesting – after having, in effect, already lived it in Auschwitz. As is true of the many media interviews that Levi gave on the occasion of the translation’s publication, the emphasis falls here on the many similarities between Levi’s and Kafka’s worlds, the natural relationship that reviewers and readers alike were expected to see in their pairing. As the pre-eminent Levi scholar Marco Belpoliti wrote in 2000, ‘l’uscita del libro [Il processo] suscita un grande interesse e viene recensito come se si trattasse di un’opera di Levi’ (Belpoliti, Primo Levi 90–1; emphasis mine) (the book’s release generates great interest and is reviewed as if it were a book by Levi). Einaudi’s general editorial practices and marketing strategy for the series certainly did nothing to discourage the emphasis on the translator’s role in reinterpreting the canonical source text. According to Fabrizio Dentice, Einaudi’s stated mission in the STS series was to ‘enrich the experience of the author-translator in his translation of another’s work,’

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while allowing the ‘translated text to be illuminated in the light of the contemporary world’ (116).26 Its more pragmatic, bottom-line side, however, proposed the following argument to its prospective translators: ‘Senti un po’: ecco qua un romanzo celebre e fuori diritti, perché l’autore è morto da più di cinquant’anni. Se tu me lo traduci, i diritti che andrebbero all’autore li do a te. E ti metto anche il nome in copertina alla pari col suo: anzi ancora più vistosa, perché te lo stampo in negativo, bianco su blu, mentre il suo lo stampo in nero.’ (116–17)27 ‘Listen, here’s a famous novel whose copyright has run out … If you translate it for me, the royalties that would have gone to the author will go to you. And I’ll even put your name on the cover on par with the original author’s; even better, yours will be even more visible, because I’ll print it in negative, white on blue, while the author’s will be in black.’

Dentice’s summary of the cover page perks afforded to the celebrity translators is incomplete, however, in one vital detail. Not only were the translators’ names in white against a blue background – and in contrast to the black typeface of the original authors’ names – but the title was placed in white face, as well, resulting in a typographical situation in which the translator’s name is actually visually aligned more closely with the translated text than is the original author’s. Reviewer Italo Chiusano took note of this typographical bias towards the translator’s position when he wrote ‘Chi non sappia altro, ne può dedurre che lo scrittore italiano Primo Levi abbia pubblicato un libro intitolato Il processo’ (If you didn’t know any better, you might deduce that the Italian writer Primo Levi had published a book entitled Il processo). The effect of this arrangement, in Einaudi’s conception of the series, was a stronger than usual identification between the translator and the original text, certainly more striking than the one constructed by Adelphi between Levi and De nacht der Girondijnen.28 Il processo’s paratextual apparatus reaches beyond the cover typography, however, to every aspect of the jacket design. Einaudi used this paratextual space to further direct the translation’s overall spin with the prominent placement of an excerpt from Levi’s ‘Nota del traduttore’ on ‘Cover 2.’29 The front cover flap carries a particularly ominous quotation that encapsulates precisely what the editors must have seen as the added value of the Levi-Kafka pairing: Levi’s ostensibly definitive – and, in its decontextualized form, reductive – verdict on the meaning of Kafka’s text. ‘Dunque è cosí, è

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questo il destino umano, si può essere perseguiti e puniti per una colpa non commessa, ignota, che “il tribunale” non ci rivelerà mai; e tuttavia, di questa colpa si può portar vergogna, fino alla morte e forse anche oltre’ (So that’s the way it is, this is human destiny, one can be persecuted and punished for a crime not committed, an unknown crime that ‘the court’ will never reveal to us; and nevertheless, this crime can bring shame, to the point of death and perhaps even beyond). Il processo was thus shaped not only by Levi’s unique interaction with Kafka’s Prozeß but also by Einaudi, and by those issues that Einaudi felt were most salient in the Levi-Kafka pairing – the absurdity of existence, guilt, and the possibility that Kafka may have foreseen an essential truth of the modern condition in his deeply troubling novel. The affinities and transparency that Einaudi foisted on Levi’s translation couldn’t account, though, for Levi’s protests that he really could not have been more different from the Prague Jew.30 As he stated in his interview with De Melis for Il manifesto, Devo dire anzi che Kafka non è mai stato uno dei miei autori preferiti, e devo anche aggiungere il perché: non è detto che si preferiscano gli autori che si sentono affini, spesso avviene addirittura il contrario: penso che da parte mia ci fosse, nei riguardi di Kafka, piú che disinteresse, o noia, un senso di difesa, e me ne sono accorto traducendo Il processo. (De Melis 189) I must say that in fact, Kafka has never been one of my favourite authors, and I must tell you why: it isn’t a given that one prefers only those authors to whom one feels an affinity, indeed, often the opposite is the case: I think that in my feelings for Kafka there was, more than indifference, or boredom, a sense of defensiveness, and I realized it translating The Trial.

Levi’s defensiveness does not seem to have been simply the result of repulsion in the face of Kafka’s text; rather, as his interviewers pointed out in response to his repeated attestations to his lack of affinity to Kafka (both the man and his oeuvre), the pairing was a striking one precisely because of their many similarities: Der Prozeß’s engagement with the problem of modernity in ways that prefigure the Holocaust, the authors’ common Jewishness, their dilettante relationship with literature, their predilection for animal characters. But Levi’s relationship with Kafka and his text seems in fact to be a complex mixture of repulsion and attraction, specifically with regard to what Levi saw as Kafka’s prophetic power. Continuing his interview with De Melis, Levi qualified this sense of defensiveness:

Palinodic Reversal 195 Ora, devo dire che traducendo Il processo ho capito il perché di questa mia ostilità verso Kafka, essa è una difesa dovuta alla paura. Forse anche per una ragione precisa, Kafka era ebreo, io sono ebreo, Il processo si apre con un arresto non previsto e non giustificato, la mia carriera si apre con un arresto non previsto e non giustificato, Kafka è un autore che ammiro, non lo amo e lo ammiro, lo temo, come una grande macchina che ti viene addosso, come il profeta che ti dirà il giorno della tua morte. (189; emphasis mine) Now, I must say that translating The Trial I understood the reason for this hostility of mine for Kafka, it’s a defensiveness born out of fear. Perhaps also because of one specific factor: Kafka was Jewish, I’m Jewish, The Trial opens with an unexpected and unexplained arrest, my career began with an unexpected and unexplained arrest, Kafka is an author whom I admire, I don’t love him and I admire him, I fear him, like a great machine that attacks you, like the prophet that announces the day of your death.

The nature of Kafka’s announcement, the prophecy that Levi likened to a death sentence, emerges clearly from his own translator’s note, in the passage placed so prominently on ‘Cover 2’ (the inner front flap) by the Einaudi cover designers. The state of constant war, of man against man in a system of signs and rules that he does not understand, was, at the beginning of Levi’s survivorhood, one that was synonymous with Auschwitz. Slowly, though, after an existential apprenticeship that began in La tregua with the Greek’s lesson that ‘guerra è sempre’ (TR I.242) (war is always), Levi admitted on the occasion of his translation of Der Prozeß that he had come to understand this state as universal and not merely a function of the specificity of Nazi camps – or the obscurity and ambiguity of Kafka’s German text: Il lieto fine mio personale, il fatto di essere riuscito a sopravvivere al Lager, mi ha reso stupidamente ottimista. Oggi non sono piú ottimista. A quel tempo lo ero. A quel tempo ho commesso un illogico trasferimento del mio personale lieto fine … a tutte le tragedie umane. Se questo è un uomo, benché parli di cose terribili, è veramente poco affine a Kafka. È stato notato da molti, è un libro ottimista e sereno, in cui si respira questo cammino verso l’alto, nell’ultimo capitolo soprattutto. Sembrava assurdo pensare che dal fondo, dalla fossa, dal Lager non dovesse nascere un mondo migliore. Io penso tutt’altro oggi. Penso che dal Lager non possa nascere che il Lager, che non possa nascere che male da quell’esperienza. (De Melis, 191–2)

196 Arduous Tasks My own personal happy ending, the fact of having managed to survive the Lager, made me a stupid optimist. Today I am no longer an optimist. Then I was. At that time I committed an illogical transfer of my personal happy ending … to all human tragedies. Survival in Auschwitz, though it tells of terrible things, has very little in common with Kafka. It’s been noted by many people, it’s an optimistic and serene book, in which one breathes this journey upward, especially in the last chapter. It seemed absurd to think that from the depths, from the pit, of the Lager a better world would not be born. I think very differently today. I think that nothing can be born of the Lager if not the Lager, that only evil can result from that experience.

If there was a concern, beyond the grey zone, beyond survivor guilt, that was to plague Levi’s later years and indeed his last book, it is this fear of the contagion and the seepage of the Lager’s brutal truths beyond geographical and temporal barbed-wire boundaries. As Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo wrote, Levi ‘restò sempre diviso tra due interpretazioni della follia nazista: come episodio orribile, sí, ma circoscritto e concluso, della storia moderna, o invece come risultato conseguente delle tendenze del mondo contemporaneo, tra sviluppo vertiginoso della tecnica e vocazione totalitariana del potere, e su questa forcella continuò a interrogarsi sino all’ultimo’ (as cited in Cases, ‘Ordine’ xxx) (was always divided between two interpretations of the madness of Nazism: as a horrible episode, yes, but circumscribed and concluded, of modern history, or instead as the consequence of the tendencies of the modern world, between the vertiginous development of technology and the totalitarian vocation to power, and he continued to question himself about this bifurcation until the end). I would like to suggest that Levi’s struggle to separate these two views in fact ended with his translation of Kafka’s Prozeß, when he eventually gave in to his ‘fear’ and ‘defensiveness’ in the face of Kafka’s undeniable truths. The stage on which this surrender played out was an exceedingly public one, considering the translation’s extensive print media coverage and the publication of two essays by Levi himself on the translation process and its product. Why did the Levi-Kafka dynamic generate so much public interest? Lawrence Venuti’s comments on the ‘reader’s narcissism’ answer the question to some extent: The publisher’s approach to the foreign text then, is primarily commercial, even imperialistic, an exploitation governed by an estimate of the market at home, whereas the approach of the domestic reader is primarily

Palinodic Reversal 197 self-referential, even narcissistic, insofar as the translation is expected to reinforce literary, moral, religious, or political values already held by that reader. (Scandals 124)

From the Italian reader’s perspective, conditioned by the editorial machine’s emphasis on Levi’s role in reinterpreting Kafka’s Prozeß31 and its own experience with Levi in the literary and cultural spheres, this narcissism played itself out in the complex network of expectations surrounding Levi’s survivor status and his position as an optimistic, healing force in postwar Italian culture. Throughout the 1980s, Levi’s personal desire for literary success unshackled from his identity as a Holocaust memoirist came more and more into conflict with the public’s conception of him as Italy’s optimistic voice of reason in the face of tragedy and oppression. Though his often disturbing fictional work was openly in dialogue with writers like Italo Calvino,32 Levi’s persona was so defined by his identity as a Holocaust survivor and witness that the Italian reader was ultimately able to encounter only the Primo Levi with whom he was familiar, the lumière, the seeker of reason and light in places as dark as Auschwitz.33 His clarity, then – but more importantly his readership’s perception of that clarity – was to become a recurrent theme of Levi’s interviews with the press. Regarding the first matter, Levi’s comment in his essay ‘Kafka col coltello nel cuore’34 is illuminating: Nel mio scrivere, nel bene o nel male, sapendolo o no, ho sempre teso a un trapasso dall’oscuro al chiaro, come (mi pare che lo abbia detto Pirandello, non ricordo piú dove) potrebbe fare una pompa-filtro, che aspira acqua torbida e la espelle decantata: magari sterile. Kafka batte il cammino opposto: dipana senza fine le allucinazioni che attinge da falde incredibilmente profonde, e non le filtra mai. (RS II.939; emphasis mine) In my writing, for better or for worse, willingly or not, I have always maintained a movement from dark to light, as (I believe that it was Pirandello who said it, though I don’t remember where) might a filtration pump that sucks in dirty water and then emits it cleaned, if sterile. Kafka takes the opposite path: he endlessly unravels the hallucinations that he draws from incredibly profound strata, and he never filters them.

In an echo of his earlier manifesto ‘Dello scrivere oscuro,’ Levi here summarizes his writing career in terms of his attempt to clarify texts

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like so much muddied water. Though he is not explicit in his statement, Levi’s juxtaposition of Kafka’s opposite impulse with his own creates a counterpoint between the two writers and implies that Levi’s main ‘ethic’ of translation was to continue the work begun in his testimonial and essayistic writings, even to the extent of subverting the original works when their obscurity demanded it. But Levi clearly did not see this impulse as a purely personal fact. As he states in his interview with Federico De Melis, the ‘battle’ that was conducted between his ‘philological conscience’ and ‘his personal reflexes … his style, already gelled’ was really a battle between his philological conscience and that residing in his reading public. Levi continues to say that the already-gelled style that was in constant conflict with his desire to ‘respect Kafka’ was in truth ‘[uno] stile non molto noto a me, noto più ai miei lettori che a me stesso, come il proprio ritratto visto di profilo. Noi ci conosciamo male di profilo, non ci vediamo quasi mai di profilo (188–89) ([a] style that I didn’t know very well, that my readers know better than I do myself, like your own portrait in profile. We don’t know ourselves very well in profile, we almost never see our own profiles).35 Levi thus admits that the force standing in opposition to his desire to be philologically faithful to Kafka’s text was in fact an image (‘il proprio ritratto’) of himself to which he had, by definition, no visual access – except with the help of the mirror reflection of his reading public – and thus that was somehow outside his control. In the end, Levi the illuminator and Levi the ostensible optimist would ultimately come into conflict in the pages of this translation: it is only through Levi’s definitive interpretations of Kafka’s ambiguities that we come to learn of his emerging – and publicly untenable – pessimism. In an editorial context like the one outlined above, we can say that the project was an essentially domesticating one: Einaudi’s expectations and the way they materialized in editorial practices made for a translating circumstance in which Kafka would be inscribed with Levi’s persona, a decidedly local, domestic factor. This had the effect of what amounts to a macro-level, editorial literary interpretation of the text in which Einaudi knowingly marked Der Prozeß anachronistically with a Holocaust sensibility, indeed a Holocaust conscience or morality. Moreover, by pairing Levi with the text, the editorial machine could be assured of a uniquely Levian reading, in which the Holocaust would bring to bear on the text not a disruptive, fragmentary force but rather the pressure of Levi’s insistent reason, the force of his constant search for coherence and understanding. The clarity that the Italian

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reading public had become accustomed to, his expressed preference for the movement ‘from darkness to light’ – as opposed to Kafka’s opposite journey from light to darkness – made an ambiguous Levian translation a virtual impossibility. Ultimately, what Levi called his ‘defensive’ reaction to the themes and style of Der Prozeß resulted in a translation that was strongly marked by the traces of Levi’s active mediation, even as Levi tried to normalize the text for his faithful Italian audience. To reproduce Kafka’s linguistic density and harshness, his hammering repetitions, his breakneck pace, and his ambiguity would have been to renege on what Einaudi had advertised implicitly and explicitly through its entire editorial enterprise: Levi’s unique reading of Kafka, an illuminating reading that was expected to come into conflict with Kafka’s very themes and style. We have already mentioned in passing Levi’s imposition of a textual integrity on his Processo where Kafka’s Prozeß is notoriously fragmentary and unstable because of the posthumous editing of his entire oeuvre by Max Brod. Levi also inserted his own sentence and paragraph breaks into Kafka’s lengthy prose, dividing it into more conventionally organized segments that ultimately guide the reader towards Levi’s specific interpretation of the text. On the word level, the work of Sandra Bosco Coletsos shows that Levi’s lexical decisions in fact mirror decisions in these more structural matters, as he consistently seeks to refine Kafka’s repetitions, ambiguities, and generalities. Where Der Prozeß’s other Italian translators typically attempted to duplicate the effect of Kafka’s notable use of the impersonal man, for example, Levi tended to use active and explicit subjects (Bosco Coletsos 262–3). Where Kafka writes ‘Er besteht darin, daß unschuldige Personen verhaftet werden’ (55) (It consists in this, in arresting innocent people), Levi carries over the noun Senn from the previous sentence and translates, not insignificantly, ‘Il senso è questo, di arrestare persone innocenti’ (Levi, Il processo 52): as Joseph K. becomes an explicit interpreter of signs in Il processo, so does Levi himself. On the topic of lexical variety, Bosco Coletsos underscores ‘la varietà di vocaboli che Levi di solito usa per esprimere uno stesso termine tedesco, fatto che movimenta lo stile del testo italiano, ma che lo allontana da quello di Kafka … Introduce inoltre, rispetto agli altri traduttori, il maggior numero di espressioni che non compaiono nell’originale’ (250) (the variety of words that Levi usually uses to express a single term in German, a fact that animates the style of the Italian text, but that distances it from Kafka’s … He furthermore introduces, in comparison to the other translators, the greatest number of expressions that do not

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appear in the original). Where Kafka repeats the word Fremde no less than four times in the first two pages of the novel, for example, Levi renders it in three different ways: as intruso, as nuovo venuto, and as uomo (Bosco Coletsos 255–6). Though all three are accurate translations of Fremde (all, by the way, differing from Pocar’s consistently rendered estraneo), each rendering offers a different interpretation of that noun within its particular context. The use of nuovo venuto in the second instance is particularly interesting for what it adds to the passage as a whole: ‘Si era bensì accorto subito che non avrebbe dovuto dire quelle cose ad alta voce, perché in certo modo esse comportavano il riconoscimento di un diritto al controllo da parte del nuovo venuto …’ (Levi, Processo 4) (Es fiel ihm zwar gleich ein, daß er das nicht hätte laut sagen müssen und daß er dadurch gewissermaßen ein Beaufsichtigungsrecht des Fremden anerkannte … [Kafka 10]; Yet it occurred to him at once that he should not have said this aloud and that by doing so he had in a way admitted the stranger’s right to superintend his actions … [Muir and Muir 2]). Levi’s addition of the temporal element to Kafka’s more neutral Fremde marks a sharp distinction between the time before and the time after the unnamed catastrophic event that moves the rest of the novel. Levi’s translation problematizes the already dubious right of the ‘stranger’ to monitor K. by pointing up the sudden newness of the situation, and thus its fundamental unexpectedness. Cesare Cases points up a similar example when he notes Levi’s translation of Kafka’s ‘Das war noch neimals geschehen’ (This had never happened before) in the novel’s first paragraph: ‘Era la prima volta che una cosa simile capitava.’ For Cases, Levi’s particularizing interpretation is indicative of his essential optimism, as it butts up against Kafka’s darkness and pessimism: ‘Which means that he still maintains his faith in the continuity of time, while Kafka wants to mark a rupture after which time no longer exists. Levi’s is almost a mistranslation, and there are many others in his version’ (as cited in Anissimov 546).36 I would argue that Levi’s decision to shift the passage’s focus from past-oriented negativity to future-oriented positivity reflects not so much his ‘faith in the continuity of time’ as his awareness of the unprecedented and unexpected nature of the event and its initiation of a new sort of time – the temporality of trauma – of which the small fact of K.’s missing breakfast was only just the beginning. Indeed, far from inscribing Levi’s supposed optimism on Kafka’s text, Levi’s ‘prima volta’ strongly suggests his resignation to the idea that K.’s condition had become synonymous with the human condition, even beyond Auschwitz.

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This is but one example of the way in which Levi inscribed his rendering of Der Prozeß with stylistic values that were generally Italian but that were also specific to his unique cultural persona in a literary marketplace, reflecting both Einaudi’s focus on the translator’s unique interpretation of the text and Levi’s own concern for his Italian reader, the same reader whom Levi felt sitting next to him in his other writing. His contract with that reader did not end when he began to translate, and the reader’s expectations of what Levi’s voice should represent continued to exert significant pressure on Levi’s work – even if his voice was speaking on Kafka’s behalf. The same formula that had worked so well for the Einaudi-Levi partnership through the years was at play again: Levi painstakingly explaining the Nazi Holocaust to his Italian reading public, Levi as a reassuring voice in the midst of chaos and existential confusion. If this voice had been central to Italians’ attempts in the late 1950s to understand Nazi atrocities, how important was it now, as Italians continued to sidestep the question of their own complicity in those same Nazi crimes? I assert that the circumstance of Levi’s pairing with Kafka confirmed prevalent domestic values visà-vis the subordinate Italian role in the Axis partnership and the essentially German nature of the bureaucratic structures at the heart of the Holocaust’s deadly efficiency.37 Perhaps the central factor in this dynamic was the continued dominance of the pre-Second World War myth of ‘Italiani, brava gente’38 and the persistence of Benedetto Croce’s postwar discursive and political strategy of characterizing fascism as a mere ‘parenthesis’ in the course of a ‘normal’ Italian political trajectory.39 Such was the strength of these domestic forces that historian Renzo de Felice was able to assert in 1987 that Italian fascism ‘carried not a shred of real guilt for the Holocaust.’40 Levi’s ‘encounter’41 with Kafka, his clarification of Kafka’s text, then, was not simply a personal battle of styles. It was also a cultural battle staged on linguistic territory as Levi worked to inscribe the alreadyalienated language42 of the Czech Jew’s bureaucratic German with Italian stylistic values. In short, Levi’s language in his Italian translation of Der Prozeß – as normalizing as it was – can be seen as Levi’s own gesture of alienation: both from the bureaucratic German that, together with George Steiner, Levi always placed at the heart of the Nazi assault on humanity, and from the ‘scrivere oscuro’ that Levi felt was so often and so unjustly lauded by the critical establishment. On the level of Levi’s Italian readership,43 Levi’s translation project was also a domesticating one to the extent that it played an important

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yet unacknowledged role in a battle that Levi had been waging with his own past literary successes since at least the publication of Storie naturali in 1966. Caught between his established success as a Holocaust writer and his stated pride in his status as an author whose ‘day job’ gave him something to write about, Levi’s desire for more broadly defined literary success was repeatedly thwarted by lukewarm critical reviews of his science fiction and other fictional works. Though Carole Angier calls the publication of his I sommersi e i salvati in 1986 the decisive blow in this contest,44 cementing once and for all the dominance of Levi’s Holocaust writings in his literary and cultural reputation, I argue that the 1983 publication of Levi’s version of Der Prozeß in fact precipitated this development, implicitly confirming the Holocaust moralist component of his public persona beyond question. While the editorial machine that drove the project and the readership that so conditioned its decisions in Levi’s translation did nothing to undermine domestic expectations and values, the same cannot be said of Levi’s own expectations of the project. Levi’s translation of Kafka’s Prozeß in fact functioned more as an identity-defining event in Levi’s own mind than the traditional view of translation as transparent linguistic exercise would seem to imply. Einaudi had pitted Levi and Kafka in a battle that it fully expected Levi’s humanism and clarity to win. However, Levi’s ideas about the possibility for the contagion of the evil of Auschwitz were already changing when he agreed to translate Kafka’s text,45 prompting a second and more explosive battle to rage just beneath the surface, that between Levi and his own authorial persona.46 Levi’s encounter with Kafka ultimately challenged and undermined the optimism of his earlier writings and thought, in some ways unravelling his entire world view; the project inscribed its own logic on Levi’s psychological and even textual persona. As Zaia Alexander has astutely noted, Kafka’s final sentence in Der Prozeß reads, ‘es war, als sollte die Scham ihn überleben,’ which Levi translates faithfully as ‘e fu come se la vergogna gli dovesse sopravvivere’ (it was as if shame would survive him). In his essay on translating Kafka Levi concludes with the words, ‘e Josef, col coltello giá piantato nel cuore, prova vergogna di essere un uomo.’ In creating a suggestive wordplay derived from the title of his first memoir Se questo è un uomo, he symbolically conflates his personal memoir with Kafka’s fiction … The shift in Levi’s message is subtle but powerful. Instead of wondering ‘if this is a man’ his final word suggests that it is a shameful thing to be a man. (66; author’s emphasis)

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In the end, the practice of re-uttering Der Prozeß to point the way to that text’s bleak vision of the human condition – albeit in the service of the interpretive ‘clarity’ that had been Levi’s hallmark since even before his deportation to Auschwitz – amounted to a deeply foreignizing act with respect to the rest of Levi’s oeuvre; as Levi would put it in his last of three published essays on the project, his translation of Kafka was nothing less than ‘una palinodia del mio ottimismo illuministico, ed un modo singolare di rivivere quella mia lontana stagione’ (‘Una misteriosa sensibilità,’ PS II.1189; emphasis mine) (a palinode of my enlightenment-like optimism, and a singular way to relive that distant season of mine). The Holocaust in Der Prozeß The intense self-reflection into which Levi was forced as a result of the Kafka translation was not so sudden, however, as Levi’s use of the term ‘palinode’47 would have us believe; indeed, a gradual shift had been taking place in Levi’s work and world view for quite some time. Signs of this shift can be found in Levi’s essayistic and poetic production of the 1970s, particularly in writings that I will call ‘judgment portraits,’ which, for the sake of this chapter’s discussion, consist of Levi’s poetic commemoration of the Adolf Eichmann arrest and Levi’s depiction of two German scientists.48 An increasingly juridical approach to his attitudes towards German (and German-language) culture emerges in this phase of Levi’s production, as does an ever-growing tendency to play the role of judge in his relationship to the grey zoners whom he places under his literary microscope. As we shall see, these essays not only suggest a more intolerant stance vis-à-vis the German culture than Levi had ever been willing to publicly articulate; they are also a central component of Levi’s slippery positionality within the complex web of victims, perpetrators, judges, and juries that make up his moral universe. Levi’s translation of Kafka in 1983 represents the culmination of a whole phase of Levi’s later moral and ethical thought: characterized as it is by a pathological preoccupation with justice and its attendant themes and images, this project encapsulates many of the issues that had held sway over Levi’s literary unconscious since at least the mid-1970s.49 Most notable among these are Levi’s positionality with regard to the juridical process and a profound reconsideration of the figure of the oppressor, understood specifically by Levi in his later years as the grey-zone functionary who carried out orders without thinking and yet whose actions constituted the lubricant for humanity’s first true death machine. But more

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broadly defined, this rethinking of the oppressor in effect caught up the whole of German culture in Levi’s gaze. And though, as we shall see, Levi’s comments on the matter are contradictory at best, and indeed aim to deny any juridical purpose – that is, an explicit bringing to justice of the perpetrators50 – to his musings, I will argue instead that his numerous encounters with German culture during this phase of his writing constitute attempts to definitively work out these juridical power relationships, assess blame, and exact (literary) punishment. In other words, as the culmination of a phase that saw Levi translate Heine’s poetry, dedicate a poem to Adolf Eichmann, portray at least two German grey zoners in his essays, and engage in extended correspondence with numerous Germans, ‘Il processo nella traduzione di Primo Levi’ is nothing less than Levi’s own juridical unconscious writ large. Kafka’s Prozeß represents the apex of this phase, not only because of its status in the literary firmament, nor solely because of the timing with which the translation was undertaken. Rather, Der Prozeß is a central text because it also mirrors, in many ways, Levi’s own concerns. Kafka and his protagonist, Joseph K., prey to shifting legal terrain, stand on the fault line of different cultures, languages, and moral stances. Levi – now a victim of the Holocaust, now the oppressor of the comrade who did not survive because Levi did, now the neutral witness who dispassionately gives his testimony, now the judge who has the final (written) word as well as the authority that sustains it – could not have ignored the linguistic and existential struggles of this particular source’s author; writing both within and against the bureaucratic culture that was his oppressor, Kafka at once represents and participates in the culture of oppression, even as he falls victim to its power. In light of this study’s view of Levi’s translation as a testimonial act, Joseph K.’s own shifting positionality vis-à-vis his oppressors and judges emerges as a grey-zone issue, not unlike those more explicitly addressed by Levi in the second chapter of I sommersi e i salvati and even in his earlier translation of Presser’s De nacht der Girondijnen. One telling episode appears near the end of the unfinished eighth chapter of Der Prozeß, when Joseph K. meets a fellow accused named Block in his lawyer Huld’s house. Though the initial waiting-room meeting between Joseph K. and Block functions as a tentative bonding experience, and Joseph K. sees in his peer a fresh source of information relevant to his own case, the change of venue as they both appear before their lawyer, vying for his time and attention, alters the nature of their relationship entirely, pitting accused against accused and blurring the distinctions between friend and

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enemy. At the same time, this scene allows the reader to witness a startling transformation in the protagonist’s position vis-à-vis the slippery juridical apparatus in which he finds himself embroiled. First, in the movement from co-accused to superior peer-as-judge, Joseph K. begins to assume a position of superiority vis-à-vis Block when the latter prostrates himself to the judge in the hopes of obtaining new information on his case. Block’s defensive reply to Joseph K.’s advice not to stoop to this level claims that all of the accused, Joseph K. included, are equal before the law: Sie sind kein besserer Mensch als ich, denn Sie sind auch angeklagt und haben auch einen Prozeß. Wenn Sie aber trotzdem noch ein Herr sind, dann bin ich ein ebensolchen Herr, wenn nicht gar ein noch größerer. Und ich will auch als ein solcher angesprochen werden, gerade von Ihnen. Wenn Sie sich aber dadurch für bevorzugt halten, daß Sie hier sitzen und ruhig zuhören dürfen, während ich, wie Sie sich ausdrücken, auf allen vieren krieche, dann erinnere ich Sie an den alten Rechtsspruch: für den Verdächtigen ist Bewegung besser als Ruhe, denn der, welcher ruht, kann immer, ohne es zu wissen, auf einer Waagschale sein und mit seinen Sünden gewogen werden. (Kafka 207) You’re no better than I am, you’re an accused man too and are involved in a law-suit like me. If none the less you’re a gentleman as well, let me tell you I’m as great a gentleman as you, if not a greater. And I’ll have you address me as such, yes, you especially. For if you think you have the advantage of me because you’re allowed to sit there at your ease and watch me creeping on all fours, as you put it, let me remind you of the old maxim: people under suspicion are better moving than at rest, since at rest they may be sitting in the balance without their knowing it, being weighed together with their sins. (Muir and Muir 210) Lei non è meglio di me, anche lei è un imputato, anche lei ha un processo. Ma se lei, nonostante tutto, è rimasto una persona rispettabile, io lo sono altrettanto, se non di piú. E come tale voglio essere trattato, specie da lei. Se poi lei si ritiene un privilegiato per il fatto di poter stare lí seduto ad ascoltare tranquillo, mentre io, tanto per usare le sue parole, striscio a quattro gambe, allora le ricorderò il vecchio detto: per chi è sospettato, è meglio il moto della quiete, perché chi sta fermo può sempre, anche senza saperlo, stare sul piatto d’una biliancia, ed essere pesato con i suoi peccati. (Levi, Processo 209; emphasis mine)

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Joseph K.’s transition from peer to morally superior judge is marked, in Levi’s translation, by his unique rendering of the German adjective bevorzugt. Departing from Pocar and Zampa’s use of the adjectival form, Levi opts for the nominal form familiar to his testimonial audiences from the taxonomy laid out in Se questo è un uomo’s ‘Al di qua del bene e del male’: ‘un privilegiato’ – a term used to critically describe those members of the univers concentrationnaire who had achieved a certain social status through conniving and ‘organization.’ Levi’s use of the term here imposes the social logic of the Lager on Kafka’s characters and attributes the culpability and agency of the Lager’s ‘privilegiato’ to Joseph K.’s newfound position of superiority. At the same time, this choice also implies the anachronistic applicability of Lagerjargon terminology to the Kafka univers. A second shift soon occurs in the protagonist, from his role as judge to that of a witness charged (‘beauftragt’ [209]; in Levi ‘ordinato’ [211]; in Pocar and Zampa ‘incaricato’ [161 and 198, respectively]) with assessing and recording the episode with the impartiality of a disengaged third party, even a scribe: ‘come se quancuno gli avesse ordinato di imprimersi nella memoria tutto quanto là dentro veniva detto, di farne denuncia in un alto luogo e di stenderne un rapporto, K. stava in ascolto, con mente critica e superiore’ (Levi 211–12) (K. listened to everything with critical detachment, as if he had been commissioned to observe the proceedings closely, to report them to a higher authority, and to put down a record of them in writing [Muir and Muir 213]).51 Levi here decides to follow and yet deviate from Pocar and Zampa in his translation of ‘genau in sich aufzunehmen’ (209). While he echoes Pocar’s and Zampa’s similar metaphor of ‘imprimersi bene nella mente’ (161) and ‘imprimersi bene in testa’ (198), respectively, by maintaining the vivid reflexive verb ‘imprimersi,’ Levi makes a striking deviation in opting for ‘memoria’ instead of ‘mente’ or ‘testa.’ This choice inscribes his own translation with a term that is one of the keywords not only of the collective testimonial lexicon but also of his own Lager-related idiolect, superimposing on Kafka’s text and protagonist his own Holocaust survivor persona and his particular testimonial agenda. The idea of ‘memory’ was, of course, of particular importance to Levi in the last decade of his life, as is evidenced by the title and theme of the first chapter of his last book (I sommersi e i salvati), ‘La memoria dell’offesa’ (‘The Memory of the Offence’). According to Marco Belpoliti’s notes at the end of the second volume of Levi’s Opere, this chapter was originally written and published in 1983, just as Levi was completing his translation of Der Prozeß (‘Note ai testi’ II.1568).

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We can also point to a number of threads running through this passage that serve to amplify this dynamic of shifting positionality. The difficulty of distinguishing friend from enemy within the confines of this juridical universe and the need to re-evaluate conventional morality according to its sui generis laws emerge from the following passage: ‘Quanto era cambiato [Block], anche solo in quell’ultima ora! Era forse il processo, che lo menava qua e là, e non gli lasciava distinguere l’amico dal nemico?’ (209) (What a change had come over the fellow in the last hour! Was it his case that agitated him to such an extent that he could not distinguish friend from foe?’ [Muir and Muir]).52 Kafka’s development of Block as somehow inferior to Joseph K., despite his seniority in the juridical process, furthermore parodies and reverses the number-based hierarchies of the Nazi camp system. Finally, Block’s ‘maxim,’ cited above, gives the sense that there exists an unsettling tension between a certain equality under the law and that law’s essential impenetrability. It is in this last theme, man’s essential powerlessness before a law that will eventually overcome him (also central both to the ‘Before the Law’ parable inserted into chapter 9 and to the story’s dire ending), that Kafka’s prescience vis-à-vis the Holocaust is most striking. Not coincidentally, this juridical theme was also – together with Levi’s related comments on guilt – among the main threads of Levi’s ‘Nota del traduttore’ that Levi’s Einaudi editors would seize upon in shaping Levi’s encounter with Kafka for the public. And ultimately, it was also the theme against which Levi’s earlier optimism about the uniqueness of the Holocaust must have come up short. Levi’s Juridical Texts: Germans on Trial How can I prove that I am not a drug dealer without asking my accuser to bring forth some proof of it and without refuting that proof? … How can you establish what is not without criticizing what is? The undetermined cannot be established. It is necessary that negation be the negation of a determination. – This inversion of the tasks expected on one side and on the other may suffice to transform the accused into a victim, if he or she does not have the right to criticize the prosecution, as we see in political trials. Kafka warned us about this. It is impossible to establish one’s innocence, in and of itself. It is a nothingness. (Jean-François Lyotard, Le différend)

Satisfying critical treatments of Levi’s translation of Kafka as a testimonial utterance are sorely lacking, and those that do address the importance of

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the project (Belpoliti, Angier, Alexander) have not adequately taken into account the importance of the juridical function of the text in Levi’s own life and thought. I argue in this section that Levi’s translation of Kafka’s Prozeß in fact operated as a juridical event in Levi’s life, and indeed represented the culmination of Levi’s growing preoccupation with juridical matters in his later years: the establishment of zones of culpability, the meting out – always in various literary forums – of justice, and attempts to fix his own positionality vis-à-vis juridical paradigms relating to the Holocaust. In defining the term ‘juridical event’ I follow Shoshana Felman and her development of the ‘juridical unconscious’:53 [t]rial and trauma have become … conceptually articulated ever since the Nuremberg trials attempted to resolve the massive trauma of the Second World War by the conceptual resources and by the practical tools of the law. In the wake of Nuremberg, the law was challenged to address the causes and consequences of historical traumas. In setting up a precedent and a new paradigm of trial, the international community attempted to restore the world’s balance by reestablishing the law’s monopoly on violence, and by conceiving of justice not simply as punishment but as a marked symbolic exit from the injuries of a traumatic history: as liberation from violence itself. (1; author’s emphasis)

Felman’s discussion of the symbolic value of the trial after Nuremberg sets the stage for a greater understanding of the cultural events – such as Levi’s translation of Der Prozeß – that have juridical value to a greater or lesser degree, events that, while they do not carry the authority of the law, are empowered by their participants to enact symbolically (elements or aspects of) the juridical process, with its attendant properties of healing, closure, and articulation. Felman’s linking of ‘trial and trauma’ is not casual; indeed, it is impossible to conceptualize the healing role of the trial outside the temporal and conceptual frameworks of trauma. As we saw in chapter 1, traumatic events such as the Holocaust are characterized by their ineffability and by the Holocaust’s victims’ incapacity to give expression to their experience until after the fact because of the impossibility of psychological, cognitive, and linguistic processing at the time of the offence. But the twentieth century saw the rise of thinkers for whom this inarticulacy is a constituent part of the human condition in the wake of the cataclysmic wars that have shaken old notions of ineffability to

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their roots; for these intellectuals, this ineffability is symptomatic of the collective trauma of civilization. More specifically, for Walter Benjamin, ‘the expressionless’ constitutes an entire human category of oppressed and forgotten voices, those which history does not make heard and on whose behalf it is the responsibility of the historian to speak.54 JeanFrançois Lyotard’s notion of the différend55 foregrounds both the discursive and juridical aspects of this historical situation and constitutes the distinction between the plaintiff (a wronged party capable of answering his/her legal adversary on his/her own terms) and the victim (a legal position characterized, even defined, by the inability to speak in the language of the court, the language of power). For Lyotard, the use of juridical terms and structures is essential to an understanding of this discursive situation, insofar as it is precisely the language of the constituent authority that determines the limits of discourse for the wronged party. The plaintiff, as the word’s etymological root indeed suggests, is in a position to cry out his lamentation to the authorities, to have his voice performatively heard by the law. The différend, however, signals a prohibition to this access to the law insofar as the complaint has in that case been formulated in the oppressive – and exclusionary – language of the authority: the plaintiff has become a victim, a figure whose position with respect to the law is conditioned by an essential and inescapable discursive inferiority and the impossibility of access to the linguistic and institutional structures of power. Though Auschwitz is one of Lyotard’s principal examples, his discussion is by no means limited to the position of the Holocaust victim. But for Lyotard writing in 1983, as for Levi translating Kafka around the same time, the Holocaust is an emblem of the matter at hand: contagion. After Auschwitz, nothing is immune from its effects; it is a sickness that not only infects the world with the very fact of its existence but threatens its survivors ‘ad ora incerta’ with its traumatic recurrence. For Lyotard, for Felman, and for Levi, the inarticulacy that is the hallmark of this kind of dehumanizing oppression is only reversible after the event, with the passage of time, and once the victim has galvanized his forces to articulate the event in some kind of verbal forum, whether that be a formal trial, in which the language of the court permits access to the victim-becoming-plaintiff, or a more properly symbolic form. Not surprisingly, all three in one way or another contrast the example of Auschwitz and the victim’s prohibition from any court of justice with the reversal of that situation embodied in the trial of Adolf Eichmann. It is in this event that fluid, amorphous memory is

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gelled into the word of history, that the victim becomes a plaintiff, that the trauma moves towards resolution in the trial. As Lyotard writes, describing the difficulties of establishing the proof of a massacre – he likens the différend of Auschwitz to an earthquake that destroys even the seismographic machinery used to measure earthquakes – [t]he differend attached to Nazi names, to Hitler, to Auschwitz, to Eichmann, could not be transformed into a litigation and regulated by a verdict. The shades of those to whom had been refused not only life but also the expression of the wrong done them by the Final Solution continue to wander in their indeterminacy. By forming the State of Israel, the survivors transformed the wrong into damages and the differend into a litigation. By beginning to speak in the common idiom of public international law and of authorized politics, they put an end to the silence to which they had been condemned. (The Differend 56; note 93)56

Lyotard’s understanding of the transformation from victim to plaintiff is cast in national-political terms, as the moment when the survivors could first speak in the language of international law. Felman’s complex analysis of this shift from trauma to resolution instead narrows the focus from the juridical authority of the State of Israel to its first juridical event, the 1961 Eichmann trial. She extends her analysis, in addition, to Hannah Arendt’s reportage of the trial, first submitted serially to the New Yorker magazine in her capacity as special correspondent, and then collected in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Felman argues, in simultaneously reconsidering the impact of both the trial and Arendt’s interpretation of it, that [w]e needed trials and trial reports to bring a conscious closure to the trauma of the war, to separate ourselves from the atrocities and to restrict, to demarcate and draw a boundary around, a suffering that seemed both unending and unbearable. Law is a discipline of limits and of consciousness. We needed limits to be able both to close the case and to enclose it in the past. Law distances the Holocaust. Art brings it closer … we needed law to totalize the evidence … we needed art to start to apprehend and to retrieve what the totalization has left out. Between too much proximity and too much distance, the Holocaust becomes today accessible, I will propose, precisely in this space of slippage between law and art. But it is also in this space of slippage that its full grasp continues to elude us. (Juridical Unconscious 107; author’s emphasis)

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It is not only the trial itself, then, that demarcates the Holocaust but its recording in Arendt’s interpretation; it is not only the fluid unconscious that brings it always nearer but also its resuscitation in artistic expression. In the same way, I contend that trials such as Eichmann’s exist as juridical events but that the reactions to them in both juridical and artistic terms on the part of a society – especially those figures, such as Arendt, such as Levi, who constitute its public face and an important common point of reference – constitute parallel symbolic juridical events, or ‘exit[s] from the injuries of a traumatic history,’ located in more textually centred forums for justice.57 Primo Levi’s own encounters with the real and metaphorical trials of the early 1960s represent a turning point in his thought and writings, changing the tone of both his private and public voices. Though his writings throughout the 1940s and 1950s claimed to maintain the stance of an impartial witness vis-à-vis his German oppressors,58 the separate captures of Adolf Eichmann and Richard Baer in May and December of 1960 demanded a different kind of response on Levi’s part. The only original published poem written by Levi in that year, on 20 July, is a poem whose title explicitly dedicates it to the chief executioner of the Final Solution: ‘Per Adolf Eichmann.’ Though Baer’s arrest seven months after Eichmann’s was to be immediately explored in the lines of Levi’s weekly column in La Stampa,59 no part of Eichmann’s arrest, trial, or execution in Tel Aviv ever prompted Levi to discuss Eichmann directly in prose.60 Instead, in keeping with Levi’s tendency to reserve the space of poetry for his most anguished writing, his only public encounter with Eichmann was to take place in the poetic space of the following harsh verses: Corre libero il vento per le nostre pianure. Eterno pulsa il mare vivo alle nostre spiagge. L’uomo feconda la terra, la terra gli dà fiori e frutti: Vive in travaglio e in gioia, spera e teme, procrea dolci figli. … E tu sei giunto, nostro prezioso nemico, Tu creatura deserta, uomo cerchiato di morte. Che saprai dire ora, davanti al nostro consesso? Giurerai per un dio? Quale dio? Salterai nel sepolcro allegramente? O ti dorrai, come in ultimo l’uomo operoso si duole, Cui fu la vita breve per l’arte sua troppo lunga,

212 Arduous Tasks Dell’opera tua trista non compiuta, Dei tredici milioni ancora vivi? O figlio della morte, non ti auguriamo la morte. Possa tu vivere a lungo quanto nessuno mai visse: Possa tu vivere insonne cinque milioni di notti, E visitarti ogni notte la doglia di ognuno che vide Rinserrarsi la porta che tolse la via del ritorno, Intorno a sé farsi buio, l’aria gremirsi di morte. The wind runs free across our plains. / The live sea beats for ever at our beaches. / Man makes earth fertile, earth gives him flowers and fruits. / He lives in toil and joy; he hopes, fears, begets sweet offspring. … And you have come, our precious enemy, / Forsaken creature, man ringed by death. / What can you say now, before our assembly? / Will you swear by a god? What God? / Will you leap happily into the grave? / Or will you at the end, like the industrious man / Whose life was too brief for his long art, / Lament your sorry work unfinished, / The thirteen million still alive? Oh son of death, we do not wish you death. / May you live longer than anyone ever lived. / May you live sleepless five million nights, / And may you be visited each night by the suffering of everyone who saw, / Shutting behind him, the door that blocked the way back, / Saw it grow dark around him, the air fill with death. (Feldman and Swann 24)

Moving from the natural elements to man’s place within them in the first stanza, Levi next addresses Eichmann directly, brusquely interrupting the natural order of things with an ellipsis and the capitalized conjunction ‘E,’ just as Eichmann’s ‘Final Solution’ brutally broke into the lives of Europe’s Jewry. Levi’s repetition of the plural possessive ‘nostro’ (‘nostro prezioso nemico,’ ‘davanti al nostro consesso’) and the first-person plural of the final stanza’s first verse (‘non ti auguriamo la morte’) establishes the poetic persona’s voice as a collective one, drawing its authority from the implicit consensus of the oppressed – the ‘consesso’ almost physically conjured up by the poet as an ad hoc jury – now through proxy reasserting its voice in the shift from victimhood to plaintiffship. The proximity of the verb ‘giurerai,’ ‘will you swear,’ to the word ‘consesso’ and both words’ emphatic placement in the poem at the same time paint a powerful juridical imagery and establish the ‘consesso’ as the authority of record, not any

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‘god’ that the defendant might be tempted to call up as the guarantor of his testimony. The next verse not only confirms the poem’s juridical register but subtly reveals Levi’s thorough engagement with the juridical events of the Holocaust: ‘Salterai nel sepolcro allegramente?’ makes explicit reference to the 1946 Nuremberg trial testimony of Dieter Wisliceny, Eichmann’s deputy, that Eichmann made the following statement while discussing his probable fate at the end of the war: ‘I laugh [sic] when I jump into the grave because of the feeling that I have killed 5,000,000 Jews. That gives me great satisfaction and gratification.’61 Just as would the savvy prosecutor, Levi the poet artfully interweaves his questioning of the defendant with evidence amassed in his preparation for the trial. Levi’s verdict – sustained, the reader imagines, by the force of the ‘consesso,’ once again represented by the poet’s first-person plural verb ‘auguriamo’ – comes in the third and final stanza of the poem. Formulated through a pair of augural subjunctives (‘Possa tu vivere a lungo …’, ‘Possa tu vivere insonne …’) that sustain the entire stanza, Levi’s conclusion takes on the tone of a divine judgment – an authority to which Eichmann has been denied access, even in oath – that recalls the final malediction of his most well-known poem, ‘Shemà’: ‘O vi si sfaccia la casa, / La malattia vi impedisca, / I vostri nati torcano il viso da voi’ (emphasis mine) (Or may your house crumble, / Disease render you powerless, / Your offspring avert their faces from you [Feldman and Swann 9]). The first of a number of juridical moments in Levi’s post-Se questo è un uomo writings, the Eichmann poem represents the kind of articulation of trauma (in this case, the fixing – trying and sentencing – of a traumatic figure in a collectively inspired verdict) that Levi sought in his encounters with ‘the juridical’ and that he would indeed continue to seek in later such writings: his judgment portraits and most of all his translation of Kafka’s Prozeß. Levi’s commemoration of the Eichmann capture with these poetic verses coincided with another episode in his ongoing postwar dialogue with his German oppressors: the publication of Heinz Reidt’s German-language translation of Se questo è un uomo. As Ian Thomson chronicles, Levi’s already notorious meticulousness with regard to his translators and their work was exacerbated by the weight that this particular testimonial audience had for Levi. After a successful collaboration with Reidt, Levi marked the end of the project with a personal letter that was to become the preface to the German edition of Se questo è un uomo:

214 Arduous Tasks Forse è presunzione: ma ecco, oggi io, 174 517, per mezzo Suo posso parlare ai tedeschi, rammentare loro quello che hanno fatto, e dire loro ‘sono vivo, e vorrei capirvi per giudicarvi.’ … Io non credo che la vita dell’uomo abbia necessariamente uno scopo definito; ma se penso alla mia vita, ed agli scopi che finora mi sono prefissi, uno solo ne riconosco ben preciso e cosciente, ed è proprio questo, di portare testimonianza, di fare udire la mia voce al popolo tedesco, di ‘rispondere’ alla SS del cinto erniario, al Kapo che si è pulito la mano sulla mia spalla, al dottor Pannwitz, a quelli che impiccarono l’Ultimo, ed ai loro eredi. Sono sicuro che Lei non mi ha frainteso. Non ho mai nutrito odio nei riguardi del popolo tedesco, e se lo avessi nutrito ne sarei guarito ora, dopo aver conosciuto Lei. Non comprendo, non sopporto che si giudichi un uomo non per quello che è, ma per il gruppo a cui gli accade di appartenere. (PS I.1136–7; emphasis mine) Maybe it is presumption: but here I am today, 174517, able by your intervention to speak to the German people and to remind them of what they have done, and to say to them: ‘I am alive, and I would like to understand you in order to judge you.’ … I do not believe that the life of man necessarily has a purpose; if I think of my own life, and the aims which I have set myself up to now, I recognize that only one of them is well defined and self-evident, and it is precisely this: to bear witness, to have my voice heard among the Germans, to ‘answer’ the SS for the truss, the Kapo who wiped his hand on my shoulder, Dr Pannwitz, all those who hanged the Last One, and all their heirs. I am certain that you have not misunderstood me. I have never harboured hatred for the German people, and if ever I did I would be cured of it now that I have got to know you. I do not comprehend – I cannot tolerate – that a man be judged not for what he is, but for the group to which he happens to belong. (As translated in Thomson 290–1; emphasis mine)

The letter is noteworthy because of Levi’s clear attempt to maintain the moral high ground vis-à-vis ‘the German question’ and maintain his neutral stance, his denial of hatred towards the German people and his distaste for judging a man merely ‘for the group to which he belongs.’ At the same time, however, this position is severely undermined by his declaration that he ‘would like to understand’ the Germans ‘in order to judge’ them. What follows in the citation is a striking example of the shifting juridical terrain that Levi finds himself

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on in these situations: immediately after expressing his desire to understand and judge, he defines himself explicitly as a witness, in the position of ‘answering’ the Germans’ crimes, literally articulating each offence and its perpetrator in turn. As such, each figure so ‘answered’ is a small trial unto itself, with Levi playing both witness and judge – is this not, in Lyotard’s terms, a reversal of the différend in Levi’s favour? – for the SS, the Kapo, Dr Pannwitz, and the entire concentrationary system. At once judge and not judge, Levi claims to be the impartial witness who performatively ‘answers’ the Germans’ dehumanizing actions through his writing, seizing the authority to mete out a kind of literary – if not properly poetic – justice for the Germans’ acts. This ‘answering’ is to be understood not so much in the sense of vocal expression but rather as a returning or restitution, an action that ‘answers’ another one, more closely aligned to a sentencing than to the witnessing that both precedes it and sustains it. Interestingly, it also echoes the last lines of the ‘Esame di chimica’ chapter both in its recall of the two strikingly painful figures (Alex and Pannwitz) first depicted in that text and in its explicit intent to judge not only the figures themselves but ‘their heirs’ as well. The result is, in effect, a shift from a spatial and situational contagion (that sees the evil of Auschwitz leaking out beyond the containment of its barbed-wire fences) to a chronological and generational one that transmits the sins of the fathers to their children and beyond. The authority claimed at the end of this letter (and, indeed, at the end of ‘Per Adolf Eichmann’) is the same one that underpins a series of essays in which Levi examines the roles of two German figures who began to preoccupy him in the late 1960s and early 1970s: Ferdinand Meyer (thinly disguised as Lothar Müller) and Reinhard Heidebroek (renamed ‘Doktor Mertens’).62 Judgment portraits that allow Levi to announce verdicts all but impossible in his real-life encounters with these men – both during the war and after – the chapter ‘Vanadio’ in Il sistema periodico and the story ‘Auschwitz, città tranquilla,’63 respectively, are mini-trials of complex men in ambiguous moral positions. The first, Meyer, was the man who claimed to have made the decision to bring Levi into the Chemical Kommando, and the second, Heidebroek, is portrayed as Levi’s negative, his other, that which Levi might have become had he, too, had the freedom to make difficult personal and professional decisions during the war. Levi’s ‘trying’ of these men in his essays – for what is the ‘essai’ etymologically if not an attempt, a trying, a trial? – was surely driven by a desire to come to terms with his

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own position in the concentrationary universe and beyond, the same impulse that drove him to his own ‘trial’ – or rather Kafka’s – in 1983. Levi’s discussion of the instability of varnishes at the beginning of the ‘Vanadio’ chapter of his 1975 chemist’s autobiography, Il sistema periodico, is also the introduction of a double mystery: why does a particular brand of enamel used by Levi’s SIVA varnish factory remain tacky long after application; and does the idiosyncratic spelling of the chemical compound Naphthenat in a certain Dr Müller’s correspondence with Levi link him to Levi’s superior in the IG Farben factory in Buna, Auschwitz? The chapter sees both mysteries to their successful conclusion with the narration of parallel letters from Levi’s ‘adversary’: one series attempting to resolve the technical problem and the other confirming the identity of the ‘colleague’ and pressing for a more extensive exchange of information regarding Levi’s tenure in Auschwitz. However, in the end, only the chemical resolution is a satisfying one for Levi. Despite Müller’s eagerness to entertain Levi’s requests for explanations of Müller’s wartime behaviour (to the point of requesting a meeting during an upcoming visit to Italy), he is unable to come to terms completely with his own complicity in Hitler’s grand plan for the Jews of Europe. As Levi writes upon coming to this conclusion, Che fare? Il personaggio Müller si era ‘entpuppt’, era uscito della crisalide, era nitido, a fuoco. Né infame né eroe: filtrata via la retorica e le bugie in buona o in mala fede, rimaneva un esemplare umano tipicamente grigio, uno dei non pochi monocoli nel regno dei ciechi. (SP I.931–2) What do to? Müller had ‘entpuppt,’ had come out of the cocoon, he was clear, in focus. Neither infamous nor a hero: filtered through the rhetoric and the lies, in good or bad faith, he remained a typically grey human specimen, one of the many one-eyed men in the land of the blind.

‘Entpuppt’: German for complete, fixed, focused, articulated. Far from revealing a fluid process of ‘becoming’ or a bundle of inarticulate traumas that might allow Levi the freedom to juridically interpret and thus fix Dr Müller on his own terms, Müller’s letters show him – and his role in Levi’s moral analysis of Auschwitz – to be a fait accompli. ‘Neither infamous nor a hero’ is Levi’s disappointed verdict on this particular grey zoner; though he occupies a zone of ambiguity in Levi’s moral universe, his presence within that zone is decidedly fixed.64

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What is anything but certain, however, is Levi’s position vis-à-vis Müller, first setting up the German chemist as the long-awaited ‘antagonista’ (SP I.926) (antagonist) in an unspoken duel, and an unwilling one at that: ‘l’impresa era riuscita, l’avversario accalappiato’ (927) (the goal had been accomplished, the adversary ensnared [emphasis mine]). He then paints Müller as requesting ‘qualcosa come un’assoluzione’ (927) (something like an absolution) from Levi, a situation that ‘coincideva solo in parte con quella del reprobo davanti al giudice’ (927) (corresponded only in part with that of the reprobate in front of the judge). Levi defends his status as both adversary and judge in the letter he drafts to the German chemist, but makes it clear that the continuation of his adversarial relationship to Müller really only confirms his juridical position as one from which judgment, and not forgiveness, must issue: Stesi la minuta: lo ringraziavo per avermi fatto entrare nel laboratorio; mi dichiaravo pronto a perdonare i nemici, e magari anche ad amarli, ma solo quando mostrino segni certi di pentimento, e cioè quando cessino di essere nemici. Nel caso contrario, del nemico che resta tale, che persevera nella sua volontà di creare sofferenza, è certo che non lo si deve perdonare: si può cercare di recuperarlo, si può (si deve!) discutere con lui, ma è nostro dovere giudicarlo, non perdonarlo … Ammettevo che non tutti nascono eroi, e che un mondo in cui tutti fossero come lui, cioè onesti ed inermi, sarebbe tollerabile, ma questo è un mondo irreale. Nel mondo reale gli armati esistono, costruiscono Auschwitz, e gli onesti ed inermi spianano loro la strada; perciò di Auschwitz deve rispondere ogni tedesco, anzi, ogni uomo, e dopo Auschwitz non è più lecito essere inermi. (SP I.932–3; emphasis mine). I drafted the letter: I thanked him for getting me into the laboratory; declared myself ready to forgive my enemies, and perhaps even to love them, but only when they show clear signs of repentance, and that is when they cease to be enemies. In the opposite case, that of the enemy who remains such, who perseveres in the desire to create suffering, it is certain that he must not be forgiven: one can try to rehabilitate him, one can (one must!) discuss with him, but it is our duty to judge him, not to forgive him … I admitted that not everyone is born a hero, and that a world in which everyone was like him, that is, honest and unarmed, would be tolerable, but this is an unreal world. In the real world the armed people exist, they build Auschwitz, and the unarmed prepare the way for them; for that reason every German must answer for Auschwitz, and after Auschwitz it is no longer permissible to be unarmed.

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Levi’s sentence, not only on Müller but on all Germans who persist in their defence of passive obedience to higher powers, is both harsh and collective: ‘it is our duty to judge him, not to forgive him.’ The subtle rhetorical gesture that Levi had used since the pages of Se questo è un uomo to vest in himself the moral authority of all the victims of Auschwitz65 is used again here to decidedly different ends: while his earlier shift to a plural subject position grants him the authority to implore the reader to judge the moral system of Auschwitz on its own terms, here it is Levi’s own collectivity that has accepted the charge to judge the enemy, handed down from an unspoken moral authority. This paragraph in the ‘Vanadio’ chapter ends, significantly, with an explicitly stated and intended diegetic omission on Levi’s part: of Müller’s invitation to meet on the Italian Riviera, Levi says ‘[d]ell’incontro in Riviera non feci parola’ (SQ I.933; emphasis mine) (I did not mention the meeting on the Riviera). A telephone call from the German chemist later forced Levi to agree to an encounter, but the conversation is more notable for what it negates than for what it actually accomplishes, as the newly planned meeting allows Levi to abandon the juridical sentence that he had so carefully written: ‘lo pregai di precisare a suo tempo i particolari del suo arrivo, e misi da parte la minuta ormai superflua’ (933; emphasis mine) (I asked him to provide the details of his arrival as it drew nearer, and I put away the now superfluous draft). But their meeting was not to be: Müller’s sudden death only eight days after their phone conversation meant that the meeting could not take place as planned. The whole episode is thus written as a potential site of judgment that is conspicuous in its absence, for its failure to occur, either in writing or in person. In the end, ‘Vanadio’ performatively stakes out its own juridical terrain, and the pages of Il sistema periodico become the only possible forum in which this juridical moment could come to light.66 Almost ten years later, yet another juridical figure emerged out of Levi’s unlikely and highly complex epistolary relationship with Hety Schmitt-Maas, the ex-wife of an IG Farben chemist and a woman with a mission to ‘ “understand” the Nazi past’ (Thomson 320). Through her correspondence with both survivors and ex-Nazis, Levi requested and obtained contact information for ‘the alcoholic Auschwitz chemist Reinhard Heidebroek.’ According to Ian Thomson’s interviews with Schmitt-Maas, Levi ‘wanted to write a short story about him … though not from a “judgmental point of view (I am no judge, I am no Wiesenthal, and Heidebroek is not a criminal)”’ (ibid. 405).

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Despite Levi’s claims to the contrary,67 the portrait that emerged68 was far from flattering and in fact shares much with Levi’s earlier indictment of ‘Dr Müller.’ Levi was certainly true to his stated intention to work outside the juridical mode, and in fact his prose abstains from explicit judgment. Seeing in his ‘Mertens’ ‘un quasi-me, un altro me stesso ribaltato’ (RS II.873) (an almost-me, another me reversed), Levi contrasts him with the ‘signori del male’ – Hitler, Stalin, Himmler, Goebbels69 – who Levi says have fascinated psychologists since the end of the war. Instead, a figure like Mertens is interesting as a living document, an example of those who ‘testimon[iando] attraverso il loro comportamento sono i testi piú preziosi, perché certamente veridici’ (873) (bear[ing] witness through their behaviour are the most precious texts, because they are certainly veracious). Using this dubious claim to interpretive neutrality as a point of departure, Levi goes on to detail the story of how Dr Mertens arrived in Auschwitz as a young chemist hoping to benefit professionally from a company-initiated transfer to the Buna industrial complex. As was true of the prisoners with whom Levi boarded his cattle car east in February of 1944,70 for Mertens and the colleagues whom he consults in his decision, ‘contro il nome di Auschwitz nessuno ha obiezioni: è ancora un nome vuoto, che non suscita echi’ (875) (no one objects to the name Auschwitz: it is still an empty name that doesn’t stir any echoes). With his wife in tow, Mertens accepts the ‘promotion,’ only to return to Germany on holiday a disturbed man, beset by the images of what he has seen in the camp. Of Mertens’s life after the war, Levi knows only that he survived to take up his profession again in Germany and that he had defended his role in the wartime machine in an interview with the German historian Hermann Langbein. Levi parses the interview, noting that ‘delle camere a gas a quel tempo non sapeva nulla perché non aveva chiesto niente a nessuno. Non si rendeva conto che la sua obbedienza era un aiuto concreto al regime di Hitler? Sì, oggi sì, ma non allora: non gli era mai venuto in mente’ (876–7) (at that time he didn’t know anything about the gas chambers because he had never asked anyone anything. Didn’t he realize that his obedience was a concrete aid to Hitler’s regime? Yes, today yes, but not then: it had never even occurred to him). Levi’s conclusion ultimately echoes that of the Müller essay: though he never tried to meet Mertens, he did write a letter to him in which he states that Hitler’s rise and regime could not have happened without ‘molti buoni cittadini tedeschi [che] si sono comportati come lui, cercando di non vedere e tacendo su quanto vedevano. Mertens non mi ha risposto, ed è morto pochi anni dopo’ (877) (the many good German

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citizens [that] behaved as he had, trying to not see and remaining silent regarding that which they had. Mertens never responded to me, and he died a few years later). If only a true expression of penitence can change adversaries to friends, a will to judgment to a disposition to absolution, then it is, in short, uniquely capable of setting the stage for a successful juridical forum. As in Levi’s understanding that Müller’s lack of remorse makes him ‘emerge’ as ‘nitido,’ ‘a fuoco,’ the stasis of his relationship with ‘Dr Mertens’ leaves him only the recourse of the summary trial of his essay. In the end, both are trials conducted in absentia, whose failure is guaranteed by their defendants’ inability or unwillingness to engage actively with the process and a pre-existing moral fixity that preempts any attempts at closure that Levi might deploy. Yet another example of this kind of literary forum for juridical matters – unfortunately beyond the scope of the present study – is Levi’s complex description of the man he calls ‘Henri’ in the ‘I sommersi e i salvati’ chapter of Se questo è un uomo. Like the other judgment portraits described above, Levi’s indictment of ‘Henri’ took place on Levi’s literary terrain and was a decidedly one-sided procedure. But unlike ‘Müller’ and ‘Mertens,’ this polyglot object of Levi’s comments – Steinberg spoke German, French, Russian, and English – was of ambiguous nationality, suggesting that juridical moments such as those described above were not limited to German subjects but that Germans and the German situation later came to provide the most powerful cases for Levi’s consideration. Furthermore, Levi’s 1947 description of the ‘Henri’ figure described in Se questo è un uomo is conspicuously devoid of juridical language, making the response of ‘Henri’ – a.k.a. Paul Steinberg – in 1996 that much more striking in its reformulation of Levi’s comments in the language of the trial, and raising the possibility that literary trials, like testimony itself, are subject to temporal mechanisms and exigencies. Calling Levi’s assessment of his comportment a ‘jugement’ and a ‘verdict,’ Steinberg responded to Levi in his 2000 Chroniques d’ailleurs: Je ressens maintenant un vif regret. Primo Levi n’est plus. Je n’ai jamais pris conscience de son jugement. Il a dit qu’il donnerait beaucoup pour connaître ma vie d’homme libre. Peut-être aurais-je réussi à infléchir son verdict? À faire valoir mes circonstances atténuantes. Je ne saurai jamais si je suis en droit de solliciter la clémence du jury. Est-on tellement coupable de survivre? (128; emphasis mine) I now feel a sharp sense of regret. Primo Levi is gone. I never knew about his judgment. He said that he would give much to know about my life as a

Palinodic Reversal 221 free man. Maybe I could have persuaded him to alter his verdict? To show that there were extenuating circumstances. I will never know if I have the right to ask the clemency of the jury. Can one be so guilty for having survived? (translation is my adaptation of Coverdale and Ford 130–1)

Commuting Sentences The moral stasis of these ‘defendants’ in the face of any call to totalizing or articulating judgment stands in stark contrast with Levi’s own fluid positionality vis-à-vis the organs and figures of the juridical process. As we have seen, Shoshana Felman sees literary expression as an approximation of the temporal fluidity of traumatic experience, both defying and complementing the fixing function of the trial: ‘we needed art to start to apprehend and to retrieve what the totalization has left out’ (Juridical Unconscious 106). In Levi’s case, at issue are two separate tensions of flux and fixity. The first, the focus of the previous section, is the result of the moral stasis of the various objects of Levi’s juridical gaze (Eichmann, Müller, Heidebroek) and the flexibility-cum-repentance that would have been necessary for Levi in turn to articulate and fix their mutable positions within his own moral and judicial system. The other tension lies between the dynamism of Levi’s own positionality – shifting constantly from witness to judge, from plaintiff to offender – and the desire for fixity and closure represented in his translation of Kafka’s Prozeß. Ultimately, I posit, Levi saw his encounter with the Prozeß as a way finally to fix the flux of his earlier positional shifts among the various subject/object positions of the juridical mode, only to find that it had in effect done the opposite: its ‘impatto traumatizzante’ revealed the project to be just as much about re-enacting trauma as about distancing it through law, as much about bringing it closer as about closing it off, as much about aperture as about closure. As Felman says in her treatment of the Eichmann trial, ‘The trial reenacts the trauma’ (146). Indirectly, the article on the ‘Hygienic and Sanitary Conditions’ of the Auschwitz camp that Levi coauthored with Leonardo De Benedetti and that appeared in the December 1946 issue of the Minerva Medica was his first attempt to stake out a position for himself vis-à-vis any authoritative postwar systems of judgment. The ‘linguaggio pacato e sobrio del testimone, non quello lamentevole della vittima né quello irato del vendicatore’ (SQ I.175; emphasis mine) (calm and sober language of the witness, neither the plaintive language of the victim nor the irate language of the avenger) that Levi will later claim to have used in Se questo è un uomo71 was inspired by both the form and the function of

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the Minerva Medica report: to disseminate information in the most ‘credibile ed utile’ way, with the most ‘obiettiv[e]’ words possible. If a scientifically oriented coauthored report was the first indication of Levi’s intended positionality with regard to an eventual judgment of the facts of Auschwitz and the transparency of his desired subject position, Se questo è un uomo and its copious autocommentary were certainly consistent in maintaining those stances: from his invitation to the reader at the end of Se questo è un uomo’s ‘Al di qua del bene e del male’ to the appendix to the scholastic edition of Se questo è un uomo,72 to Levi’s introduction to the theatrical version of that book.73 In explicitly assuming and fulfilling the duties of the ‘testimone,’ Levi in effect places himself outside the traditionally adversarial relationships of conventional juridical constructs: an impartial witness is neither wronged nor in the wrong. At the same time, however, the witness is not at all removed from juridical processes – either symbolically or legally understood – in the desubjectified sense of Lyotard’s wordless, voiceless position of inaccess. Indeed, without the witness’s testimony, that which ‘prepar[a] il terreno al giudice’ (lays the groundwork for the judge), the entire juridical process is indefinitely forestalled. In 1953, however, with his participation in a class-action lawsuit against the chemical giant IG Farben,74 Levi’s positionality took a decidedly juridical turn as he began ‘to speak in the common idiom of public international law and of authorized politics,’75 to become a real plaintiff in the German courts, seizing the linguistic and thus juridical authority to speak the language of those who were once his oppressors. Six years later, just before the capture of Adolf Eichmann, Levi would receive 122 Deutschmarks in damages for his internment as a slave labourer in the IG Farben complex (Thomson). But Levi’s foray into the adversarial juridical fray was not at all one-sided or simply defined. Indeed, his real-life role as legal plaintiff – one that he never discussed in his writings – was counterbalanced by feelings of shame and guilt that re-emerged in his recourse to juridical metaphors of culpability in articulating his own position in literary and essayistic forums. A case in point is Levi’s already-discussed reference to himself as a ‘repeat offender’ in the realm of poetry,76 where he couches his sudden and inconsistent inspirations to give (poetic) voice to his most intense feelings in a discourse of guilt and legal transgression. Against whom the ‘offence’ of poetry is aimed or committed is left unclear in the most immediate context of Levi’s comment, leading us to believe that Levi is flippantly asking absolution of the reader for unintended crimes

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against poetry itself, or perhaps against the reader’s patience or literary tastes. But his poem ‘Il superstite’ raises the possibility that Levi may have been conflating the ‘offence’ of inflicting an imperfect or emotionally difficult poem with the offence described within those poetic vehicles: the crimes of omission committed against a fellow prisoner in the zero-sum game of Lager survival, through traumatic return and the ‘incerta’ nature with which they demand redress, become part and parcel of their very poetic expression. In contrast with Levi’s countless addresses to the reader in which he invites us to consider and judge the moral landscape that he has just placed before us, in these moments Levi is interested not in passing judgment but in locating and negotiating his own position within the slippery grey zones of culpability: could he have done differently? Or, as Levi puts it near the end of the ‘Vergogna’ chapter of I sommersi e i salvati, ‘Hai vergogna perché sei vivo al posto di un altro?’ (SS II.1054) (Are you ashamed because you live in another’s place?). With all of Levi’s shifting juridical positionality as a backdrop, it becomes clear that his acceptance of the Kafka translation commission in 1982 represented an undertaking fraught with both promise and danger. It was an opportunity for the kind of juridical closure to which Levi was constantly – and frustratingly, I believe – denied access through his literary encounters with uncanny figures from his Lager past: here, finally, was a viable entry into a juridical evaluation – metaphorical, textual, and psychological alike – of the Holocaust. Furthermore, translating Der Prozeß would give him the opportunity finally to fix his own position in both his own eyes and the eyes of an editorial public for whom his intellectual and writerly persona would in theory guarantee a very clear, unproblematic, and predetermined reading of a troubling, complex, and slippery text. By placing himself in the diegetic position of Joseph K. – consciously or otherwise – Levi could smooth over doubts about his own guilty position in the assessment of a Holocaust morality by shifting the focus away from survivor guilt onto more precise distinctions about the relative guilt or innocence of a prisoner as he entered the camp.77 From another perspective, Levi’s identification with and mediation of Franz Kafka on the extradiegetical level allowed him to position himself with regard to linguistic identities and literary traditions whose relationships he had been grappling with since his entry into the Lager. Taking our cue from Lyotard, Steiner, and Deleuze and Guattari, we cannot ignore the centrality of language hierarchies in discussing

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Levi’s encounter with this particular text and with this particular trial. Only one among many of the ways in which Levi’s desire for a totalizing fixity of Holocaust juridical roles may have conditioned his translation of Der Prozeß is the extent to which its transfer from German into Italian would have represented Levi’s linguistic domination of the idiom of oppression. In I sommersi e i salvati Levi characterizes the bureaucratic elements of the Lingua Tertii Imperii as a significant part of the Lagerjargon and, by extension, of the organizational system of Nazi oppression. If this is so, then Levi’s domesticating translation of Kafka’s bureaucratic German in the service of a clear reading of this story so similar to his own promised to be exactly the kind of articulating, totalizing juridical event described by Lyotard in philosophical, Deleuze and Guattari in political, and Felman in literary terms. To return to the basic premise with which this discussion began, this translation’s potential to act as a linguistic vehicle for coming to terms with German-language culture certainly adds yet another level to the already complex system of personal and moral affinities that Levi may have seen in Kafka’s Der Prozeß. Moreover, Levi’s utterance of this text through translation was appropriative in yet another way: he experienced this translation as precisely the kind of metaphorical and literary trial that Felman describes, and only in part because of his deep associations with the protagonist who endures the plot’s juridical traumas. On the one hand, the project was the source of a hoped-for exit from trauma, with its promises of closure, mastery, and corrective readings of a text antithetical to Levi’s own world view and style. On the other, it was a testimonial and translational event that unexpectedly brought trauma closer through Levi’s vicarious reliving of Joseph K.’s arrest, guilt, and trial, and his intense reading of Franz Kafka’s dark indictment of the modern condition. Levi’s translation of Kafka’s Der Prozeß was none other than a juridically based palinode of his ‘earlier optimism,’ a process by which Levi put the very reason and light of his entire persona on trial and found it to be lacking, silent, a failure. Like the other case studies developed in these pages, Il processo was a vehicle for undermining and reversal, even though the palinodic mode of this reversal suggests a more complex range of those processes than we have seen in Levi’s mediation of other texts. Here, as in his treatment of Coleridge, Dante, and Presser, Levi does violence to the text. His translation decisions – particularizing and generalizing alike – had the effect of ‘smoothing out’ Kafka’s story and his way of telling it; of eliding the central fact of Der Prozeß’s incompleteness with a veneer of

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organic, unproblematic integrity; and of shifting the focus of the language to reflect Levi’s own concerns and his own understanding of Joseph K.’s crisis. In return, however, the text and its crisis had an undermining effect on Levi, prompting him to think of Il processo as tantamount to a poetic recantation: an utterance on a par with his own more properly ‘original’ work whose palinodic result was the retraction of what came before it. We cannot overstate the importance of the source language in this complex interplay between translator and text: Levi’s approach to this translation cannot be separated from his evolving reflections on German culpability, his preoccupation with juridical positioning and survivor guilt and shame, and ultimately with the dangers of mediating a threatening text, however we may define it. The danger that the text holds and, by extension, that can potentially be unleashed in its translation emerged clearly from Levi’s encounter with Kafka as text and as an emblem for German culture. But Levi had similar recourse to images of violence in non-German contexts, too; by the same token, he did not always describe the interplay of his own Italian with the German that he saw brutalized in the Lager in these same threatening terms. In other words, if we are to attempt to sketch a Levian theory of translation, we must keep in mind that it is shaped not only by the particulars of the source text but by Levi’s position within the chain of mediation. His translation of Der Prozeß is emblematic also of this: it shows us that as much as a translator can mediate the text, she or he can also be altered by it, and in often perilous, violent ways. As we saw in Levi’s ‘Tradurre ed essere tradotti’ essay, translation is trap-laden territory, full of metaphorical snares waiting to swallow up metaphorical translators. But Levi figures this danger in consistently corporal ways, pointing not only to the very real threat to the translator’s body but also by extension to his corpus, or the body of work that ‘makes him up,’ as it were. This study will conclude with a return to ‘Tradurre ed essere tradotti’ and to Levi’s last published comments on being translated in I sommersi e i salvati.

Conclusion: The Witness’s Tape Recorder and the Violence of Mediation

This study has focused a great deal on the way in which translation functions as a metaphor for the challenges and mechanisms of Holocaust testimony in Levi’s oeuvre; in this context, I have argued that Levi’s translation practices are consistently interventionist, and that they tend more often than not to undermine or even reverse their source text. This results in a foregrounding, variously, of the witness’s reacquisition of agency through the translating process; of the very real challenges of the transmission of Holocaust testimony; and of translation’s unique ability to figure the witness’s mediating role in transmission, as well as the anxieties that emerge from that role. These anxieties manifest themselves textually in the sites of translation examined here, but also paratextually in Levi’s commentaries on translation and other kinds of mediation. Interestingly, these latter texts suggest two specific – and very different – tropes that are helpful in understanding Levi’s bifurcated notion of translation, a notion that, as it turns out, depends entirely on where Levi sees himself in the chain of translational acts. Just as Levi’s essay ‘Tradurre ed essere tradotti’ was the point of entry into this exploration of Levi’s testimonial world, so it will be this study’s point of egress. As we have seen, the essay plots out the difficulties of both terms, active and passive. The first term, the act of translating, is variously described as a thankless job (a counter-intuitive fact, Levi says; the reversal of Babel should draw the gratitude of all human kind); a trap-laden terrain where false cognates, idioms, and culturally specific signifiers lie waiting in ambush for the unsuspecting but well-meaning translator – a poorly remunerated figure within both intellectual and commercial economies; and a process requiring the kind of art not taught

Conclusion 227

or teachable in schools. In short, translating is ‘[un] compito … più arduo’ (‘Tradurre ed essere tradotti,’ AM II.733) than can be remedied by the mere awareness of such snares as false friends, because of the ‘superhuman’ difficulty of transmitting the ‘expressive force’ of a text from one language to another. Belying the equal valence given to both terms in the essay’s title is the scant, one-paragraph conclusion in which Levi comments on the diametrically opposed role of ‘being translated.’ Here, the position of being the author translated by someone else is described primarily in terms of imposed, unwanted passivity and imprisonment: ‘[u]n lavoro né feriale né festivo, anzi, [quello di essere tradotti] non è un lavoro per niente, è una semi-passività’ (‘Tradurre,’ AM II.734) (a kind of work that belongs neither to the work week nor to the weekend; as a matter of fact, it’s not work at all, it’s a semi-passivity), similar to that of being operated on or psychoanalysed. The staccato list of feelings that assail the poor passive translatee frames the discourse in even more striking terms: the translated author feels, by turns or all at once, ‘lusingato, tradito, nobilitato, radiografato, castrato, piallato, stuprato, adornato, ucciso’ (‘Tradurre,’ AM II.734) (flattered, betrayed, ennobled, x-rayed, castrated, levelled, raped, adorned, killed) by the translator of his or her work. This rhetoric of brutal physical violence (highly sexualized, we should say, by images of castration and rape) whose agent ‘pokes his nose and fingers into your entrails’ is in tension with Levi’s description just a few pages earlier of a translator (much like himself) who must ‘calarsi nella personalità dell’autore del testo tradotto’ (lower himself into the personality of the author) to detect the many dangers presented by the text. In the process of translating, it is the translator who must risk his well-being for the greater linguistic good, but from the perspective of the translated, the personal, bodily stakes are even higher: invasive prodding, mutilation, and even death. Risky business in either case; but it is clear that translating for Levi is decidedly not the same as being translated, and indeed the two terms end up being the bearers of very different codes of interpretation and conduct, translatorly and otherwise. On the other hand, the two processes as described by Levi do share at least one fundamental characteristic: a respect for the unity between place and language, between experience and its linguistic expression. A consideration of this commonality helps us to understand better what, exactly, is at stake in Levi’s seemingly divergent theories and practices of translation. Namely, it suggests that, on either side of the

228 Arduous Tasks

equation, to express the Holocaust in a code different from the locus of its linguistic and cultural logic is arduous, to say the least; that Levi is aware of the various levels of mediation that bring his language and the testimony that it transmits farther and farther away from its source text; that Levi’s interpretive gestures are part of a lifelong struggle to gain power over the signification of the Holocaust, to articulate from the position of the survivor despite and against the commanding logic of the event, its unique mode of articulation, its grammar, its language. Levi’s comments on the active term in ‘Tradurre ed essere tradotti’ represent a kind of translator’s apologia, a defence against potential criticisms of inaccuracy or excessive licence, and ultimately a plea for the translator as ‘il solo che legga veramente un testo, lo legga in profondità, in tutte le sue pieghe, pesando e apprezzando ogni parola e ogni immagine, o magari scoprendone i vuoti e i falsi’ (‘Tradurre,’ AM II.734) (the only one who truly reads a text, reads it profoundly, in every crease, weighing and valuing every word and every image, or perhaps discovering its gaps and missteps). This passage constructs the translator as a privileged figure whose intimate knowledge of the text puts him in a position to assess even its shortcomings. What it does not make explicit is the extent to which Levi as a translator in fact felt compelled to correct those gaps and missteps in the service of goals that reached beyond the source text and into his own aesthetic, moral, and ethical world view: in sum, to enact the same intrusive violence on the source text that he describes from the position of the translatee. The difference, in the end, is one between the holistic investment suggested by the notion of ‘lowering oneself into’ the source text’s author and the more violent and even deadly paradigms of interaction imagined by Levi’s anxieties of passivity in the signification of the Holocaust – specifically his Holocaust. By means of a conclusion, I propose to place both of these modes of translation in open dialogue with Levi’s discussion – in the ‘Lettere di tedeschi’ section of I sommersi e i salvati – of having Se questo è un uomo translated into German, and with his private reflection on the process of constructing his ‘antologia personale,’ La ricerca delle radici. After a career of troubling the text to accommodate the reader (as Freidrich Schleiermacher would say), of recontexting and subverting the Ancient Mariner and Dante’s poet and pilgrim, of reshaping and ‘correcting’ writers like Presser and Kafka, Levi in the 1985 essay ‘Lettere di tedeschi’ (‘Letters from Germans’) (the last proper chapter of I sommersi e i salvati) selects the curious image of the tape recorder to articulate what he hoped Heinz Reidt’s German translation of Se questo è un uomo would be.

Conclusion 229

In that essay, Levi develops an antidote to the kind of potentially annihilating and castrating violence that for him characterized ‘being translated’: ‘In certo modo, non si trattava di una traduzione ma piuttosto di un restauro: la sua era, o io volevo che fosse, una restitutio in pristinum, una retroversione alla lingua in cui le cose erano avvenute ed a cui esse competevano. Doveva essere, piú che un libro, un nastro di magnetofono’ (SS II.1128) (In a certain sense, it was not so much a matter of translation as of a restoration: it was, or I wanted it to be, a restitutio in pristinum, a retroversion into the language in which the events had happened and to which they owed themselves. It was to be, more than a book, a recording tape). The idea that the translation from Italian into German should represent a restoration of the source text of Auschwitz compels us, first, to see the Holocaust as a source text that demands translation; by this theory Levi’s text is ostensibly diminished by its attempts to reproduce the Lager ‘original’ since it expresses itself in a language not inherent to the events and their logic. It also suggests that Levi’s claim for the desirability of this kind of reverse signification process represents, in effect, an attempt to test the truth value of the Italian translation that lies between the German source text of Auschwitz and the German translator’s attempt to recapture it. This circular or ‘back translation’ is a common process in legal and technical translation fields, a check to ensure that the first translation was ‘faithful’ enough to be unproblematically rendered back into its ‘original’ state. Despite its currency in technical translation practice, however, this prospect is quite a different one in the literary and testimonial spheres, where the possibility of a quality-control check on Levi’s and Reidt’s ‘reproductions’ of the Holocaust is illusory, at best. At worst, it seeks to occult the layers and levels of difference that lie on one hand between the Lager and Levi’s rendering of it and on the other between Se questo è un uomo and Ist das ein Mensch: temporal differences; a double spatial dislocation; the rerouting of the system of signification out of the German cultural space via Levi and his torinese, integrated, Enlightenment subject position; the host of linguistic differences at play between the Lager’s corrupt German, its use within Levi’s elegant Italian narrative, and its recontextualized appearance in postwar German prose. But most importantly, Levi’s comments suggest that he conceives of the various seasons in the life of his testimony in fundamentally different ways, and thus as subject to essentially different theories and ethics of translation. Levi’s description of his goals for the German translation, in this same part of I sommersi e i salvati, suggests the slippery nature of his notions of originality and reproduction:

230 Arduous Tasks a quel tempo io ero premuto da uno scrupolo di superrealismo; volevo che in quel libro, ed in specie proprio nella sua veste tedesca, niente andasse perduto di quelle asprezze, di quelle violenze fatte al linguaggio, che del resto mi ero sforzato del mio meglio di riprodurre nell’originale italiano.’ (SS II.1128; emphasis mine) at the time, I was spurred on by a scrupulous sense of superrealism; I wanted for nothing to be lost in that book, and especially in its German garment, of that bitterness, of that violence done against language, that I had tried so hard to reproduce in the Italian original.

‘[T]hat I tried so hard to reproduce in the Italian original’: Levi’s Se questo è un uomo is thus constructed as a site of oscillation between imperfect reproduction and originality, between the ‘superrealist’ mimesis of a source or object and the sacred utterance – harking back to romantic notions of translation’s evocation of divine creation – of the ‘original’ testimonial word. Levi’s paradoxical terminology in fact walks a line between translating – in his own earnest effort to reproduce the German source text of the Lager – and being translated, between control and its relinquishment. If the first stage of the testimony’s life – Levi’s translation from the German of the Third Reich to his measured, rational Italian – is couched in terms of derivation, interpretation, analysis, even lack or inadequacy, the second phase, the German restitutio in pristinum, is described in terms of the stability of a source text that can be recaptured and reinstalled as the primary bearer of truth and meaning. Moreover, for Levi the process of returning to that fixity entails none of the violence and change (adornment, castration, rape, murder) described in the last paragraph of ‘Tradurre ed essere tradotti’; rather it amounts to a corrective restoration of the most organic and peaceful kind, neither adding to nor subtracting from the source text to be transmitted, and indeed eliminating any and all anxieties that Levi might feel about the violence wrought by normal translation. In the return to his original’s ‘original,’ Levi would have us believe, the violence is neutralized, the process externalized from the bodies of translator and translatee alike; and somehow all the various source texts in question remain intact. As an emblem for the ways in which translation can come to stand for the whole of an albeit tension-filled Levian testimonial value system, Levi’s comments tell us this: that each of these phases or translation acts is linked to an essentially different translatorly ‘task,’ or duty,

Conclusion 231

and that translating is not necessarily the same as being translated, in either practical or ethical terms. Specifically, I would like to suggest that Levi in this particular instance deploys these delicately balanced tropes of translation as strategies of containment for the German language, that Levi’s desire to return his story to its originary linguistic state ultimately emerges from the need to allow German only the space it needs to perform the historical violence of the camps and the violence done to the German language by the camps but not to introduce new violence – the inevitable violence of translation – on Levi’s testimonial text. That if German, the language of the offence (and the violence) is acceptable within the safe confines of Levi’s appropriation of it, the German language and culture must not however be set free to enact new translatorly offences on Levi’s now sacred testimonial text, in other words, to ‘x-ray’ it, ‘rape’ it, or ultimately ‘kill’ it. We have noted, however, that Levi’s anxieties about the danger associated with close reading and mediation are not limited to translations from and into the German language. Striking evidence of this comes in the form of Levi’s letter to Einaudi editor Giulio Bollati on the occasion of his submission of the Ricerca delle radici manuscript in September 1980: mi sono sentito piú spiattellato nel fare questa scelta che nello scrivere libri. Non ho mai subito trattamenti psicoanalitici né operazioni chirurgiche; questo lavoro me ne è sembrato l’equivalente. Mi sono sentito con la pancia aperta, anzi, in atto di aprirmela io stesso, come Maometto nella nona bolgia e nell’illustrazione del Doré. (‘Note ai testi’ II.1576–7) I have felt more laid bare in making this choice than in writing books. I have never undergone psychoanalytic treatment or surgery; this work has seemed to me equivalent to those. It has felt like having my stomach opened, or rather, like being in the act of opening it myself, like Mohammed in the ninth Bolgia and in Doré’s illustration.

Doré’s illustrations of Dante’s Inferno recur frequently as signposts of anxiety in Levi’s essayistic work, most notably in his piece on ‘Paura dei ragni’ (Fear of Spiders’) in L’altrui mestiere. In language uncannily similar to that used to explore the ‘essere tradotti’ term in Levi’s ‘Tradurre’ essay, Mohammed’s splayed torso is proposed as a figure for the violence of reading and textual examination, the body of the man as it stands for the ‘laid bare’ text, or corpus, of the writer. Here, the violence is of the writer’s own doing as he examines – and then opens for the

232 Arduous Tasks

examination of others – his textual genealogy. Levi’s idea of corpus is thus expanded to embrace not only his own textual production but the body of texts that have helped to form him, to compose his own textual body. As Belpoliti writes of the Ricerca delle radici letter, this is the closest that Levi comes to an explicitly Freudian self-reading: ‘Le radici del titolo sono dunque le parti di sé – dello scrittore – che affondano nella parte sotterranea, terrigna e dunque anche più complessa e inquietante’ (‘Note ai testi’ II.1578) (The roots of the title are thus the parts of himself – of the writer – that plunge into the subterranean, earthly regions, and therefore also the most complex and disquieting). If specific texts are threatening for linguistic, cultural, or historical reasons, Levi’s more general comments here suggest an awareness of the difficulty of his own potential mediation by his readers, and a reluctance to have undue violence done to any of his figured bodies: textual, evidentiary, and testimonial alike. What are the implications of Levi’s double standard for broader testimonial issues within his oeuvre – one translation theory applied to his own testimonial task and quite another applied to the duty that is owed to him by potential translators or interpreters of his work? What are, for Levi, the ethical differences between translating and being translated? And can we discern, in the space between these two processes, a space, or gap, that illuminates Levi’s work in a more global way? If translating and being translated come to mean essentially different things for Levi, what does this say about his role as interpreter of the Holocaust? What is the relationship, in the end, between theoretical notions of translating and being translated and the practical dynamics of testimony? Ultimately, Levi’s uses and abuses of translation constituted textual sites of exploration in which the mechanics, the challenges, and the ethics of testimony came under his sophisticated gaze. Through this process, his activist translations came to symbolize and authorize new agencies, a subjecthood reclaimed after its brutal evacuation in the Lager. Levi’s theorizations of these processes, though, prefer to underscore the danger inherent in such close readings as translation demands; unravelling Babel, as we well know from Se questo è un uomo, is no easy task. But being translated – both in theory and in practice – was a far more threatening prospect for Levi. Its potential for ‘flattery’ and ‘ornamentation’ aside, being translated represented for Levi an offence against his testimonial agency and a threat to the integrity of his testimonial signs. Even when the threat is figured as a more textually corporeal one (as the body of his textual influences-cum-textual self) and even when it is Levi himself doing the violent prodding, an open text is always a vulnerable one.

Conclusion 233

Levi’s two views of translation are radically different. One perceives only the violence imposed on a text when it is mediated and on a translator when she or he mediates it. The other amounts to an idealized fantasy of pristine source texts and an externalized, neutralized model of return and restitution, healing and reversal of the failures (such as Levi’s Italian rendering of the corrupt sign systems of the Lager) of mediation. Taken together, they indicate a whole constellation of testimonial anxieties on Levi’s part, not only in the early stages of his production, when ineffability, transgression, and traumatic reoccurrence are of principal concern, but in its later stages as well, when the danger of textual mediation comes into collision with its absolute necessity. Is there a lesson to be learned in this gap between translating and being translated? Should mediators of the Holocaust source text do as Levi says – or as Levi does? Should we, lured by the appeal of documentary transparency, seek an untroubled return to the pristine ‘origin’ of the event? And if so, do we risk coming to the same sad end as Levi’s Mr Simpson, whose Torec machine offers externalized and simulacral ‘tape recordings’ of realities with which we engage too easily, too temporarily, too weakly? Perhaps, instead, we must come to terms with the violence of ‘profound’ reading that Levi saw so clearly, and with the fact that any attempt to represent the Holocaust is perforce inscribed with our role as mediators, interpreters – to wit, translators of the event.

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Notes

Preface: Points of Entry 1 Originally published on 5 Nov. 1980 in Levi’s column for the Turin daily La Stampa, as ‘Lasciapassare per Babele,’ and reprinted in L’altrui mestiere (1985). 2 Analogies with monetary systems and currency in general are a time-worn topos in the rhetoric of translation theory, and Levi’s encounter with the field is no exception. I deal extensively with the intersection between translation and Holocaust numismatics in chapter 4. 3 Leontius Pilatus was the first to translate Homer’s Odyssey into Latin, at Petrarch’s request and expense, in the 1350s. 4 Of course, anthropological concerns underpin much of Levi’s work. It is thus no coincidence that three of Levi’s book-length translations – of Mary Douglas’s Natural Symbols and of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s La vie des masques and Le regard éloigné – are canonical texts of that field. 5 Italo Calvino, in an October 1974 letter to Levi, expressed scepticism about ‘Argon’s’ placement at the beginning of Il sistema periodico and in fact encouraged him to place it in the middle of the text. Levi’s insistence on the prominent position of ‘Argon’ indicates the pivotal role of language in laying the groundwork for this ‘chemist’s autobiography,’ as Calvino called the text (Correspondence: Archivi di Stato di Torino, ‘LEVI, Primo’ cartella 1, fogli 1–452). 6 For a full survey of Levi’s interest in language and dialect, see Lepschy and Lepschy’s ‘Primo Levi’s Languages.’ 7 As Italo Calvino dubbed the tales that would become the nucleus of Storie naturali (1966) in a November 1961 letter to Levi (Belpoliti, ‘Note ai testi,’ Opere I.1429). 8 The version of ‘L’ordine a buon mercato’ that originally appeared in the journal Il Giorno explicitly ended with the narrator’s arrest and incarceration for

236 Notes to pages xiii–4

9 10

11

12

transgressing against this prohibition, and the story is in fact framed from the perspective of these final events (‘Note ai testi,’ I.1439). I would like to thank Ellen Nerenberg for suggesting to me this story’s relevance to the overarching themes of the Arduous Tasks project. This editorial enterprise was also supposed to have involved Italo Calvino, Leonardo Sciascia, and Paolo Volponi, but Levi was the only one to complete his anthology. See Belpoliti’s Primo Levi, 131, and Angier, 621–2. Here Levi is referring to the identification of his own textual preferences, which he claims to have found surprising. Levi also famously referred to his poetic production in strikingly similar terms. For a broader treatment of Levi as ‘occasional’ poet, see chapter 2. Levi would later write the preface for the 1984 Italian edition of Langbein’s Menschen in Auschwitz, translated as Uomini ad Auschwitz.

Introduction: Translation Matters 1 Levi’s rhetorical approach to this problem is clear already in Se questo è un uomo, where in chapters like ‘Ottobre 1944’ (cited in this passage) and ‘Al di qua del bene e del male’ he challenges the reader to understand that his language cannot be applied to the univers concentrationnaire: ‘Vorremmo ora invitare il lettore a riflettere, che cosa potessero significare in Lager le nostre parole “bene” e “male”, “giusto” e “ingiusto’’’ (SQ I.82) (At this point we would like to invite the reader to reflect on what our words ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ could have meant in the Lager). He uses this same trope in short science-fiction stories such as ‘Visto di lontano’: ‘Perciò, quando si parla ad esempio di città o di navi, occorre ricordare che esse sono “città” (ossia fitti agglomerati di abitazioni umane) e “navi” (ossia voluminosi oggetti galleggianti costruiti e pilotati dall’uomo) per noi, non per l’ignoto estensore del Rapporto: al quale le une e le altre apparivano sotto un aspetto assai meno rivelatore’ (SN I.600) (Therefore, when we speak of cities or ships, it must be remembered that these are ‘cities’ [or rather dense conglomerations of human dwellings] and ‘ships’ [or rather voluminous floating objects constructed and piloted by man] for us, not for the anonymous author of the Report: for whom the former and the latter appeared in much less revealing contexts). 2 Cf Levi’s essay ‘Dello scrivere oscuro’ in L’altrui mestiere (AM) II.676–82, originally published in La Stampa on 11 Dec. 1976. 3 Levi’s published translation work includes La notte dei Girondini (Milan: Adelphi, 1976; trans. of Jacob Presser’s De nacht der Girondijnen); I simboli naturali (Turin: Einaudi, 1979; trans. of Mary Douglas’s Natural Symbols); Il

Notes to pages 4–9 237

4 5 6

7

8

9

10

processo (Turin: Einaudi, 1983; trans. of Franz Kafka’s Der Prozeß); La via delle maschere (Turin: Einaudi, 1985; trans. of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s La vie des masques); Lo sguardo da lontano (Turin: Einaudi, 1989; trans. of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Le regard eloigné); the five anthologized passages (out of thirty total) that Levi translated himself for La ricerca delle radici: Antologia personale (Turin: Einaudi, 1981); and translations of Heinrich Heine’s poetry at the end of Ad ora incerta, a collection of Levi’s original poetic work published in 1984. I have chosen the Presser and Kafka translations (in chapters 4 and 5, respectively) as objects of particular examination because of their pride of place as the first and last large-scale projects taken on by Levi and because of the specifics of how the projects developed. In particular, the poem ‘Il superstite,’ published in Ad ora incerta and the chapter ‘Il Canto di Ulisse’ of Se questo è un uomo. Specifically, his translations of Presser’s De nacht der Girondijnen and Kafka’s Der Prozeß. In many ways, Levi’s high literary style was at cross-purposes with the majority of the literature produced in Italy in the immediate postwar period, literature that was marked instead by the bare and streamlined anti-literariness of the neorealist impulse. This tradition includes, but is by no means limited to, the following articles, essays, and chapters: Eve Tavor Bannet, ‘The Scene of Translation: After Jakobson, Benjamin, de Man, and Derrida,’ New Literary History 24.3 (1993): 577–95; Maurice Blanchot, ‘Translating,’ trans. Richard Sieburth, Sulfur 26 (1990): 82–6; Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986); Jacques Derrida, ‘Des Tours de Babel,’ in Difference in Translation, ed. and trans. Joseph Graham (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985); Carol Jacobs, ‘The Monstrosity of Translation,’ Modern Language Notes 90 (1975): 755–66; Horst Turk, ‘The Question of Untranslatability: Benjamin, Quine, Derrida,’ Translation Perspectives 5 (1990): 43–56. Jacques Derrida, ‘Des Tours de Babel,’ in Difference in Translation, ed. and trans. Joseph Graham (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985). Original French is in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), and is also reproduced in the appendix to Graham’s volume, 209–48. ‘situe le problème, au sens de ce qui précisément est devant soi comme une tâche, comme celui du traducteur et non de la traduction … Il nomme le sujet de la traduction, comme sujet endetté, obligé par un devoir, déjà en situation d’héritier, inscrit comme survivant dans une généalogie, comme survivant ou agent de survie’ (Difference 223). For a discussion of Levi’s translation of the Auschwitz source text in terms of Walter Benjamin’s messianic vision of utopian linguistic unity and translation

238 Notes to pages 9–10 as the movement towards perfect language, see my ‘The Witness as Translator: Primo Levi’s Task.’ In addition to its reconsideration of the relationship between source and target texts, ‘The Task of the Translator’ is also helpful in thinking through the translational metaphor as a figure of the ethical dimension of Levi’s testimonial project. Felman and Laub’s Testimony demonstrates that the source text of Auschwitz is predicated upon the idea of erasure, of the cancellation of the event and all its material and human evidence. The essential nihilism of Auschwitz and the Lagerjargon resists translation in terms of Benjamin’s notion of a translatable language’s ‘gesturing’ towards other languages and towards a general harmony of intention, and it is precisely this resistance that Levi as translator must overcome in order to canonize his own text. But more importantly, Benjamin’s theoretical model allows us to see Levi’s translation practices as a form of ‘afterlife,’ or as Jacques Derrida ‘translates’ it in ‘Des Tours de Babel,’ as survival. In Benjamin’s words, ‘a translation issues from the original – not so much from its life as from its afterlife. For a translation comes later than the original, and since the important works of world literature never find their chosen translators at the time of their origin, their translation marks their stage of continued life’ (71). Levi’s translation of the events of the Holocaust constitutes a very real body of evidence, thus denying the erasure demanded by the Nazi regime, a source text that commands silence instead of gesturing towards the harmony described by Benjamin. Survival is thus reinscribed in the event; indeed, the translating act allows the translator’s very survival to occur. The ‘sur-vie’ or extra life that is supplied by translation is one that in any case adds life, but in the case of Lagerjargon actually gives life to the original; the translation of Auschwitz represents the afterlife of a death-ridden event. And the defiance inherent in Levi’s translation is never more bold than when he appropriates the very language of the camps in his rendering, in effect forcing it into the harmony of all languages, simultaneously enacting the reversal of Benjamin’s biblical Babel and its reincarnation in Auschwitz. 11 ‘un ricordo troppo spesso evocato, ed espresso in forma di racconto tende a fissarsi in uno stereotipo, in una forma collaudata dall’esperienza, cristallizzata, perfezionata, adorna, che si installa al posto del ricordo greggio e cresce a sue spese’ (SS II.1006–07) (a memory evoked too many times, and expressed in narrative form, tends to fix itself in a stereotype, in a form that has been tested by experience, crystallized, perfected, embellished, that instals itself in place of the raw memory and grows at its expense). 12 My comment is oriented principally towards shifts in Levi’s literary program; his experience with survivor guilt was a cyclical pattern, as were his bouts with depression. See Thomson, especially 505.

Notes to pages 12–18 239 13 I take this term from Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002), whose thinking about juridical events that enact juridical processes in other spheres has been fundamental to my work on Levi’s translation of Der Prozeß. 1 Transmission: The Witness as Translator 1 In particular, see Levi’s two transmission dreams in Se questo è un uomo (the first later cruelly parodied at the end of the ‘Kraus’ chapter of the same text, as Levi invents a similar dream to recount to his inept campmate), and the ‘Wstwać’ dream within a dream that both poetically begins and narratively concludes La tregua (I.203, I.395). 2 Unless otherwise indicated, all citations are taken from the 1997 twovolume edition of Levi’s Opere, edited by Marco Belpoliti (Turin: Einaudi); a less complete collection of Levi’s works was published in three volumes (Turin: Einaudi) ten years earlier, the year of Levi’s death. 3 This, like all uncited translations, is mine. In all other cases, translations of Se questo è un uomo are taken from Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Macmillan, 1961). 4 Unless uncited (in which case translations are mine), all translations of I sommersi e i salvati are taken from The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Summit Books, 1988). 5 The connection between the prisoners’ physical needs and their narrative ones is clearly drawn by Levi in Se questo è un uomo. He accomplishes this primarily through an exploration of the relationship between the orality of food and drink and that of narration, a matter to which he returns in his ‘Comunicare’ essay in I sommersi e i salvati (I.1064). On this point, see especially Biasin’s chapter on Levi in I sapori della modernità. Cibo e romanzo. Furthermore, the importance of communication to survival in the univers concentrationnaire is thoroughly documented by Levi: from his attribution of the Italians’ high death rate in the camp to their inability to understand the orders being shouted around them; to the prisoners’ communicative, moral, and psychological disintegration as a result of the censorship and linguistic chaos of the Nazi regime; to the remaining inmates’ ability to ‘rebecome men,’ as Levi puts it (in the ‘Storia di dieci giorni’ chapter that concludes SQ), after the German troops’ departure from the camp. 6 See, for example, the case of Jan Karski, a courier for the Polish underground Resistance. During a diplomatic mission to the United States meant to alert the Western powers to the Nazi destruction of the Jews of Poland, Karski met with Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter. Karski recalled a

240 Notes to page 21 particularly illustrative episode for a special edition of Newsweek in 1999: ‘I told him what I knew and saw … [m]ostly he listened in silence until I had nothing else to say. He got up and started to pace back and forth. Then he took his seat and I remember every word he said: “Mr. Karski, a man like me talking to a man like you must be totally frank. So I must say that I’m unable to believe what you told me.” [Polish Ambassador Jan] Ciechanowshi begged him: “Felix, you don’t mean it. You cannot tell him that he’s lying. The authority of my government is behind him.” Frankfurther replied: “I didn’t say this young man is lying. I said I am unable to believe what he told me (emphasis mine).”’ Jan Karski’s memoirs were published in 1944 as Story of a Secret State, but his role in making the Nazi ‘Final Solution’ known to the world remained obscured until Claude Lanzmann’s interview with Karski for Shoah. See Felman’s ‘The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah’ (in Felman and Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History) for a treatment of Karski’s own positionality within the witnessing process. 7 Hence Levi’s predilection for line 582 of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ ‘At an uncertain hour,’ and the stanza that it introduces (ll 582–5), often used epigraphically to introduce particularly impassioned responses to the Holocaust, both in citation and in Levi’s original translation. This phenomenon marks Levi’s production from the mid-1960s on, inspiring the title of his second collection of poetry (Ad ora incerta, a literal translation of Coleridge’s l 582); the poem ‘Il superstite’ (‘The Survivor’) from that same collection; and the epigraph to his last published book, I sommersi e i salvati. Levi also mentions Coleridge’s poem and his specific feelings of empathy with its poetic narrative persona in Il sistema periodico (‘Cromo’ II.870–1) and in the preface to the 1966 theatrical version of Se questo è un uomo. Finally, the Ancient Mariner himself appears in Levi’s fantastic short story ‘Nel parco,’ published in 1971 in Vizio di forma. Levi’s (mis)translation and appropriation of Coleridge’s four-line stanza is taken up in chapter 2. 8 In On Translation, ed. R.A. Brower (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1959). Rpt, in French, in Jakobson’s Essais de linguistique générale (Paris: Éditions de Minuit: 1963). 9 Jakobson qualifies this assertion by admitting that jest, dreams, magic, and all sorts of ‘linguistic mythology’ best represented by poetry are much more complex issues, considering their heightened semantic tenor. The ‘unreal’ or ‘surreal’ nature of the univers concentrationnaire tempts us to categorize its experience as dreamlike (or better, nightmare-like). But its semantic elements are not heightened in the way that symbolism heightens poetry or

Notes to page 22 241

10

11

12 13

dream; indeed, the absence of multiple – or even unique – correspondences between word and meaning in the Lager annihilates symbolism of all kinds, especially poetic symbolism. Term coined by David Rousset in his book by the same name, L’univers concentrationnaire (Paris: Éditions du Pavois, 1946), which addresses the problem of both Nazi and Soviet concentration and extermination camps; the phrase will be used throughout the present work in the more limited sense of the German Lager. Levi’s treatment of the (in)efficacy of intracamp communication in Se questo è un uomo focuses mostly on the Italian linguistic minority and the difficulties of receiving information both from camp functionaries speaking only German or Polish and from campmates who quickly made clear that traditional notions of ally and enemy would not hold true in the Nazi Lager (cf I sommersi e i salvati, especially the chapter entitled ‘La vergogna’). Survival was thus closely associated with the ability to understand orders and what rare advice came the prisoner’s way. For Levi, who understood a bit of German before his deportation, ‘la maggior parte degli italiani deportati con me sono morti nei primi giorni per non capire … Fra le tante cause di naufragio nel Lager, quella linguistica era una delle prime’ (Ritorno ad Auschwitz) (The majority of Italians deported with me were killed within days of arrival because they didn’t understand … Among the many causes of ruin in the Lager, the linguistic ones were some of the most important). Dvorah Getzler’s 1986 interview with Levi revealed that ‘[h]e reckons that about 100 of the 125 Italians in the camp with him died in the first month because they could not understand simple commands, or the mechanics of reporting sick’ (17). Cf Levi’s chapter dedicated to ‘L’intellettuale ad Auschwitz,’ and his objections to Améry’s assessment of the same topic, in I sommersi e i salvati. It would seem that Levi, in his preface to Se questo è un uomo, has exactly this sort of linguistic alienation in mind when he addresses the ‘otherness’ of the straniero: ‘A molti, individui o popoli, può accadere di ritenere, piú o meno consapevolmente, che “ogni straniero è nemico”. Per lo piú questa convinzione giace in fondo agli animi come una infezione latente; si manifesta solo in atti saltuari e incoordinati, e non sta all’origine di un sistema di pensiero. Ma quando questo avviene, quando il dogma inespresso diventa premessa maggiore di un sillogismo, allora, al termine della catena, sta il Lager’ (SQ I.5) (Many people – many nations – can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that ‘every stranger is an enemy.’ For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason. But when this does come about, when the unspoken

242 Notes to pages 23–4

14

15

16

17

18

19

dogma becomes the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager [Woolf 5]). Uncited translations of La tregua are my own; all others are taken from The Reawakening, trans. Stuart Woolf (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1965); this translation is my adaptation of Woolf 25. For purposes of continuity and consistency with Levi’s own references to Lagerjargon, however, our discussion of linguistic issues will retain his term, with exceptions noted. Just as language is perverted in the Nazi camp system, so is the notion of translation, as language transfer is parodied as its very obliteration: ‘Racconta Marsalek, nel suo libro Mauthausen (La Pietra, Milano 1977) che in questo Lager, ancora piú mistilingue di Auschwitz, il nerbo di gomma si chiamava “der Dolmetscher”, l’interprete: quello che si faceva capire da tutti’ (SS II.1062) (In his book Mauthausen [La Pietra, Milano 1977], Marsalek tells us that in this Lager, even more polyglot than Auschwitz, the rubber truncheon was called der Dolmetcher, the interpreter: the one who made himself understood to everybody [Rosenthal 92]). As Levi explains in I sommersi e i salvati, ‘Salvo casi di incapacità patologica, comunicare si può e si deve … perché il silenzio, l’assenza di segnali, è a sua volta un segnale, ma ambiguo, e l’ambiguità genera inquietudine e sospetto’ (II.1059–60) (Except for cases of pathological incapacity, one can and must communicate … because silence, the absence of signals, is itself a signal, but an ambiguous one, and ambiguity generates anxiety and suspicion [Rosenthal 89]). ‘Con chi non li capiva, i neri reagivano in un modo che ci stupí e spaventò: l’ordine, che era stato pronunciato con la voce tranquilla di chi sa che verrà obbedito, veniva ripetuto identico con voce alta e rabbiosa, poi urlato a squarciagola, come si farebbe con un sordo, o meglio con un animale domestico, piú sensibile al tono che al contenuto del messaggio’ (SS II.1061) (To those who did not understand them the black men reacted in a manner that astonished and frightened us: an order that had been pronounced in the calm voice of a man who knows he will be obeyed was repeated word for word in a loud, angry voice, then screamed at the top of his lungs as if he were addressing a deaf person or indeed a domestic animal, more responsive to the tone than the content of the message [Rosenthal 91]). Sander Gilman defines the Lagerjargon as ‘that lingua franca which combined and deformed all languages and which was the special language of the Jews in Hell … It consisted of fragments of the language of the murderers, combined with bits and pieces of the languages of the victims and some words which were created only in the camps’ (140). I would propose a classification

Notes to pages 27–8 243

20 21

22

23

24

25

of camp semiotics that takes these linguistic elements to be Lagerjargon’s primary component and includes at least four other categories of ‘signification’: extralinguistic elements such as tone and register; the violent gestures of the Kapos and other camp leaders; the number classification system used to label and name the prisoners; and all other forms of non-linguistic signs, most notably the musical conventions that were instituted to mark the camp’s work schedule. See Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich: LTI, Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook. By definition, power differences are assumed to lie at the heart of the traditional distinction – driven by both linguistic and political colonial models – between superstrate and substrate. This, in the case of the Lager pidgin, is radically problematized by the multiple levels of power and authority, oppression and victimization, that are at work in the power structure of the camps. For this reason, Yiddish and Polish – though they would not seem to be part of the dominant linguistic and political sphere of the Nazi system – in fact participate in the superstrate of Lager pidgin by virtue of their speakers’ prominence in camp hierarchies of power, typically governed by seniority and sheer numbers. On Levi’s stance vis-à-vis the linguistic difficulties of narrating the Holocaust, see chapter 3 of Robert Gordon’s Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues: From Testimony to Ethics, ‘Discretion, or Language and Silence,’ 73–88. The ‘inexpressibility’ or ‘ineffability’ topos and its relationship to both Levi’s testimonial project and Dante’s Commedia will be more extensively elaborated in chapter 3. It should come as no surprise, under these circumstances, that language itself becomes a valuable camp commodity, both the vehicle of trade and a component in trade: Holm traces the very etymology of the term ‘pidgin’ to the world of business and trade, whether that be to the ‘English word business as pronounced in Chinese Pidgin English,’ to the ‘Hebrew-derived pidjom “exchange, trade, redemption,”’ or to the ‘Chinese pronunciation of the Portuguese word ocupação, “business”’ (8–9). The exchange of bread for communication tools such as language instruction is emblematic of the larger economic transaction being deployed through Levi’s testimonial act – that of the survivor’s narrative for the reader’s witnessing. Levi’s essay ‘Il re dei Giudei,’ printed both in Lilít e altri racconti and I sommersi e i salvati, focusing on a coin minted in the Lodz ghetto, is another example of the strong relationship between narrative and economic exchange. For a thoroughgoing exploration of these matters, see chapter 5, where the trope of economic exchange for Holocaust testimony

244 Notes to pages 28–30

26 27 28

29

both enriches our understanding of Levi’s first work of literary translation, La notte dei Girondini (trans. of De nacht der Girondijnen [1957] by Jacob Presser [Milan: Adelphi, (1976), 1997]), and helps to integrate that translation with other manifestations of Levi’s preoccupation with camp economies. For an original reading of various literary characters and authors as border figures whose actions are marked by uniquely economic characteristics, see Bartkowski, Travelers, Immigrants, Inmates: Essays in Estrangement (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995). For a more general application of economic figures to literary analysis, see Shell, Money, Language, and Thought (Berkeley: U of California P, 1982) and The Economy of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978). Translation of Levi’s Italian is mine; for Dante’s verse I have used Longfellow’s translation. Translation is my adaptation of Rosenthal 97. It is important to see the Lagerjargon as a composite, though degenerate, language, rather than an ‘anti-language’ that would completely disallow any attempts at transmission. Proponents of this latter view include, for example, Eli Pfefferkorn, ‘Fractured Reality and Conventional Forms in Holocaust Literature,’ Modern Language Studies 16.1 (1986): 88–99. The literary corollary to this position, which states that Holocaust literature is by definition an anti-genre, ‘a kind of reverse Erziehungsroman [education novel]’ (Rosenfeld, A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature [Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980]) can be found in such other Holocaust thinkers as Lawrence Langer, Irving Greenberg, and, as in the citation above, A.H. Rosenfeld. Although Levi does not explicitly discuss the importance of this reference to the Bayer company, we should briefly note that Bayer, during the Second World War, was one of the three subsidiaries that together made up the German chemical giant IG Farbenindustrie. IG Farben was the largest of the many German industrial firms that collaborated with the National Socialist Regime in the construction of labour camps. These camps, such as the Buna-Monowitz complex where Levi worked as a chemist during the last months of his imprisonment, ultimately became integrated with concentration and extermination camps to form the vast industrial and bureaucratic network of the ‘Final Solution.’ According to Mirna Cicioni, Levi successfully brought a legal suit against IG Farben in 1953 for compensation for his labour during the war. As Cicioni states, ‘This was also a political trial, because the two prisoners [Levi and Lello Perugia, the ‘Cesare’ character of La tregua] wanted to demonstrate that firms which had collaborated with the Nazi regime were still thriving after the war, and had not really paid for their involvement (Guadagni 1993)’ (25).

Notes to pages 30–8 245 30 Translation is my adaptation of Rosenthal 99. 31 For an introduction to the concepts of foreignization and domesticity, see Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility (New York: Routledge, 1994), especially chapter 1. 32 Translation is my adaptation of Woolf 38–9. 33 The Deutsche Reichsbahn was the German national railway, founded in 1920; the SNCF was the French national rail system, founded in 1938. 34 ‘Le nostre notti,’ the chapter that contains the dream about Levi’s sister, was first published in the journal L’amico del popolo in May 1946; ‘Ka-Be,’ which contains the train dream, dates to June of the same year, according to the typed manuscript sent to Levi’s American cousin Anna Yona. See Belpoliti’s ‘Note ai testi’ to Se questo è un uomo, I.1377–80. 35 On Levi’s dreams see Belpoliti’s excellent ‘Se questo è un sogno. Sogni, incubi e risvegli nell’opera di Primo Levi,’ where he deftly sketches out the complex intertextuality among all of Levi’s writings on dreams and dreaming. See also Segre (‘Introduzione,’ Opere II.ix-x [1988]) and Cavaglion (Primo Levi 12– 18). Particularly interesting is Cavaglion’s discussion of the two dreams as ‘texts’ that Levi explicates in the context of his testimonial writing. 36 The Oxford English Dictionary gives the primary definition of ‘translation’ as, ‘transference; removal or conveyance from one person place or condition to another … the removal of the body or relics of a saint to another place of interment.’ This image of a more holy or sacred burial of human remains is certainly rich in promise for application to Levi’s case when we consider that his mission is principally to speak for those who did not return; Levi’s testimony is indeed a sort of proper rhetorical burial of the ‘sommersi’ (the term he uses in Se questo è un uomo to describe the mussulmani, those prisoners who never adapted to the Lager system, and so perished by it, and, later, to more complex philosophical ends, in I sommersi e i salvati; for a thorough discussion of the term’s usage in Levi, see Nezri), whose death must be witnessed before it can achieve the closure that the ritual of burial usually accords. Though Levi takes this term from Dante’s Inferno (6.15, 20.3), the Purgatorio – where the inhabitants are not ‘sommersi’ but rather derive hope from the possibility of narrative transmission and spiritual intercession – resonates just as strongly with Levi’s mission in this particular context, especially considered from the point of view of the prisoner who has not survived, and to whom the survivor owes the debt of his testimony. Cf episodes in this cantica that involve the inhabitants’ stories of their own inappropriate burials, such as those of Manfredi (Purg. 3.103–35) and Buonconte (Purg. 5.85–129). In both cases, the souls’ request that Dante relay their true fates to family members on earth is united with tales of their

246 Notes to pages 38–9

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38 39 40

respective burials. Manfredi’s case is particularly pertinent, since his lastminute conversion prompts a true translatio of his bones, in addition to the metaphorical one provided by Dante’s narrative: ‘Se ’l pastor di Cosenza, che a la caccia / di me fu messo per Clemente allora, / avesse in Dio ben letta questa faccia, / l’ossa del corpo mio sarieno ancora / in co del ponte presso a Benevento, / sotto la guardia de la grave mora. / Or le bagna la pioggia e move il vento / di fuor dal regno, quasi lungo ’l Verde, / dov’ e’ le trasmutò a lume spento’ (124–32) (If Cosenza’s pastor, who was then sent by Clement to hunt me down, had well read that page in God, the bones of my body would yet be at the guard of the heavy cairn. Now the rain washes them and the wind stirs them, beyond the Kingdom, hard by the Verde, whither he transported them with tapers quenched). Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Dante’s Commedia are from Singleton. The anonymous ‘Letter of Aristeas,’ most probably authored during the second century BCE, describes the collective process undertaken by seventy-two elders of Israel to make the first translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek: ‘And so they proceeded to carry it out, making all details harmonize by mutual comparisons’ (Robinson, Western Translation Theory 4). As Douglas Robinson writes in his introduction to the text, ‘The “letter of Aristeas” is … significant for the light it sheds on the widespread anxiety felt in the ancient world about the translation of sacred texts – an anxiety that may partially explain the need to present this particular translation as divinely inspired’ (4). Philo Judeas’s first-century BCE rewriting of the ‘legend of the Septuagint’ and Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana reinforce the importance of divine inspiration in the translation of sacred texts. From Shelley’s ‘A Defence of Poetry,’ written in 1821 but first published in 1840. See Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility. See, in particular, Jacques Derrida’s and Paul de Man’s rereadings, themselves interpretive translations, of Walter Benjamin’s iconic ‘Task of the Translator’ essay. Derrida’s ‘Des Tours de Babel’ focuses on the law of the original, which ‘does not command without demanding to be read, deciphered, translated’ (184); departing from Benjamin, Derrida concludes that though the law is given because of the original, it is not given by it, but rather by its inherent lack and failure. For Derrida, the authority of the juridical order is at once reminiscent of God’s own power to command and symbolic of the essential incompleteness of language after Babel. In this way, the original is indebted in its semantic imperfection and yet has the authority to command its own translation, to issue a law for its own completion. De Man, in his remarks on Benjamin’s essay, concludes that the

Notes to pages 40–1 247

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44

translation’s function is – as is that of history or criticism – an interpretive one, a process that, at one remove from its object of study, points to something in the object itself. Translations, in other words, ‘disarticulate, they undo the original, they reveal that the original was always already disarticulated. They reveal that their failure, which seems to be due to the fact that they are secondary in relation to the original, reveals an essential failure, an essential disarticulation which was already there in the original. They kill the original, by discovering that the original was already dead’ (Resistance to Theory 84). The inherent failure of the translation, then, has less to do with its derivative nature than with the fact that it must reflect, almost en abyme, the nature of the original. As Levi stated in his 1983 interview with Federico De Melis, ‘Davanti a certe durezze, certe asperità, ho preso la lima, ho spezzato alcuni periodi. Non ho avuto esitazioni, pur di conservare il senso. Kafka non esita davanti alle ripetizioni, nel giro di dieci righe ripete tre, quattro volte lo stesso sostantivo. Questo io ho cercato di evitarlo perché nelle convenzioni italiane non c’è. Può darsi che sia un arbitrio, che invece anche in italiano la ripetizione sia funzionale a ottenere un certo effetto. Ma ho avuto pietà del lettore italiano, ho cercato di portargli qualcosa che non avesse un sapore troppo forte di traduzione’ (Faced with certain hard, harsh elements [in Kafka’s language], I tried to polish them, I broke up some sentences. I didn’t hesitate, as long as I maintained the sense. Kafka doesn’t hesitate to repeat things, in the space of ten lines he repeats the same noun three, four times. I tried to avoid this because it doesn’t exist in conventional Italian. Maybe this was a judgment call, maybe even in Italian repetition can function to obtain a certain effect. But I had pity on the Italian reader, I tried to bring him something that wouldn’t seem too much like a translation). From ‘On the Different Methods of Translating,’ an 1813 lecture delivered by Schleiermacher at the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Levi introduces his final work, I sommersi e i salvati, with a strophe from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’: ‘Since then, at an uncertain hour, / That agony returns, / And till my ghastly tale is told / This heart within me burns’ (ll 582–5). The imperative to witnessing – as well as its challenges – is embodied in Levi’s long-term, sustained interest in this poem, as we shall see in chapter 2. Robert Gordon calls the ‘Rapporto sulla organizzazione igienico-sanitaria del campo di concentramento per ebrei di Monowitz (Auschwitz-Alta Silesia)’ (‘Appendici’ I.1320–60) Se questo è un uomo’s ur-text in his introduction to Judith Woolf’s translation of the Minerva Medica article, published as Auschwitz Report. See also Gordon’s ‘Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man and

248 Notes to pages 41–2 Responses to the Lager in Italy 1945–47’; and Cavaglion, who suggests that passages of the report, with their willingness to describe the gas chambers of Auschwitz, constitute ‘il capitolo “assente” di Se questo è un uomo’ (Primo Levi e Se questo è un uomo 39) (the ‘missing’ chapter of Survival in Auschwitz). For Belpoliti, instead, the report is Levi’s ‘laboratorio’ (‘Note ai testi’ I.1379–81). For detailed treatments of the Minerva Medica report see Cavaglion, ‘Alle radici di un libro. Un contributo a quattro mani su Minerva Medica,’ Millelibri 52 (April 1992): 53–7; ‘Il “ritorno” di Primo Levi e il memoriale per la Minerva Medica,’ Il ritorno dai Lager, proceedings of the international conference (1993): 221–40; and Primo Levi e Se questo è un uomo (Turin: Loescher, 1993). See also Cicioni (23), Angier (443), Thomson (229), and Anissimov (425). The report is reprinted in its entirety in the 1997 edition of Levi’s Opere (‘Appendici’ I.1339–60). 45 For Levi’s inclination to tell people about his story upon return, see Thomson 224. For Lucia Levi’s decisive role in the book’s genesis, see Thomson: ‘[At the end of 1946, t]he book, in short, was in textual disarray. But Lucia, with her combination of criticism and encouragement, transformed the work … Levi had begun to think of Lucia, romantically, as his muse. And she started to help him impose coherence on the pages by putting the sections in order. Lucia was able to improve the pacing of the manuscript by asking Levi to read sections out loud to her, and she was an exacting critic: every word had to be aware of its own etymology, intended and considered …’ (ibid., 241–2). See also Angier, 441–54. 46 For a full description of the publishing vicissitudes of Levi’s first book, see Thomson, in particular 228–54. The ‘parenthesis’ strategy for garnering Allied support in the reconstruction of war-torn Italy was first expounded by Benedetto Croce in his ‘Teatro Eliseo’ speech of September 1944, then published as ‘I diritti dell’Italia nella vita internazionale solennemente affermati dall’alta parola di Benedetto Croce. Discorso fraternamente italiano,’ in the Liberal party’s newspaper, Risorgimento liberale. See David Ward, Antifascisms: Cultural Politics in Italy, 1943–46, especially 76–85. For an expanded treatment of the historical interpretation of the ventennio nero in both the First and Second Italian Republics, see Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship. 47 On the influence of American literary styles at the end of the war, and in particular the adoption of these as a form of anti-fascist cultural protest by Pavese and Vittorini, see Valerio Ferme’s excellent Tradurre è tradire. La traduzione come sovversione culturale sotto il Fascismo. For the importance of English literature in the development of Beppe Fenoglio’s writing, see Mark Pietralunga, Beppe Fenoglio and English Literature: A Study of the Writer as Translator.

Notes to pages 42–9 249 48 See Gordon’s ‘Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man and Responses to the Lager in Italy 1945–47.’ 49 On the periodization of Holocaust testimony in Italy, especially within the context of Primo Levi’s mediation, see Gordon, ‘Which Holocaust? Primo Levi and the Field of Holocaust Memory in Post-War Italy.’ 50 Cf ‘Una buona giornata’ in Se questo è un uomo, in particular I.68. 51 ‘chi esercita il mestiere di traduttore o d’interprete dovrebbe essere onorato, in quanto si adopera per limitare i danni della maledizione di Babele’ (‘Tradurre ed essere tradotti,’ AM II.730) (whoever practices the trade of translator or interpreter should be honoured, insofar as he labours to limit the damage of Babel’s curse). 52 On the importance of Levi’s italianità for his literary-testimonial project, see Marcus, ‘Filming the Text of Witness: Francesco Rosi’s The Truce.’ 53 Translation is my adaptation of Woolf 23–4. 54 Only in the fall of 1943, with the Nazi invasion of northern Italy, did the large-scale, systematic deportation of Italian Jews become an efficient enterprise. Their late arrival, as such, is ‘documented’ in the tattooed registration number, which thus becomes an index not only of each prisoner’s arrival in camp but of his national identity. See Susan Zuccotti’s The Italians and the Holocaust (New York: Basic Books, 1989). 55 Translation is my adaptation of Woolf 43. 56 Cf Gilman. 57 ‘Avevamo deciso di trovarci, noi italiani, ogni domenica sera in un angolo del Lager; ma abbiamo subito smesso, perché era troppo triste contarci, e trovarci ogni volta piú pochi, e piú deformi, e piú squallidi’ (SQ I.31) (We Italians had decided to meet every Sunday evening in a corner of the Lager, but we stopped it at once, because it was too sad to count our numbers and find fewer every time, and to see each other ever more deformed, and more squalid). 58 Originally delivered at the University of Pennsylvania conference on ‘Translation and Cultural Confirmation’; now reprinted as the concluding essay of the Translation Studies Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004), 482–502. 59 The full import of this episode, particularly with regard to the themes of ineffability, translation, transgression, and transcendence will be more fully explored in chapter 3. 60 The transgressive nature of this act will be more fully interrogated in chapter 3. 61 Cf also Baranski; Marco Belpoliti’s entry on Dante Alighieri in Primo Levi (60–5); Piero Boitani’s L’ombra di Ulisse. Figure di un mito; Sophie Nezri’s ‘Primo Levi ou le naufrage de la déportation’; Usher; Gunzberg; Jagendorf; Mondo; and Anissimov.

250 Notes to pages 50–9 62 The Dantean distinction between Levi as prisoner (or protagonist) and as writer (or poet) is a useful one in the context of Se questo è un uomo. Not only does it provide a framework for seeing the often complex mises en abyme through which Levi foregrounds transmissive acts of testimony within and then outside of camp walls; it is also key to understanding the temporal complexity of this first memoir, in which the verbal fabric is woven from past and present threads, much as is the traumatized survivor’s very identity and understanding of his own trauma. 63 Gérard Genette’s Discours du récit, published in 1972 in the third volume of Essais (Paris: Éditions du Seuil), gave narrative theory both a vocabulary and a framework with which to address the recipient at various diegetic levels. 64 Translation is my adaptation of Woolf 36. 65 On Levi’s supposed optimism, see his exchange with Jean Amery, detailed by Levi in the ‘Intellettuale ad Auschwitz’ chapter of I sommersi e i salvati. Many literary and biographical monographs on Levi’s work and life also underscore the optimism of his oeuvre: to wit, Nicholas Patruno’s Understanding Primo Levi, Mirna Cicioni’s Primo Levi: Bridges of Knowledge, and Myriam Anissimov’s Primo Levi, ou la tragédie d’un optimiste. Of course, Levi’s 1987 death so close to the publication of I sommersi e i salvati prompted many – most notably Cynthia Ozick – to reread Levi’s work in this dark vein. See her essay ‘Primo Levi’s Suicide Note’ in Memory and Metaphor. For a more complex reading of this strain of Levi criticism, in dialogue with what he sees as Levi’s ‘modernist skepticism,’ see Cheyette’s ‘The Ethical Uncertainty of Primo Levi.’ 66 As will become clear in my conclusion, I understand Levi’s corpus to be as much the body of work produced by him as the body of texts that have, over the years, informed his writings. Central to my argument is the striking rhetorical proximity between Levi’s comments regarding the difficulties of self-reading for the Ricerca delle radici project and those regarding being translated in ‘Tradurre ed essere tradotti.’ A dialogue between these two texts reveals that the bodily violence of self-reading is akin to that inflicted by the translator on the (textual) body of the translated author. 2 Source Texts and Subtexts: Translation and the Grey Zone 1 Unless otherwise noted, all following translations of I sommersi e i salvati are mine. 2 Translation of Raymond Rosenthal, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Summit Books, 1988), 44.

Notes to pages 59–61 251 3 Noteworthy in this regard is the polemic between two schools of thought dividing American and German historians and sociologists: those led by Christopher R. Browning (Ordinary Men [New York: Harper Collins, 1992]) who argue that sociological and economic factors such as an atmosphere of conformity and careerism led large numbers of ‘ordinary’ Germans to participate in the Final Solution; and those who fall into the camp of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, whose Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996) supports the view that characteristics unique to Germany – namely a long and deep history of anti-Semitism – are to blame for its crimes against humanity. 4 ‘Credo che proprio a questo volgersi indietro a guardare l’“acqua perigliosa” siano dovuti i molti casi di suicidio dopo (a volte subito dopo) la liberazione. Era sempre un momento critico, che coincideva con un’ondata di ripensamento e di depressione. Per contro, tutti gli storici dei Lager, anche di quelli sovietici, concordano nell’osservare che i casi di suicidio durante la prigionia erano rari’ (SS II.1049; author’s emphasis) (I believe that it was precisely this turning to look back at the ‘perilous water’ that gave rise to so many suicides after [sometimes immediately after] Liberation. It was in any case a critical moment which coincided with a flood of rethinking and depression. By contrast, all historians of the Lager – and also of the Soviet camps – agree in pointing out that cases of suicide during imprisonment were rare). 5 In this chapter, I will follow the terminological approach adopted by Robert Jay Lifton in his Death in Life. He addresses the relationship between guilt and shame in the following way: ‘I shall use the term “death guilt” throughout the book to encompass all forms of self-condemnation associated with literal or symbolic exposure to death and dying, including those usually linked with the sense of shame’ (36n). Although he does not provide any more detailed explanation for this lack of articulation between the two terms, we can deduce his rationale from his writings. In Lifton’s view, guilt is presented as an objective force, originating from outside the survivor, while shame is portrayed as an external revelation of hidden, personal opinions, feelings, or (auto)accusations; in short, a subjective phenomenon. As he says in describing the testimony of a Hiroshima survivor, ‘he felt accused by the eyes of the anonymous dead and dying of wrongdoing and transgression (a sense of guilt), for not helping them, for letting them die, for “selfishly” remaining alive and strong; and “exposed” and “seen through” by the same eyes for these identical failings (a sense of shame)’ (Death in Life 36). His conflation of these two terms is the result of a survivor phenomenon by which an external measure for

252 Notes to pages 61–3

6

7

8

9

10

culpability – the ‘eyes of the anonymous dead’ – becomes internalized by the survivor. An analysis of Levi’s poem ‘Il superstite’ will provide an example of psychological splitting and doubling that results in the survivor persona’s internalization and expression of exactly that external accusatory stance described in Lifton’s phrase. Significantly, Lifton and other psychoanalysts (see Jack Terry, for example) often discuss survival guilt in terms of regret for inadequate burial and mourning rituals to mark the passing of family members and comrades (see especially Lifton’s discussion of the ‘homeless dead’ in Death in Life [492–4]). This point of view represents a psychoanalytic explanation for exactly the sort of literary or rhetorical burial that was described in chapter 1. The issue of the agency of survival – that is, survival as an event or experience as opposed to an act that can be chosen (or not) by a certain ‘type’ of individual who is particularly likely to survive – lies at the heart of Bruno Bettelheim’s response (‘The Survivor,’ New Yorker [2 August 1976]: 31–52, reprinted in The Survivor and Other Essays by Bruno Bettelheim) to Terrence des Pres’s The Survivor and Lina Wertmüller’s film Seven Beauties. Critics such as Terrence des Pres have even attempted to conflate the two opposing sentiments of the survivor, stating that what others choose to term ‘guilt’ is really only a sense of conscience, or ‘response-ability’ (The Survivor 47), and citing Robert Jay Lifton’s own changing viewpoint throughout the years, vis-à-vis the redemptive and productive potential of the survivor’s guilty feelings (40), as support for his own point of view. Marco Belpoliti outlines the elements that prompted Levi’s redoubled attention to the ‘grey zone’ in the mid 1970s: the release of Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter; the debate surrounding then-current revisionist theories of the Holocaust; the fading memories of perpetrators and survivors alike; and Levi’s translation of Jacob Presser’s De nacht der Girondijnen (Primo Levi 189). I would take exception to Belpoliti’s characterization of this last element, and assert that Levi’s translation of Presser’s semifictional grey-zoner novella is the product – and not the cause – of Levi’s broader and already present preoccupations with grey-zone issues, especially given his independent proposal of the translation project to the Adelphi publishing house. Chapter 4 examines Levi’s translation of De nacht in exhaustive detail. For a concise summary of the hierarchical structure of witnessing positions and their attendant terminology, see Gary Weissman’s excellent Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust (in particular, his introduction, ‘To Feel the Horror’) (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2004).

Notes to pages 67–71 253 11 For the composition dates of Il sistema periodico, see Belpoliti, Primo Levi. 12 ‘Le occasioni? La memoria, un ponte, una ragnatela,’ Tuttolibri (La Stampa), 17 Nov. 1983: 3. 13 Cf Giovanni Tesio’s interview in Tuttolibri (La Stampa) and Giuseppe Grassano’s ‘Conversazione con Primo Levi.’ 14 Cf the last section of Levi’s interview with Giorgio Calcagno, ‘Capire non è perdonare.’ 15 It is also one of a select group of poems used in epigraphs to Levi’s works of prose. Specifically, it was chosen by Levi’s translator Ruth Feldman to introduce her English translation of the short stories that made up Lilít e altri racconti, Moments of Reprieve (New York: Summit Books, 1986), two years before the English-language publication of Levi’s other poems (Collected Poems) by Ms Feldman and Brian Swann. 16 Critical assessments of Levi’s poetic production are united in their attempt to find adequate models for the relationship between poetry and prose in thematic and philosophical terms. Their organizing principles tend – with the use of a variety of images and metaphors – to focus on poetry’s marginal, irrational, emotional, and annunciative characteristics. See Cesare Greppi’s ‘Una figura nella poesia di Primo Levi’; Cesare Segre’s introduction to vol. II of the 1988 edition of Levi’s Opere; Italo Rosato’s ‘Ad ora incerta,’ ‘Poesia,’ and ‘Primo Levi: Sondaggi intertestuali’; and Franco Fortini’s ‘L’opera in versi’; as well as Levi’s own interviews on the topic, most notably those cited in Poli and Calcagno and that done with Giulio Nascimbeni. 17 Cf Rosato’s observations regarding the binaries created throughout Levi’s work between prose and poetry, productive work and degenerative infection, in ‘Primo Levi: Sondaggi intertestuali.’ Franco Ferrucci, in his ‘La casa di Primo Levi,’ sketches out another similar binary between the productive ‘work’ of testimonial writing and the transgressive attraction of creative invention. 18 Cf Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. 19 Levi’s interview with Giuseppe Grassano also mirrors his use of the Ancient Mariner in these first two contexts, referring to his initial ‘burning need to tell’ his experience upon his return home in 1946; in all three of these instances, Levi refers indiscriminately to prose and/or poetry. 20 Though Levi’s notorious mythologizing of the urgency behind Se questo è un uomo’s genesis began with that book’s very publication, such myths have been successfully deconstructed by recent studies and biographies. See in particular Thomson’s chapters ‘Homecoming 1945–6’ and ‘Rebirth and Rejection 1946–8,’ in which he details Levi’s composition and revisions of the book.

254 Notes to pages 72–8 21 Levi takes the term ‘sommersi’ from both Inferno 4.15 ‘sovra la gente che quivi è sommersa’ and Inferno 20.3, ‘de la prima canzon, ch’è d’i sommersi.’ ‘Salvati’ appears in Inferno 4.63: ‘spiriti umani non eran salvati.’ 22 Certainly, this is a logical assertion considering that the Dantean infernal narrative and Ulysses’ ‘folle volo’ are a rich font of imagery for describing the camp and its perverse moral code, while the value of the ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ as a source text more properly derives from the Mariner’s role as narrating survivor. 23 Marco Belpoliti, Primo Levi, entry on ‘Sommersi e salvati.’ 24 It is essential to note that, for Levi as for the Ancient Mariner, the interactive nature of the testimonial mission means that the interlocutor is an elect figure, destined to carry on the mission and to give it meaning: ‘The moment that his face I see / I know the man who must hear me’ (‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ ll 588–9). 25 The Feldman and Swann translation of this poem, entitled ‘The Survivor,’ ignores Levi’s changes to the Coleridge source text and represents Levi’s translation of line 581 (‘Dopo di allora, ad ora incerta’) as the first verse of Levi’s poem, followed by lines 582–5 of the Coleridge poem, tali quali, as lines 2–5. Furthermore, these lines are set apart graphically from the rest of the poem, both in terms of the size of their font and by a space between line 5 (‘This heart within me burns’) and line 6 (‘Once more he sees his companions’ faces’). I am grateful to Ms Feldman for her generous willingness to discuss her translation of this poem with me in our telephone conversation of 26 Feb. 2000; unfortunately, she was unable to explain her choices with regard to this particular passage. For a more extensive look at the Feldman and Swann translation of the poem, see Insana, ‘Tracing the Trauma of Translation: The Ancient Mariner’s Voyage from English to Italian – and Back Again.’ 26 In addition to Belpoliti, see also Alberto Cavaglion’s Primo Levi e Se questo è un uomo (Turin: Loescher, 1993), 17. Gina Lagorio’s ‘La memoria perenne e la poesia “Ad ora incerta,”’ though it treats Levi and Fenoglio’s common affinity for the poem, does not address the matter of where or how Levi might have encountered it (in Frassica, ed., Primo Levi as Witness: Proceedings of a Symposium Held at Princeton U. [Florence: Casalini, 1990], 63–75). 27 It is noteworthy, however, that Italo Rosato (‘Poesia’ 423–5) identifies precisely this passage as one of many of Levi’s poetic self-citations from his other poetic and prose work, particularly his short story ‘Trattamento di quiescenza’ from Vizio di Forma, his poem ‘Fuga,’ and segments of I sommersi e i salvati, the latter two contemporary to the ‘Superstite’ poem. 28 ‘Può essere a questo punto scontato citare Freud e le sue negazioni che affermano: “Lei domanda chi possa essere questa persona del sogno. Non è

Notes to pages 78–9 255 mia madre”’ (Rosato, ‘Poesia’ 425) (It might be superfluous at this point to cite Freud and his affirming negations: ‘You might ask who is this person in the dream. It’s not my mother’). 29 Italo Rosato (‘Ad ora incerta’ 96), Marco Belpoliti (Primo Levi 125), and Cesare Segre (xxiv) have all noted Levi’s poetics of repetition, the former two in terms of ‘ripetizione e accumulazione’ and the latter in terms of ‘anafore.’ None, however, has attempted to place Levi’s tendency to repeat phrases and words in the context of traumatic repetition, as I hope to do here. 30 In the polemical opinion of Giorgio Agamben, Levi’s poem is indicative of his refusal to accept ‘fino in fondo le conseguenze’ (fully the consequences) of individual survivor guilt, and its poetic persona representative of one who ‘lotta tenacemente contro di esso’ (fights tenaciously against it). He further asserts that Levi’s stance vis-à-vis his own guilt is ‘un esame di coscienza così puerile da lasciare il lettore a disagio’ (a test of conscience so puerile that it leaves the reader uneasy), the result of the author-survivor’s ‘impossibilità di venire a capo della [propria] vergogna’ (incapacity to master shame) (Quel que resta di Auschwitz 82–3). Translations of Agamben are from Heller-Roazen, 88–9. 31 This is also the impulse behind Levi’s most famous poem (and one of his earliest), initially published as an untitled poetic epigraph to Se questo è un uomo (famously naming the book with its own fifth verse), but later published as ‘Shemà.’ The poem is essentially a midrash, or as Daniel Boyarin puts it, a ‘recontexting,’ of the Hebrew prayer Sh’ma, which means ‘hear, listen’ and is based on three passages from Deuteronomy: 6:5–9, 11:13–21, and 5:37–41. Both the Hebrew prayer and Levi’s poem performatively impose the dual mitzvah, or duty, of repetition and transmission on the listener/ reader; the act of repetition thus contains the seed of its own survival. The poem’s six central verses – following ten verses that command the reader to consider the inhuman realities of the Holocaust – are closely modelled on the Hebrew prayer, and as such forcefully echo its emphasis on continuity through a cyclical process of hearing, inscribing, and rereading. Ultimately, the result of this process is the guaranteed constant transmission through repeated retelling of both Levi’s new, recontexted ‘Shemà’ and the commandments it imposes on the reader: ‘Meditate che questo è stato: / Vi comando queste parole. / Scolpitele nel vostro cuore / Stando in casa andando per via, / Coricandovi alzandovi; / Ripetetele ai vostri figli’ (ll 15–20) (Consider that this has been: / I commend these words to you. / Engrave them on your hearts / When you are in your house, when you walk on your way, / When you go to bed, when you rise. / Repeat them to your children [Feldman and Swann 9]). Levi’s placement of the command

256 Notes to pages 81–5

32 33

34 35

36 37

to ‘repeat it to your children’ in the emphatic last line of the segment underscores the most important duty inherent to the midrashic approach: that of repetition. Just as – in Derridian translation terms – the essentially lacking original issues a command to be translated, and thus completed, so is the Sh’ma blessing incomplete without the fulfilment of its own demand for propagation. It is in this sense that the Sh’ma must be repeated, dynamically relived every day upon waking and upon going to bed, and it is in this sense that Levi’s poetic reinterpretation reformulates the Hebrew prayer in post-Holocaust terms. Moreover, Levi’s mitzvah to enact this rethinking of the central proclamation of the Jewish faith is parallelled by that of his readers, who now have a sacred obligation to repeat Levi’s words on pain of domestic destruction and a catastrophe of generational continuity: ‘O vi si sfaccia la casa, / La malattia vi impedisca, / I vostri nati torcano il viso da voi’ (21–3) (Or may your house crumble, / Disease render you powerless, / Your offspring avert their faces from you [Feldman and Swann 9]). Translation is my adaptation of Rosenthal 84. This mission to speak on behalf of those who did not survive, to speak as if they were themselves giving testimony, can also be interpreted in the context of Lifton’s definition of identification guilt in Death in Life, 495–6. Translation is my adaptation of Rosenthal 84. This count does not include the Mariner’s attempt to reassure the Wedding Guest after his description of his dead comrades’ ‘inspiration’ and subsequent remanning of the ship in lines 349–53. ‘I believe you are deceiving me,’ I said to him, ‘for Branca d’Oria is not yet dead, and eats and drinks and sleeps and puts on clothes’ (Singleton 359). ‘Cotal vantaggio ha questa Tolomea, / che spesse volte l’anima ci cade / innanzi ch’Atropòs mossa le dea. / E perché tu più volontier mi rade / le ‘nvetrïate lagrime dal volto, / sappie che, tosto che l’anima trade / come fec’ïo, il corpo suo l’è tolto / da un demonio, che poscia il governa / mentre che ‘l tempo suo tutto sia vòlto. / Ella ruina in sì fatta cisterna; / e forse pare ancor lo corpo suso / de l’ombra che di qua dietro mi verna. / Tu ’l dei saper, se tu vien pur mo giuso: / elli è ser Branca Doria, e son più anni / poscia passati ch’el fu sì racchiuso.’ / ‘Io credo,’ diss’io lui, ‘che tu m’inganni: / ché Branca Doria non morì unquanche / e mangia e bee e dorme e veste panni’ (Inferno 33.124–41) (‘Such vantage has this Ptolomea that oftentimes the soul falls down here before Atropos sends it forth; and that you may more willingly scrape the glazen tears from my face, know that as soon as the soul betrays as I did, its body is taken from it by a devil who thereafter rules it until its time has all revolved. The soul falls headlong into this cistern, and perhaps the body of the shade that is wintering

Notes to pages 86–9 257

38

39

40 41

42

here behind me still appears above on earth: you must know if you are but now come down. He is ser Branca d’Oria, and many years have passed since he was shut up thus.’ ‘I believe you are deceiving me,’ I said to him, ‘for Branca d’Oria is not yet dead, and eats and drinks and sleeps and puts on clothes’ [Singleton 358–9]). ‘The Ardeatine Caves massacre occurred as a reprisal for thirty-three German SS police … killed during a partisan attack in Rome’s Via Rasella on March 23. Ten Italians in prison for political offenses were to be killed for each SS man who died. The Nazis threw in a few more for good measure. To fill the quota, they also included most Jewish males in Roman prisons at the time, although they were not accused of political crimes. The 335 men and boys, tied together, were driven to the network of manmade caves that comprised part of the Christian catacombs along the Appian Way. There they were forced to wait for hours while those ahead of them entered the caves in groups of three. Inside, they had to kneel on the growing pile of corpses, to await the shot in the back of the head that would kill them. At the end of the day, the caves were sealed’ (Zuccotti 192; emphasis mine). Erich Priebke, an SS officer stationed in Rome who was in charge of the massacre, was eventually arrested and brought to trial following his 1994 interview with ABC reporter Sam Donaldson. Convicted of crimes against humanity on appeal by an Italian court in 1997, he remains under house arrest in Rome at the age of ninety-five. Judenräte were Jewish Councils, established by decree in the Third Reich on 28 November 1939 for the Polish territory and instituted immediately after occupation governments were set up in other occupied areas as the war progressed. Among their duties were the creation of community lists, the distribution of social services, and the execution of all German orders for the community. See Dawidowicz for documentation of the original German decrees. The organization of Judenräte was usually the first bureaucratic measure taken in conjunction with the establishment of the ghettos (Mosse 225). According to Zuccotti, such councils were never set up by the Nazis in Italian territory (276). Translation is from Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann, Primo Levi: Collected Poems (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1988), 64. Daniele did survive the Holocaust experience, but Levi writes in I sommersi e i salvati that this episode always seemed to stand between the two men in their interactions after the war. As Raimonda Modiano shows in her ‘Sameness or Difference? Historicist Readings of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,”’ numerous critics have linked the moral system of the ‘Rime’ with concurrent historical phenomena. William Empson, for example, makes an explicit connection between the

258 Notes to pages 89–93 ‘crime’ of the Ancient Mariner and the slave trade, while Robert Manquis sees the violence of the French Revolution as the principal historical subtext of the poem. Both interpretations, but particularly the latter, open the ‘Rime’ to uncanny historical comparisons with the Holocaust. In Modiano’s words, ‘On the one hand, the Terror seemed like old violence and was linked with recurrent episodes of brutality throughout history, especially primitive rites of human sacrifice. On the other hand, the Terror appeared to have the characteristics of a new form of violence, for which the past offered no meaningful interpretative narratives’ (197; emphasis mine). She continues, ‘This is one of the painful lessons of history that Coleridge and other contemporaries of the French revolution experienced again and again: generalized violence, like an infernal God, arbitrarily picks its victims and turns people into unwitting instruments of violence; that at such times the distinguishing boundaries between friends and foes, brothers and murderers disappears’ (207–8; emphasis mine). 43 See Modiano for an introduction to the Christian critical tradition of the ‘Rime,’ as well as her New Historicist response to it. 44 ‘Recidivo,’ Cambridge/Signorelli Italian-English/English-Italian Dictionary, 1981 [1985]. 45 Cf, for example, the chapter on ‘La vergogna’ in I sommersi e i salvati: ‘Piú realistica è l’autoaccusa, o l’accusa, di aver mancato sotto l’aspetto della solidarietà umana. Pochi superstiti si sentono colpevoli di aver deliberatamente danneggiato, derubato, percosso un compagno: chi lo ha fatto (i Kapos, ma non solo loro) ne rimuove il ricordo; per contro, quasi tutti si sentono colpevoli di omissione di soccorso. La presenza al tuo fianco di un compagno piú debole, vo piú sprovveduto, o piú vecchio, o troppo giovane, che ti ossessiona con le sue richieste d’aiuto, o col suo semplice “esserci” che già di per sé è una preghiera, è una costante della vita in Lager’ (SS II, 1051) (More realistic is self-accusation, or the accusation of having failed in terms of human solidarity. Few survivors feel guilty about having deliberately damaged, robbed, or beaten a companion. Those who did so [the Kapos, but not only they] block out the memory. By contrast, however, almost everybody feels guilty of having failed to offer help. The presence at your side of a weaker – or less cunning, or older, or too young – companion, hounding you with his demands for help or with his simple presence, in itself an entreaty, is a constant in the life of the Lager [translation is my adaptation of Rosenthal 78]). 3 Transgression: Translation and Levi’s ‘Trapassar del segno’ 1 As does Walter Benjamin, Curtius notes in his introduction to the segment on ‘figures’ that the most important of these, metaphor (Gr.) means translatio (Lat.) or transfer (128).

Notes to pages 93–100 259 2 Cf Purgatorio 1.1–3 and Paradiso 2.1–15 for Dante’s most explicit uses of the metaphor. 3 Cf especially Iannucci and Barolini. 4 Cf Boitani’s introduction, especially pages 13–14 of the Italian, for a discussion of Gottlob Frege’s concept of the ‘figura,’ and the process by which such ‘signs’ acquire meaning. 5 Unless otherwise noted, all translations of Boitani are taken from The Shadow of Ulysses. Figures of a Myth, trans. Anita Weston (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). This translation is my adaptation of Weston 18. 6 Inferno 26, the episode at issue in this chapter; Purgatorio 19; and Paradiso 27. 7 Indeed, they have been amply covered by Dante scholars of every age. Some of the most innovative and important contributions to the debate can be found in Scott, ‘Inferno XXVI: Dante’s Ulysses’; Nardi, ‘La tragedia di Ulisse’; Barolini, ‘Dante’s Ulysses: Narrative and Transgression’; Corti, ‘On the Metaphors of Sailing, Flight, and Tongues of Fire in the Episode of Ulysses (Inferno 26)’; and Iannucci, ‘Ulysses’ folle volo: The Burden of History.’ 8 Cf Deisser for the importance of Dante’s version of the Ulysses myth for writers like Tasso, Tennyson, Pascoli, and Saba. 9 While Ulysses is ostensibly a positive model for Dante’s roles as a rhetor and as a guide to the followers that read his salvational tale, his condemnation seeks to illustrate the treacherous danger of those roles. Similarly, Ulysses’ transgressive exploration of divinely imposed boundaries points both to the daring nature of Dante’s endeavour and to the danger that, unguided by grace, it could end in the poet’s damnation. Bruno Nardi has noted that Dante’s attitude vis-à-vis Ulysses’ role is marked by great – and perhaps unconscious – internal conflict: ‘Pare a me che nella tragica figura d’Ulisse si riflettano due sentimenti che contrastano fra loro nell’animo del poeta, e che da questo interiore contrasto derivi appunto il carattere essenzialmente tragico della figurazione dantesca’ (128–9) (It seems to me that two contrasting sentiments in the soul of the poet are reflected in the tragic figure of Ulysses, and that the essentially tragic character of the Dantean representation stems from this internal conflict). Barolini’s reading of a more conscious conflict on Dante’s part, however, would seem to be borne out by the detailed and comprehensive way in which the poet portrays his relationship to the Greek hero. 10 Nardi, Stanford, Scott, Iannucci, and Boitani, to name the most foundational studies. 11 See also Stanford 128–37 for similar views. 12 See Donno for an innovative linguistic explanation of Virgil’s interdiction of Dante’s speech.

260 Notes to pages 100–6 13 As da Imola writes in his 1380 commentary on the Commedia, ‘[q]uicquid dicatur, nulla persuasione possum adduci ad credendum quod autor ignoraverit illud quod sciunt etiam pueri et ignari …’ (cited in Toynbee 630). 14 All translations of the Commedia are Singleton’s, unless otherwise noted. 15 Klesczewski explores the question of whether Dante’s use of the Ulysses episode represents a transgression against medieval norms, but ultimately concludes that Dante’s adherence to official church dogma and respect for ‘misura’ represent the poet’s conformity, while his creativity can be considered somewhat transgressive. Unfortunately, this last point is only tentatively addressed. 16 ‘Rispuose a me: “Là dentro si martira / Ulisse e Dïomede, e così insieme / a la vendetta vanno come a l’ira; / e dentro da la lor fiamma si geme / l’agguato del caval che fé la porta / onde uscì de’ Romani il gentil seme. / Piangevisi entro l’arte per che, morta, / Deïdamìa ancor si duol d’Achille, / e del Palladio pena vi si porta”’ (Inferno 26.55–63) (He answered me, ‘There within are tormented Ulysses and Diomedes, and they go together thus under the vengeance as once under the wrath; and in their flame they groan for the ambush of the horse which made the gate by which the noble seed of the Romans went forth; within it they lament the craft, because of which the dead Deidamia still mourns Achilles, and there for the Palladium they bear the penalty’). 17 Cited in Barolini, 127n. 18 Translation is Lansing’s. 19 See Corti for a distinction between the pursuit of knowledge alone (Ulysses) and the same pursuit aided by grace (Dante). 20 Levi’s collapse of these terms, of course, is well-exampled in Dante’s infernal rhetoric: ‘Io non morì e non rimasi vivo; / pensa oggimai per te, s’hai fior d’ingegno, / qual io divenni, d’uno e d’altro privo’ (Inferno 34.25–7) (I did not die and I did not remain alive: now think for yourself, if you have any wit, what I became, deprived alike of death and life!). 21 Cf Sophie Nezri, ‘Primo Levi, ou la naufrage de la déportation.’ Nezri is one of the few critics – if not the only – of Levi’s later work, I sommersi e i salvati in particular, to recognize the possibility of movement from one term to another, to wit, from salvation to submersion: ‘De rescapé qu’il avait été et tenté de demeurer grâce à l’écriture, Primo Levi avait fini, vers la fin de sa vie, par être englouti, comme Ulysse …’ (103) (From the survivor that he had been and tried to remain with the help of his writing, Primo Levi wound up, towards the end of his life, being engulfed, like Ulysses …). It is worth noting, especially given our focus on issues of properly linguistic translation, that the French translation of Levi’s last work was titled Les

Notes to pages 107–9 261

22 23

24 25

naufragés et les rescapés, rendering a very different sense of the Dantean citations than that given by the English version (The Drowned and the Saved) and even its Italian original (I sommersi e i salvati). While the former proposes a much more bleak dichotomy (it is quite difficult to be both drowned and saved), and the latter conveys Dante’s infernal damnation without necessarily implying such permanence for its contemporary referent, the French ‘naufragés’ (shipwrecked) allows for both the potential of salvation and risk of drowning. Also of note in this article is the author’s observation that most of the poetic translations included at the end of Levi’s collection Ad ora incerta concern themes of shipwreck and storms at sea (103). See chapter 1. Levi tells us in I sommersi e i salvati that ‘Io supplicai … un alsaziano, di tenermi un corso privato ed accelerato, distribuito in brevi lezioni somministrate sottovoce, fra il momento del coprifuoco e quello in cui cedevamo al sonno; lezioni da compensarsi con pane, altra moneta non c’era’ (SS II.1066) (I begged … an Alsatian, to give me a private, accelerated course, spread over brief lessons imparted in whispers, between the moment of curfew and the moment when we gave way to sleep, lessons to be recompensed with bread, since there was no other currency [translation is my adaptation of Rosenthal 97]). Translation is my adaptation of Woolf 101. In I sommersi e i salvati, Levi comments on this episode’s role in the rediscovery of his lost identity and humanity: ‘Rileggo dopo quarant’anni in Se questo è un uomo il capitolo “Il canto di Ulisse” … [D]ove ho scritto “darei la zuppa di oggi per saper saldare non ne avevo alcuna col finale,” non mentivo e non esageravo. Avrei dato veramente pane e zuppa, cioè sangue, per salvare dal nulla quei ricordi, che oggi, col supporto sicuro della carta stampata, posso rinfrescare quando voglio e gratis, e che perciò sembrano valere poco. Allora e là, valevano molto. Mi permettevano di ristabilire un legame col passato, salvandolo dall’oblio e fortificando la mia identità. Mi convincevano che la mia mente, benché stretta dalle necessità quotidiane, non aveva cessato di funzionare. Mi promuovevano, ai miei occhi ed a quelli del mio interlocutore. Mi concedevano una vacanza effimera ma non ebete, anzi liberatoria e differenziale: un modo insomma di ritrovare me stesso’ (Levi, SS II.1100) (After forty years I am reading in Survival in Auschwitz the chapter entitled ‘The Canto of Ulysses’ … Well, where I wrote ‘I would give today’s soup to know how to join, “I had none whatever” to the ending,’ I was neither lying nor exaggerating. I would really have given bread and soup, that is, blood, to save from nothingness those memories which today with the sure support of printed paper I can refresh whenever I wish and

262 Notes to pages 110–15

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27 28

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30 31

gratis, and which therefore seem of little value. Then and there they had great value. They made it possible for me to reestablish a link with the past, saving it from oblivion and reinforcing my identity. They convinced me that my mind, although besieged by everyday necessities, had not ceased to function. They elevated me in my own eyes and those of my interlocutor. They granted me a respite, ephemeral but not hebetudinous, in fact liberating and differentiating: in short, a way to find myself again [translation is my adaptation of Rosenthal 139–40]). My adaptation of Woolf 102; Woolf’s replacement of Dante’s ‘misi me’ with an English rendering of the phrase, ‘I set forth’ domesticates both Levi’s reading of Ulysses’ audacity and Dante’s own language. Translation is my adaptation of Woolf; translation of lines 119–21 of Inferno 26 is Mandelbaum’s. Compare, for example, Levi’s ‘Ecco, attento Pikolo, apri gli orecchi e la mente’ with this terzina from Dante’s Purgatorio: ‘Aguzza qui, lettor, ben li occhi al vero / ché ‘l velo è ora ben tanto sottile, / certo che ’l trapassar dentro è leggero’ (8.19–21). See, for example, the end of the ‘Il viaggio’ chapter of Se questo è un uomo, with its subtle transition from past narration to a much more immediate present, on the fulcrum of a question posed in the infinitive. Translation is my adaptation of Woolf 105. Levi does, however, make the contents of his revelation known in the following annotation to the ‘Canto di Ulisse’ in the 1973 scholastic version of Se questo è un uomo, which echoes the interview cited above: ‘In quell’istante, all’autore pare di intravvedere una conturbante analogia fra il naufragio di Ulisse e il destino dei prigionieri: l’uno e gli altri sono stati paradossalmente “puniti”, Ulisse per aver infranto le barriere della tradizione, i prigionieri perché hanno osato opporsi a una forza soverchiante, qual era allora l’ordine fascista in Europa. Ancora: fra le varie radici dell’antisemitismo tedesco, e quindi del Lager, c’era l’odio e il timore per l’“acutezza” intellettuale dell’ebraismo europeo, che i due giovani sentono simile a quella dei compagni di Ulisse, e di cui in quel momento si riconoscono rappresentati ed eredi’ (153) (In that instant, the author seemed to glimpse a disturbing analogy between Ulysses’ shipwreck and the prisoners’ destiny: both had been paradoxically ‘punished,’ Ulysses for having broken the barriers of tradition, the prisoners because they had dared to oppose an overwhelming power, such as fascism was at that time in Europe. Furthermore: among the various sources of German anti-Semitism, and therefore of the Lager, was the hatred and fear of the intellectual ‘keenness’ of European Judaism, that the two young men feel to be similar to that

Notes to pages 116–25 263

32

33 34

35 36 37 38

39 40

of Ulysses’ companions, and of which, in that moment, they recognize themselves to be representatives and heirs). For an illuminating examination of Levi’s quotation strategy in this episode, see Usher’s ‘“Libertinage” Programmatic and Promiscuous Quotation in Primo Levi,’ especially 91–9. Translation is my adaptation of Woolf 104. Cf Franco Ferrucci, ‘La casa di Primo Levi,’ for a provocative and original analysis of the relationship between creation and transgression in Levi, especially in the context of ‘inappropriate’ objects of representation such as leisure and fun. Translation is my adaptation of Woolf 104. For a more general discussion of the theme of food in Se questo è un uomo, cf Gian Paolo Biasin’s Sapori della modernità, 183–204. Translation is my adaptation of Woolf 105; translation of Inferno 26.142 is Singleton’s. The Steinlauf episode is a notable addition to the 1947 De Silva edition of Se questo è un uomo and appears for the first time in the 1958 Einaudi reissue of the text. See Iannucci 429–30 for the significance of the left turn in terms of Virgil and Dante’s leftward journey through hell. Piero Boitani’s study of the ‘figures’ of the Ulysses myth treats both the Mariner and Levi as literary-historical reincarnations of the Homeric character.

4 Infinite Transaction: Testimonial Numismatics and the Narrative Exchange 1 The mechanics of Levi’s translation of this text are a source of disagreement among Levi scholars and biographers. Cicioni’s Bridges of Knowledge holds that Levi worked from a German translation (99n). The novella was, in fact, translated into German by Edith Rost-Blumberg as Die Nacht der Girondisten in a 1959 volume with another Dutch short story. However, in his ‘Primo Levi Traduttore’ essay (‘Note ai testi’ II.1582–9) at the end of his twovolume 1998 Opere, Belpoliti writes that Levi, in two 1975 letters to Adelphi head and founder, Luciano Foà, first proposed the translation and then claimed to have already received both the necessary materials to write a preface and biography of the Dutch author-historian and a copy of the book in its original Dutch. Levi biographer Ian Thomson also claims that Levi translated directly from the Dutch, having been introduced to the book by the Dutch television director Rolf Orthel; Thomson justifies his assertion by noting the proximity between Dutch and German, which Levi already knew and continued to study at the Goethe Institute of Turin (369–70).

264 Notes to pages 125–6

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5 6

Notte dei Girondini reviewer Mario Baudino of La Stampa, after speaking to Adelphi representatives who remembered the circumstances of the translation, wrote that they ‘ricordano ancora l’entusiasmo dello scrittore. Gli proposero [l’assistenza di] un traduttore dall’olandese, ma lui volle fare tutto da solo, anche se poi accettò un piccolo aiuto’ (still remember the writer’s enthusiasm. They offered him [the assistance of] a Dutch translator, but he wanted to do everything himself, even if he later accepted a bit of help). Finally, Marina Warners, owner of the Libreria Bonardi in Amsterdam (the only Italian bookseller in Holland), claims to have asked Levi about the translation in a 1987 letter, during a period in which she was celebrating the bookstore’s tenth anniversary and contacting living translators between the two languages. Asked if he had translated anything else from Dutch, Levi responded that ‘oltre al libro di Presser non ho tradotto altro dall’olandese: è stato un tour de force solitario’ (personal e-mail correspondence) (other than Presser’s book I have not translated anything else from Dutch: it was a one-time tour de force). Given this evidence, my comments on Levi’s translation decisions – both specific and general – will focus on their relationship to the Dutch original, containing the Afterword by Philo Bregstein that Levi translated and incorporated into his own final product. Levi translated Chimica superiore organica for Einaudi (with Giorgio Anglesio) between 1951 and 1959, the fourth and last tome being published in 1960 (Belpoliti, Primo Levi 176–7). Levi completed the Douglas translation for Einaudi in August 1975, even though it did not see publication until 1979. See Belpoliti, ‘Primo Levi Traduttore,’ Opere II.1584. As Robert Gordon suggests, the Adelphi house was an editorial force in the resurgence in interest in ‘Ostjudentum’ culture in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s (‘Which Holocaust?’ 105, n80). Mirna Cicioni locates this revival specifically in the year 1971, with the publication of Claudio Magris’s Lontano da dove: Joseph Roth e la tradizione ebraico-orientale (109–11). On this point, see Baudino 25, Thomson 274–5, and Angier 503. As Belpoliti writes in his note on ‘Primo Levi Traduttore’ (Opere II), ‘La ristampa di Se questo è un uomo presso Einaudi nel 1958 e la nascita della Boringhieri nel ’57, modificano il rapporto di Levi con quella che è ormai la sua casa editrice: la sua figura di “esperto” cambia e Levi non viene piú consultato solo come chimico ed esperto scientifico, ma come autore di Se questo è un uomo’ (II.1583) (The reissue of Survival in Auschwitz with Einaudi in 1958 and the birth of Boringhieri in ’57 alter Levi’s relationship with what has become his publisher: his ‘expert’ status changes and Levi is no longer consulted merely as a chemist and scientific expert but as the author of

Notes to pages 126–8 265

7

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9

10

Survival in Auschwitz). The only other notable exception to Levi’s close personal and professional relationship to the Einaudi house is the publication of his poetry, first published with the small Scheiwiller press in 1975 as L’osteria di Brema and then in a much expanded version in 1984 as Ad ora incerta, with Garzanti. Levi only decided to publish his poetic work with Scheiwiller after having dutifully shown it to Einaudi editors, with whom he had a contractual agreement of first refusal. See Thomson 457, as well as the March 1975 correspondence between Levi and the Einaudi publishing house, where he notifies them – ‘per scrupolo, data l’opzione che è prevista nei contratti che ci legano’ (on principle, considering the option set out in our contracts) – that the Scheiwiller publishing house has agreed to publish his poems, rejected at an unknown earlier moment by Einaudi (Archivi di Stato di Torino, ‘LEVI, Primo’ cartella 1, fogli 1–452). It is noteworthy that the text inhabits Levi – or his head – in the case of the Presser translation, whereas Levi always figures Kafka’s Der Prozeß as a text (with an author and a protagonist, for that matter) that he must inhabit. See chapter 5 of the present study for a more exhaustive analysis of Levi’s epitextual comments on the Kafka translation and his relationship to the text. ‘Da molti segni, pare che sia giunto il tempo di esplorare lo spazio che separa (non solo nei Lager nazisti!) le vittime dai persecutori, e di farlo con mano piú leggera, e con spirito meno torbido, di quanto non si sia fatto ad esempio in alcuni film. Solo una retorica schematica può sostenere che quello spazio sia vuoto: non lo è mai, è costellato di figure turpi o patetiche (a volte posseggono le due qualità ad un tempo), che è indispensabile conoscere se vogliamo conoscere la specie umana, se vogliamo saper difendere le nostre anime quando una simile prova si dovesse nuovamente prospettare, o se anche soltanto vogliamo renderci conto di quello che avviene in un grande stabilimento industriale’ (SS II.1020; emphasis added for comparison). Of particular note are changes to the text that bring the issue of contagion to the fore (‘non solo nei Lager nazisti!’ and the suggestion that the laws of the grey zone are also applicable to Levi’s professional life), and the change from ‘carnefici’ to ‘persecutori.’ ‘taciti, soli, senza compagnia’: the citation is from Inferno 23.1 (‘Taciti, soli, sanza compagnia’), and refers to Dante and Virgil as they enter the sixth pouch of the Malebolge, populated by the hypocrites. For the most part, I have given my own translations of Presser’s Dutch, the better to illustrate Levi’s departures from and particularizations of De nacht der Girondijnen. Where, instead, I have relied wholly or in part on Barrows Mussey’s published translation of the novella, Breaking Point (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1958), I have indicated this parenthetically or in a note.

266 Notes to pages 128–30 11 Sereny’s Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (New York: McGraw Hill, 1974) was translated into Italian in 1975 as In quelle tenebre, not coincidentally by the same Adelphi Edizioni that published Levi’s La notte dei Girondini. 12 The story of Chaim Rumkowski and the Lodz ghetto is best known to American audiences from Leslie Epstein’s 1979 novel of the same name, The King of the Jews. For further reading on creative (American) depictions of Chaim Rumkowski, see Ellen Schiff, ‘American Authors and Ghetto Kings: Challenges and Perplexities’; for a general discussion of the Lodz ghetto, see Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation. 13 On the ‘necessity’ of a subjectless translation, Pym’s Translation and Text Transfer, and in particular chapter 3, ‘“I Am Translating” Is False,’ is representative of this traditional bias in translation studies. For Lawrence Venuti’s opposing view, see his Translator’s Invisibility. 14 Presser’s title means, literally, ‘The Night of the Girondists,’ referring to the faction of democratic parliamentarians in revolutionary France that was purged by rival Montagnards. The clash among Jacobins is embedded in the novella’s plot line as a history lesson taught by the protagonist to his Jewish students, and is developed as part of the Cain-Abel topos of brother turning against brother. Jacob Presser had a research interest in French history and was the author of a book on Napoleon. 15 The chronology of Presser’s life that was translated by Levi and appears at the end of the Girondini text tells us that ‘De nacht der Girondijnen verschijnt als Boekenweekgeschenk en wordt bekroond met de Van der Hoogtprijs’ (Nacht 94) (The Night of the Girondists is published as a prize for the Week of the Book and is awarded the Van der Hoogt Prize). 16 Translated into English in 1968 as Ashes in the Wind: The Destruction of Dutch Jewry, trans. Arnold Pomerans (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1988 [1968]). 17 Philo Bregstein writes in his Afterword that the novella ‘is zijn enige bijdrage aan de literatuur op hetzelfde niveau als zijn geschiedschrijving, beoefende hijook al beoefende hij zijn hele leven allerlei literaire genres en publiceerde hij ten dele onder pseudoniem enkele gedichtenbundels en detectiveromans’ (Nacht 85) (is his only literary contribution to reach the high level of his history writings, even if all his life he explored all sorts of literary genres and published – in part under a pseudonym – poetry collections and detective novels). The Simon Wiesenthal website mentions that Presser’s poetry included pieces written in memory of his wife while he himself was still in hiding; this is confirmed by the ‘About the Author’ note at the end of the 1958 English translation of the novella: ‘He dedicated to [his wife] a book of poems, Orpheus, which circulated clandestinely during

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the war and was twice reprinted after the liberation of 1945’ (93). Philo Bregstein’s 1970 hour-long interview-documentary of Presser, The Past That Lives, makes no mention whatsoever of the novella. ‘er is voor mij bijna geen scheiding tussen literatuur zoals De nacht der Girondijnen en geschiedenis als Ondergang … Ja … en die fable van De nacht der Girondijnen is werkelijkheid … zoals de werkelijkheid die Ondergang is, een fable is, verder reikt dan de beschrijving sec … iets met literatuur te maken heeft’ (Nacht 88). ‘En hier blijkt waarom Presser voor hij aan Ondergang kon beginnen eerst dit verhaal over Westerbork moest schrijven: vanuit zijn gevoel van persoonlijke medeverantwoordelijkheid en in wanhoop om het verlies van zijn eerste vrouw had hij in het historisch materiaal gezocht naar de plaats waar zijn vrouw het laatst geweest was voor haar spoor verdween: dat was Westerbork. Daarom wist Presser over dit onderwerp zoveel, al had hijzelf de oorlog als onderduiker overleefd en nooit in Westerbork gezeten’ (Nacht 87). Levi’s own work corresponds quite well with Ezrahi’s paradigm if we consider that he had already coauthored (with fellow survivor and physician Leonardo De Benedetti) the ‘Rapporto sulla organizzazione igienicosanitaria del campo di concentramento per Ebrei di Monowitz (Auschwitz – Alta Silesia)’ (‘Appendici’ I.1339–60) for the Minerva Medica medical journal in 1946. See chapter 1, n44. ‘Begin dan over iets waar je heel veel van weet, zomaar, schrijf er iets over’ (translation Robert Naborn). ‘precies toen viel in mijn brievenbus dat papier met die uitnodiging iets te schrijven voor de prijsvraag van de Boekenweek … En toen was ik vrij, toen kon ik beginnen aan mijn boek’ (translation Robert Naborn). ‘En uit de Gesprekken (blz. 121) over De nacht de Girondijnen: “Bij alles wat erin staat, behalve natuurlijk een paar kleinigheden, moet ik zeggen dat het volstrekt historisch is. Het is helemaal zo gebeurd.” En (blz. 132): “… de andere vraag, waarom De nacht der Girondijnen als verhaal is geschreven en mijn boek Ondergang al geschiedenis. Mijn antwoord zou ik, al tastend in mezelf, hierin willen zoeken dat mijn verhaal in heel sterke mate geschiedenis is. De nacht der Girondijnen is zelfs veel meer geschiedenis dan men kan weten en ik will dat ‘kan’ onmiddellijk even toelichten. Dat voert ons ook nog tot een andere, misschien literair-historisch belangrijke zaak. Bij welk verhaal van wie ik ook lees, van beel groteren dan ikzelf, is voor mij altijd de vraag: welke door de schrijver ingebouwde signalen kan the lezer niet meer opmerken, laat staan verklaren?”’ (Nacht 88–9). On the ethical and historiographical aspects of representation, see the nowclassic Friedlander volume Probing the Limits of Representation, in particular

268 Notes to pages 132–3

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27

28

Friedlander, Browning, White, Ginzburg, and LaCapra. On the relationship between historical fact and literary fiction in Holocaust writing, see Langer’s ‘Fictional Facts and Factual Fictions: History in Holocaust Literature’ and Foley’s ‘Fact, Fiction, Fascism: Testimony and Mimesis in Holocaust Narratives.’ Also of interest in this context is the recent debate stemming from allegations of fabrication against author James Frey. His Oprah Book Club selection, A Million Little Pieces, prompted a public reconsideration of the term ‘memoir’ in 2005–6 and led Winfrey to choose Elie Wiesel’s Night as her subsequent reading in the wake of the scandal. For a summary of the issues, as well as the renewed scrutiny that the selection placed on Wiesel’s book and its English translation, see Wyatt. ‘De meest indringende aanwezige echter is de mens Presser zelf: de jood Presser in al zijn gespletenheid’ (translation is my adaptation of Robert Naborn’s). The protagonist’s decidedly non-Dutch name is a sign of his Portuguese heritage. As Levi explains in a translator’s note to the narrator’s selfdescription as one of the ‘mmesjoggene Portegeizen’ (matti portoghesi or crazy Portuguese), ‘Questi “portoghesi” sono i discendenti degli ebrei spagnoli e portoghesi che l’Inquisizione aveva scacciati dalla penisola iberica negli anni 1492–1498, e che si erano dispersi in varie città del Mediterraneo, dell’Africa settentrionale e delle coste atlantiche. In Olanda, in cui vivevano da tempo ebrei di origine tedesca o orientale, erano stati accolti bene, ma, essendo diversi per costumi, rituale e lingua, costituivano in effetti una minoranza entro la minoranza ebraica’ (21) (These ‘Portuguese’ are the descendants of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews whom the Inquisition had driven out of the Iberian Peninsula in 1492–1498, and who had dispersed in various Mediterranean, North African, and coastal Atlantic cities. In Holland, where German and eastern Jews had lived for some time, they were well-received, but differences in tradition, rites, and language rendered them a minority within the Jewish minority). On this point, and in particular the slap as a fulcrum that marks Presser’s ability to see and overcome his own culpable inactivity during the war, see Bregstein’s Afterword (Nacht 87–8). ‘De nacht de Girondijnen is in elk detail waar, het is allemaal echt gebeurd … behalve de slag in het gezicht van Cohn, die niet! … dat uit de diepste diepten omhooglaaien van die kracht, als alles kapot is, dat dat opnieuw ontstaat!’ The phrase ‘dat dat opnieuw ontstaat!’ should more properly be translated as ‘that creates anew!’ but I have borrowed from Levi’s translation, ‘e che è una rinascita!’

Notes to pages 134–7 269 29 As LaCapra writes in his essay ‘Representing the Holocaust: Reflections on the Historians’ Debate’: ‘The Holocaust presents the historian with transference in the most traumatic form conceivable – but in a form that will vary with the difference in subject position of the analyst. Whether the historian or analyst is a survivor, a relative of survivors, a former Nazi, a former collaborator, a relative of former Nazis or collaborators, a younger Jew or German distanced from more immediate contact with survival, participation, or collaboration, or a relative “outsider” to these problems will make a difference even in the meaning of statements that may be formally identical. Certain statements or even entire orientations may seem appropriate for someone in a given subject position but not in others’ (110). Recent work done by historian Jeremy D. Popkin on the implications of autobiographical writings by Holocaust historians is also relevant to this study of Presser; see in particular his ‘Historians and Holocaust Memoirs’ in History and Memory 15.1 (2003): 49–84, now reprinted as chapter 8 of Popkin’s History, Historians and Autobiography (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005). 30 For Presser’s employment in Amsterdam’s Jewish Lyceum, see the ‘Beknopte chronologie’ in Presser (94) (in Levi, the ‘Breve cronologia di Jacques Presser’ 112); for the establishment of such schools in Holland in the aftermath of the Nazi occupation, see Presser’s Ondergang, especially Part II, ‘From Isolation to Deportation.’ 31 Dé does represent, however, Jacques/Jacob’s ‘voorwereld’ (70) (prior world), implying that she belongs to a temporal and moral realm essentially different from that of the Westerbork camp and that her presence might signal some salvific turn of events. 32 Jacob Presser and Dé Appel were married in 1936. For information on their courtship and relationship up until her capture in 1943, see The Past That Lives. 33 Presser recounts in The Past That Lives that he and his wife, after failing to reach the harbour of IJmuiden and leave Holland in the chaotic days following the German occupation in early May 1940, together unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide. Presser describes this period as an ‘epidemic’ of suicides and suicide attempts among Dutch Jewry. Interestingly, Presser’s protagonist expresses his hatred (‘hoe haatte ik … al die bij de capitulatie naar IJmuiden stuivende, doodgeschrokken, radeloze Joden …’ [21]) for those same desperate Jews. 34 For a particularly well-developed and illuminating discussion of this matter, see Foley. Her assertion that, in contrast to more conventional and totalizing narrative forms such as autobiography, realistic novel, and fantasy, ‘such non-teological forms as the diary and the pseudofactual novel more readily penetrate to the core of Holocaust experience, if only because they

270 Notes to pages 137–9 do not impose idealist philosophical schemes upon their material’ (333) is particularly relevant to Presser’s pseudo-diary of Jacques/Jacob’s moral struggle and its claims to historical ‘veracity,’ for Presser and Levi alike. Her exploration of the intrinsic characteristics of diary writing versus memoir writing – dynamic development versus fixed retrospection – also bears on our understanding of Presser’s novella, which takes the form of a pseudo diary whose unit of writing is not daily, but weekly. 35 For an illuminating discussion of the hierarchies of witnessing positions, see Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing, especially chapter 1, ‘Reading Wiesel’; for Weissman’s notion of vicarious witnessing, see ‘Introduction: To Feel the Horror.’ 36 I define ‘testimonial market’ here both linguistically and culturally. Levi is far better known in Italy than in the United States, while for many years Elie Wiesel’s physical presence and cultural prominence in U.S. publishing markets and academic circles (he has been Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University since 1976) led to his prominence in the American canon of Holocaust literature. On Wiesel as an agent of Holocaust memory in the United States, see Weissman; on the differences between Levi and Wiesel, see Cheyette’s ‘Appropriating Primo Levi.’ 37 For Lawrence Venuti’s discussion of Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s notion of the ‘remainder,’ see The Scandals of Translation and his essay ‘Translation, Community, Utopia’ in The Translation Studies Reader. As Venuti writes in the latter piece, ‘In current practices, a translation of a novel can and must communicate the basic elements of narrative form that structure the foreign-language text. But it is still not true that these elements are free from variation … Jean-Jacques Lecercle calls these variations the “remainder” because they exceed communication of a univocal meaning and instead draw attention to the conditions of the communicative act, conditions that are in the first instance linguistic and cultural, but that ultimately embrace social and political factors (Lecercle 1990) … Any communication through translation, then, will involve the release of a domestic remainder, especially in the case of literature. The foreign text is rewritten in domestic dialects and discourses, registers and styles, and this results in the production of textual effects that signify only in the history of the receiving language and culture. The translator may produce these effects to communicate the foreign text, trying to invent domestic analogues for foreign forms and themes. But the result will always go beyond any communication to release target-oriented possibilities of meaning’ (485). In my own use of this term, I understand Levi’s translation decisions to release a remainder that is very tied to Levi’s cultural and textual identity as an Italian Holocaust survivor

Notes to pages 140–9 271

38 39

40

41

42 43

44

writing within and against a number of ‘major forms’ (Scandals 10): from the articulation of his experience against the constraints of Lager German and the Lagerjargon, to his carving out of a testimonial space in a postwar Italian literary landscape mostly concerned with the development of founding myths for the new Republic and the Crocean task of forgetting the fascist ‘parenthesis,’ to his attempt to normalize and domesticate Kafka’s brutal linguistic realities. I further understand the remainder to stand for the textual variables that Levi brings to the texts that he translates, variables that ‘exceed’ any attempt to create equivalencies between source and target, and that create precisely the opacity by which the translator – and the translating process – marks the translated text. See chapter 5. Lawrence Langer’s comments on the ‘war’ that constantly rages in Holocaust fiction between history and imagination may shed some light on the difference between Levi’s translations of Presser and Kafka. If, as Langer states, ‘Literature generalizes human experience, while the events of atrocity we call the Holocaust insist on their singularity’ (‘Fictional Facts’ 119), it is clear that in the space between these two translations lies the passage from the Dutch novella’s Holocaust specificity and veracity to the contagion implied (at least in Levi’s reading of it) by Kafka’s Der Prozeß. One particularly striking example of this occurs in the transition between two of the novella’s segments. At pages 31–2, Presser ends one segment with ‘Het duivelspact was bezegeld’ (The pact with the devil was signed) and begins the next segment with a repetition of the same noun: ‘Het duivelspact. Ik trek het word in, het is niet echt, het is literatuur’ (The pact with the devil. I take the word[s] back. They’re not authentic. They’re literature). Levi, at page 45, is faithful to the first segment’s ending (‘Il patto col diavolo era firmato’) but omits Presser’s redundancy at the beginning of the next segment and jumps straight to the expression’s recantation: ‘Cancello l’espressione: è incongrua e letteraria’ (46). According to figures provided by the Adelphi Edizioni publications office, sales for the 1997 reissue eclipsed those for the 1976 edition by almost 30 per cent (31 Jan. 2006 e-mail correspondence with Adelphi Edizioni Commerciale). This trope might be related to that of the protagonist’s ‘split personality’ (Jacques the assimilated Jew / Jacob the observant one). Nietzsche’s Jenseits von Gut und Böse was published for the first time in Italy in 1898, as Al di là del bene e del male, in the translation of Edmondo Weisel (Milan: Fratelli Bocca). By creating a scarcity on the black market until such time as they were ready to introduce superior, competing items, the Nazi leadership

272 Notes to pages 149–51

45 46

47

48 49

effectively eliminated any chance of profit or even fair trade by the market actors themselves, who were still holding the inferior shirts, now subject to plummeting market value. This figure acquires a privileged status in Levi’s description of the Lager because of the central position of Lorenzo Perrone in Levi’s survival narrative. Interestingly, this punishment is described by Levi as a contrappasso wherein the guilty civilians must imitate, for a time and to the extent possible, the prisoners’ status and conditions: ‘Gli operai a cui viene applicato questo genere di contrappasso, vengono come noi spogliati all’ingresso, ma i loro effetti personali vengono conservati in un apposito magazzino. Non vengono tatuati e conservano i loro capelli, il che li rende facilmente riconoscibili, ma per tutta la durata della punizione sono sottoposti allo stesso nostro lavoro e alla nostra disciplina: escluse beninteso le selezioni’ (SQ I.78; emphasis mine) (The workers who receive this kind of contrappasso are, like us, stripped upon their entry into camp, but their personal effects are put aside in a special warehouse. They are not tattooed, and they keep their hair, which makes them easily recognizable, but for the entire duration of their punishment they are subjected to the same work and discipline as we are: excluding, of course, the selections). For a general picture of the monetary situation in the univers concentrationnaire, see Joel J. Forman’s ‘Holocaust Numismatics’ on the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s On-line Multimedia Learning Center. See also the special issue of The Shekel dedicated to the issue of Holocaust Numismatics 16.2 (Mar.-Apr. 1983), as well as issue 15.5 (Sept.-Oct. 1982), which dedicates a section to reprintings of past Holocaust Numismatics articles. We will return to the matter of camp currency in the last section of this chapter. On the importance of food in Levi, see Biasin, I sapori della modernità; and Jagendorf. As Levi wrote in the ‘Comunicare’ chapter of I sommersi e i salvati: ‘[Una parte dei prigioneri francesi ad Auschwitz] erano i nostri interpreti naturali: traducevano per noi i comandi e gli avvertimenti fondamentali della giornata, “alzarsi”, “adunata”, “in fila per il pane”, “chi ha le scarpe rotte?”, “per tre”, “per cinque”, eccetera. Certo non bastava. Io supplicai uno di loro, un alsaziano, di tenermi un corso privato ed accelerato, distribuito in brevi lezioni somministrate sottovoce, fra il momento del coprifuoco e quello in cui cedevamo al sonno; lezioni da compensarsi con pane, altra moneta non c’era. Lui accettò, e credo che mai pane fu meglio speso’ (II.1065–6) ([A group of French prisoners in Auschwitz] were our natural interpreters: they translated the basic commands and warnings of the day for us, ‘get up,’ ‘assembly,’ ‘line up for bread,’ ‘who has broken shoes?,’ ‘by threes,’ ‘by fives,’ and so on. Of course it wasn’t enough. I begged one of

Notes to pages 153–61 273

50

51 52 53

54

55 56

them, an Alsatian, to give me a private, accelerated course, spread over brief lessons imparted in whispers, between the moment of curfew and the moment when we gave in to sleep, lessons to be recompensed with bread, since there was no other currency. He accepted, and I believe that never was bread better spent [my adaptation of Rosenthal 97]). Levi eventually honoured Lorenzo’s name through his children, Lisa Lorenza (b. 1948) and Renzo (b. 1957) in a gesture of gratitude for his role in Levi’s survival (Cicioni 24, 51). For Levi’s relationship with Lorenzo see in particular Thomson (183–4, 215, 264); Cicioni (37–8, 117); and, among Levi’s own references to him, I sommersi e i salvati, ‘La zona grigia,’ and Lilít, ‘Il ritorno di Lorenzo.’ Levi uses this same word in his description of Lorenzo in the Lilít essay ‘Il ritorno di Lorenzo’ (II.63 [59–66]). Translation is my adaptation of Mussey 33. ‘Roustan’ was the French nickname of Rostom Razmadze, Napoleon’s chief bodyguard, a ‘Mameluke’ (or slave soldier, from the Arabic for ‘owned’) who was his right-hand man from 1798 until 1814. This passage also underscores a continuing theme in Nacht, that of the irony in the historian who knows history but cannot apply it to the present, and for whom history is only an abstract, hermetically sealed intellectual exercise. The novella’s title is perhaps the best example of this, pointing to a history lesson that Jacques/Jacob is able to deliver with almost theatrical gusto without ever seeming to realize its relevance to his own situation. The choice of the historical metaphor of the Girondists also points, once again, to the theme of doubling and to political or religious ‘brothers’ who eventually turn to fratricide, as in the case of Holland’s Jewry and Jacques/Jacob. Translation is my adaptation of Mussey 36. It also echoes another passage in Levi’s Se questo è un uomo in which Levi describes the dynamic of the camp rumour mill. Similarly, the following excerpt from the ‘Ottobre 1944’ chapter also concludes with a brutal example of zero-sum economics: ‘La notizia è giunta, come sempre, circondata da un alone di particolari contraddittori e sospetti; stamattina stessa c’è stata selezione in infermeria; la percentuale è stata del sette per cento del totale, del trenta, del cinquanta per cento dei malati. A Birkenau il camino del Crematorio fuma da dieci giorni. Deve essere fatto posto per un enorme trasporto in arrivo dal ghetto di Posen. I giovani dicono ai giovani che saranno scelti tutti i vecchi. I sani dicono ai sani che saranno scelti solo i malati. Saranno esclusi gli specialisti. Saranno esclusi gli ebrei tedeschi. Saranno esclusi i Piccoli Numeri. Sarai scelto tu. Sarò escluso io’ (SQ I.122) (The news arrived, as always, surrounded by a halo of contradictory or suspect details: the selection

274 Notes to pages 163–72

57 58

59

60 61

62

63

64

in the infirmary took place this morning; the percentage was seven per cent of the whole camp, thirty, fifty per cent of the patients. At Birkenau, the crematorium chimney has been smoking for ten days. Room has to be made for an enormous convoy arriving from the Poznan ghetto. The young tell the young that all the old ones will be chosen. The healthy tell the healthy that only the ill will be chosen. Specialists will be excluded. German Jews will be excluded. Low Numbers will be excluded. You will be chosen. I will be excluded [Woolf 115]). Paul de Man, ‘Conclusions: Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator”’ in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986), especially 81–4. And not only this first one: the novella’s seventh segment begins with the following observation, strongly echoing the first: ‘Hoe vreemd! Ruim veertien dagen geleden, achttien om precies te zijn, begon ik aan mijn eerste verslag, een dag of tien daarna aan mijn tweede, beide mislukten. Nu, na veel horten en stoten in het begin – ik herlees het en kan erom lachen – loopt het …’ (47) (How strange! More than fourteen days ago, eighteen days to be exact, I started my first report, ten days later my second, both failures. Now, after many fits and starts in the beginning – I read it and can laugh about this – it is moving along … [translation is my adaptation of Mussey 54]). ‘Ik meen oprecht bij mijn verstand te zijn en het enige, wat me nog zou kunnen verontrusten, is de behoefte, dit aldoor weer uit te spreken’ (9) (I honestly feel that I am in my right mind, and the only thing that disturbs me is my need to keep saying so [Mussey 10]). Jacques/Jacob, in De nacht der Girondijnen, was a member of the OD group. As Bregstein writes in his ‘Note’ to De nacht, ‘De hoofdpersoon bijvoorbeeld is gedeeltelijk gebaseerd op een Joodse leraar die Presser gekend had (Gesprekken blz. 120), maar heeft ook elementen van Presser zelf …’ (89) (The protagonist, for example, is partly based on a Jewish teacher that Presser had known [Conversations 120], but also had elements of Presser himself). In both the version printed in La Stampa and that printed in Lilít, a reproduction of the coin’s images – tail and head in the former and head and tail in the latter – appears under the essay’s title. The images are not reproduced in the ‘La zona grigia’ chapter of I sommersi e i salvati. Interestingly, when Levi revisits the story’s introduction for inclusion in his ‘La zona grigia’ essay, he elides his earlier reference to having used the coin as a ‘portafortuna,’ saying only that he had ‘dimenticato l’esistenza’ (SS II.1037) (forgotten the existence) of the coin until 1974, when he was able to reconstruct its story. The first case study in the chapter is, of course, that recounting the greyzoner tale of the Sonderkommandos as told by the Jewish-Hungarian physician

Notes to pages 173–7 275

65

66 67

68

Miklos Nyiszli. Nyiszli was one of the few survivors of the last Sonderkommando; his story, told in Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, via Levi’s retelling of it, inspired Tim Blake Nelson’s 1998 play and 2001 film, The Grey Zone. Levi claims ‘devo aver trovato quella moneta per terra, ad Auschwitz, subito dopo la liberazione: certo non prima, perché nulla di quanto avevo indosso allora avevo potuto conservare’ (‘Il re dei Giudei,’ LI II.67–8) (I must have found that coin on the ground, in Auschwitz, right after the liberation: certainly not before, because I had not been able to save anything of what I had on my person). See Shell’s chapter ‘The Language of Character’ in The Economy of Literature, in particular 66–73. Though students of Holocaust numismatics do not expressly address the realities of exchange between various camp currencies, Forman’s article does imply that the unique circumstances that condition the issue of prison coinage and scrip are such that exchange would not be feasible even in the event of more regular contact between prisoners (when a transit camp prisoner would be sent to a concentration camp, for example). Forman describes the Sokolka ghetto (Russia) in terms of its sui generis nature: ‘The currency issued in Sokolka is interesting. The money was printed only on one side, with the following inscription in seven lines: “RM 0.91 (Jewish Money) Good only as a way of payment by Germans for Jewish work within the ghetto of Sokolka, the Treasury of Sokolla [sic], the Mayor.” It appears that 91 Pfennig was the daily wage during 1940–41. Therefore, one note could be issued for each day’s work’ (Forman 10). Not only does the currency specifically delineate the boundaries of its own market validity, but its denomination effectively prohibits easy (or any) exchange with more conventionally denominated moneys in other camps. Levi edited this passage before reintegrating it into the ‘La zona grigia’ chapter, as well: ‘Una storia come questa non è chiusa in sé. È pregna, pone piú domande di quante ne soddisfaccia, riassume in sé l’intera tematica della zona grigia, e lascia sospesi. Grida e chiama per essere capita, perché vi si intravede un simbolo, come nei sogni e nei segni del cielo’ (SS II.1042; emphasis added to reflect Levi’s edits). Of particular note is Levi’s substitution of ‘capita’ (understood) in 1987 for the original ‘interpretata’ (interpreted).

5 Palinodic Reversal: The Trials of Translation 1 Notable entries abound on both sides of the debate over the possibility of reading Kafka in the light of the Holocaust atrocities that eventually took

276 Notes to pages 179–81

2

3

4 5

the lives of Kafka’s own sisters. On Kafka’s oeuvre as Holocaust ur-text see especially: Theodor Adorno, ‘Notes on Kafka’ in Prisms; George Steiner, Language and Silence; Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, By Words Alone. In a more Italian-specific, Levian context, see Cesare Cases’s 1948 article in the Bollettino della Comunità Israelitica di Milano (cited in Ferrero, Antologia) and David Meghnagi’s ‘La vicenda ebraica.’ Survivor David Rousset, in his L’univers concentrationnaire (Paris: Éditions du Pavois, 1946), describes the camps as a universe inhabited by ‘des bureaux toujours plus encombrés de fonctionnaires, détenus impeccables et affairés, des visages gris et sérieux, surgis d’un univers kafkéen, qui demandent poliment le nom et l’adresse de la personne à prévenir de votre mort, et tout est inscrit très posément sur de petites fiches preparées à l’avance’ (15; emphasis mine) (offices crowded with still more bureaucrats, impeccable and industrious, with gray serious faces fresh from a Kafkaesque universe, who politely inquire the name and address of the person to be notified in case of death. And all this is meticulously noted down on special forms prepared ahead of time [my adaptation of Guthrie 30]). For an opposing viewpoint see Lawrence Langer, ‘Kafka as Holocaust Prophet: A Dissenting View’ in his Admitting the Holocaust. Literally, ‘I dress up [or disguise myself] as Kafka’ (24 Apr. 1983, 116–20). The Espresso article, which covered Levi’s translation as the inaugural volume of the Einaudi ‘Scrittori tradotti da scrittori’ series, also includes interviews on translation with Natalia Ginzburg – whose translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary was the second work in the series – and Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini, translators of the third work, Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Levi uses the same imagery in his interview with Laura Mancinelli in Il secolo XIX: ‘infilarsi nella pelle di un altro,’ as well as in his interview with Luciano Genta in Tuttolibri: ‘Ho dovuto spogliarmi del mio modo di scrivere e di vedere il mondo.’ See also Levi’s interview with Giovanni Tesio. Sandra Bosco Coletsos, ‘La traduzione di Der Prozeb di Franz Kafka,’ in Studi Tedeschi (Annali dell’Istituto Universitario Orientale) 1–3 (1985): 229–68. In critiquing Levi’s treacherous translation, Bosco Coletsos quotes ‘le sagge parole di B. Terracini’ (the wise words of B. Terracini) on the personality of the translator, which ‘si fa trasparente, si riduce come una parete di cristallo che lascia vedere senza deformazioni ciò che sta dall’altra parte, ma che con il suo spessore lascia separate gli ambienti’ (249; emphasis mine) (becomes transparent, diminishes itself like a crystal wall that permits one to see what lies on the other side without distortions, but whose thickness allows the zones to remain separate).

Notes to pages 181–3 277 6 In Levi’s ‘Nota del traduttore,’ published as ‘Nota al Processo di F. Kafka’ in PS II.1208–10. 7 Lawrence Venuti, ‘The Difference That Translation Makes: The Translator’s Unconscious,’ in Alessandra Riccardi, ed., Translation Studies: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 214–41. 8 As developed in Venuti, Scandals. 9 ‘[T]he first step [in resisting and changing the conditions under which translation is theorized and practised today] will be to present a theoretical basis from which translations can be read as translations, as texts in their own right, permitting transparency to be demystified, seen as one discursive effect among others’ (Venuti, Translator’s Invisibility 17; emphasis mine). 10 As Bosco Coletsos writes, ‘Quello che è stato anche definito stile protocollare, relazione scientifica o verbale giudiziario si realizza concretamente attraverso una grande semplicità lessicale; notiamo per es. l’esclusione del gioco stilistico dei sinonimi, l’uso limitato dell’aggettivo sempre riferito ad aspetti evidenti ed inevitabili del mondo sensibile, all’aspetto fisico o comunque apparente della persona, mai a quello morale o psicologico. Sono numerose invece tutte quelle espressioni che rendono al massimo vaga, indeterminata, incerta qualsiasi forma di soggettività, di chiaro riferimento personale, di identificazione dell’apparenza con l’essenza’ (234–5) (That which has even been defined a protocol style, a scientific report, courtroom testimony is realized in concrete terms through great lexical simplicity; we note for example the exclusion of the stylistic game of synonyms, the limited use of adjectives, which always refer to evident and inevitable aspects of the tangible world, to the physical or in any case apparent aspects of a person, never to moral or psychological aspects. Expressions that render as vaguely, as indeterminately, as uncertainly as possible any form of subjectivity, of clear personal reference, or of identification of appearance with essence are, instead, numerous). 11 The Einaudi Archives at the Archivio di Stato di Torino contain letters that document Levi’s opinions regarding his various German translators and their work; indeed, many translation contracts stipulated Levi’s participation in the choice of eventual translators. Though the German case is particularly understandable in this regard (according to both Thomson and Angier, Levi enjoyed a positive collaborative relationship with Heinz Reidt) as Levi repeatedly expressed the importance of that audience’s understanding of his work, Levi’s deep engagement with the translating process is also evident in other contexts; his disappointment with the French translation of Se questo è un uomo, for example, is notorious (see Angier 511–12 and also the Nov. 1966 letter from Levi to Einaudi voicing his demand for greater control over future translations of his work as a result of the ‘illegible’

278 Notes to pages 183–5

12

13 14

15 16

17

original French translation that Levi and Einaudi eventually had legally blocked from further publication). Levi’s demands seem to have been formalized contractually by February 1967, when he was given rights of refusal not only over the German translator of Storie naturali but over the publisher and financial terms of the agreement as well (Archivi di Stato di Torino, ‘LEVI, Primo’ cartella 1, fogli 1–452). See also the brief entry on ‘Traduzioni’ in Belpoliti’s Primo Levi. Thomson cites the case of the Romanian translator of Se questo è un uomo, Doina Condrea Derer, whom Levi ‘asked … for a copy of her translation in manuscript, along with an Italian-Romanian dictionary (which he could have easily procured in Turin), in order to “verify” the accuracy and quality of her work’ (345). In Levi’s note to the ‘Traduzioni’ section of AOI (II.584). The ‘remainder’ is Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s term for that which the rules and systems of language cannot account for, a term appropriated by Lawrence Venuti for application to translation studies in his Scandals of Translation. For a full elaboration of the term, see Lecercle’s The Violence of Language (London: Routledge, 1990). See also chapter 4, n37. See, in particular, their Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996). ‘Ma l’urlo è un ricorso estremo, utile per l’individuo come le lacrime, inetto e rozzo se inteso come linguaggio, poiché tale, per definizione, non è: l’inarticolato non è articolato, il rumore non è suono. Per questo motivo, mi sento sazio delle lodi tributate a testi che (cito a caso) “suonano al limite dell’ineffabile, del nonesistente, del mugolio animale.” Sono stanco di “densi impasti magmatici,” di “rifiuti semantici” e di innovazioni stantie. Le pagine bianche sono bianche, ed è meglio chiamarle bianche; se il re è nudo, è onesto dire che è nudo’ (‘Dello scrivere oscuro’ AM II.678–9) (But the scream is the last resort, as useful to the individual as tears, inept and coarse if understood as language, because that, by definition, it is not: the inarticulate is not articulate; noise is not sound. For this reason, I am fed up with the praises heaped upon texts that, I’m citing off the top of my head, ‘ring at the limit of the ineffable, of the non-existent, of the animal moan.’ I am tired of ‘dense magmatic pastiches,’ of ‘semantic waste’ and of stale innovations. White pages are white, and it’s better to call them white; if the emperor is naked, it is honest to say that he is naked). Levi began requesting translation projects from Einaudi editors in the mid1970s, ‘[t]o avoid boredom and loneliness’ in the wake of the publication of Il sistema periodico (Thomson 368). Indeed, according to both Thomson and Angier, most of Levi’s translation projects had their origin in the depressive

Notes to pages 185–91 279

18 19

20

21

22

23

24

void that Levi felt upon completion of a testimonial or more properly creative work (cf Thomson’s description of Levi’s acceptance of the Kafka project, 427). On Levi’s interest in promoting an understanding of the Holocaust as a uniquely German crime, see Gordon, ‘Which Holocaust?’ especially 101. Il processo, translated by Ervino Pocar, was published by Mondadori in 1971; Zampa’s translation of Kafka’s text was published under the same title in 1973 by Adelphi. Levi claimed in his ‘Nota del traduttore’ to have used both the Zampa translation (‘È traduzione, e come tale si presenta, a viso aperto …’) (It’s a translation, and presents itself as such, openly) and that done in 1933 by Alberto Spaini, which had, for Levi ‘la ragionevole tendenza a rendere liscio quanto era ruvido, comprensibile l’incomprensibile’ (PS II.1209) (the reasonable tendency to make what was rough, even, what was incomprehensible, comprehensible). Levi himself said as much to Germaine Greer in his 1985 interview in the Literary Review: ‘[Der Prozeß] is a pathogenic book. Like an onion, one layer after another. Each of us could be tried and condemned and executed, without ever knowing why. It was as if it predicted the time when it was a crime simply to be a Jew’ (Primo Levi: The Voice of Memory 11; emphasis mine). That is, the interaction between juridical processes, be they institutional or metaphorical, and traumatic memory; specifically, the way in which traumatic memory seeks closure in juridical events that paradoxically serve as forums for that trauma’s re-enactment. See The Juridical Unconscious. The STS series today numbers eighty-two volumes, the most recent of which is Emilio Tedini’s 2000 translation of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Despite the series’ hiatus since 2000, many of the volumes, including Levi’s Il processo, have since been reissued in Einaudi’s Einaudi tascabili ‘Classici’ series. Though this connection does represent yet another example of transgression between diegetic and extra-diegetic levels, the initial publicity campaign for the series did not take explicit note of it. Note, for example, the published comments of Bernardi: ‘Con chi meglio di [Levi], scrittore puntuale delle umiliazioni dell’uomo e della pietà che non accampa crediti, prigioniero un tempo, senza sapere perché, dell’orrido campo di Auschwitz, avrà senso parlare di Kafka?’ (Who better than [Levi], that meticulous writer of man’s humiliations and of the pity that stakes no claim to special considerations, one-time prisoner, without knowing why, of the horrible camp of Auschwitz, would it make sense to talk about Kafka with?); and Andreani: ‘in ogni caso è facile comprendere come molto leghi l’ebreo tedesco di Praga all’ebreo torinese; e forse è stata proprio questa affinità ideale, questo comune sgomento dinanzi ai mostruosi ingranaggi costruiti dal potere per ingabbiare e ingoiare individui, a far sorgere in Levi la

280 Notes to pages 192–7

25 26

27

28 29

30

tentazione di sovrapporre la propria prosa, il proprio ritmo alla prosa e al ritmo di Kafka’ (in any case it’s easy to understand that much links the German Jew from Prague and the torinese Jew; and perhaps it was precisely this ideal affinity, this common anxiety in the face of the monstrous machinery constructed by the forces of power to cage and swallow individuals, that tempted Levi to superimpose his own prose, his own rhythm, on those of Kafka). Tuttolibri (La Stampa), 9 Apr. 1983. ‘“Lo scrittore-traduttore si viene ad arricchire di un libro altrui, e il testo tradotto viene ad essere illuminato dal riflesso del mondo contemporaneo.”’ Interestingly, it is precisely this view of translation that Sandra Bosco Coletsos critiques so harshly in her review of Italian translations of Der Prozeß: ‘Quella che Levi fornisce insomma è una versione nel senso usato da Mounin [Teoria e storia della traduzione. Turin, 1975], versione che presuppone la “scelta soggettiva del traduttore, spesso scrittore egli stesso” e che nel caso specifico è molto pericolosa per tutti i motivi visti sopra’ (250) (What Levi produces, in short, is a version in the sense used by Mounin, a version that presupposes the ‘subjective selection of the translator, often a writer himself’ and in this particular case is very dangerous for all of the reasons seen above). On this same duality in Einaudi’s global approach to editorial practices, in general, see Nicoletta Simborowski’s Secrets and Puzzles: Silence and the Unsaid in Contemporary Italian Writing, chapter 5. See chapter 4 for a discussion of Levi’s Presser translation and its paratextual elements. This is Genette’s term for a text’s inside front cover. All narratological terminology in the following pages is taken from Gérard Genette, Paratexts (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997). Levi claimed in his 18 June 1983 interview with Giovanni Tesio (Nuovasocietà) that it was only on reading the first of his translation’s reviews that he came to see the affinities between Kafka and himself: (GT) –Tradurre Kafka, o meglio tradurre Il processo di Kafka, non è un po’ come far riaffiorare la memoria del Lager? (PL) – Sì, lo è stato, ma me ne sono accorto soltanto dopo, quando me lo ha fatto notare Del Buono su ‘La Stampa.’ (GT) – Isn’t translating Kafka, or better, translating Kafka’s Trial, a bit like bringing your memories of the Lager back to the surface? (PL) – Yes, it was, but I only realized it after, when Del Buono’s article in La Stampa made me notice it.

31 The Gazzetta del Popolo perhaps put it most succinctly in its review of Levi’s translation: ‘L’idea è anche quella di dare la possibilità ai grandi scrittori di

Notes to pages 197–201 281

32

33

34 35

36

37

tradurre, ma personalizzando questi testi. Non bisogna infatti pensare all’idea di un traduttore anonimo, incapace di intervenire con quella fantasia e con quell’arguzia propria dei narratori veri e propri, sulle pagine più intricate e difficilmente traducibili’ (The idea is also that of giving the opportunity to the great writers to translate, but personalizing these texts. We shouldn’t, in fact, think in terms of an anonymous translator, incapable of intervening with that imagination and that keenness that is unique to real narrators, in the most intricate and difficult-to-translate pages). Calvino was one of the few early voices to recognize the value of Se questo è un uomo, and he remained an important interlocutor and sounding board for Levi’s works-in-progress, weighing in on texts ranging from the Storie naturali to Il sistema periodico. The affinities between Levi’s ‘storie fantabiologiche’ and Calvino’s own work are more than clear; as Ian Thomson writes, ‘When Calvino read “Carbon” [the last chapter of The Periodic Table] in manuscript he exclaimed to his wife, “Goodness, but that’s Calvinoesque!”’ (Thomson 376). See also Belpoliti’s ‘Fantascienza’ entry in Primo Levi. The most convincing proof of this public perception of Levi comes in the widespread refusal to accept the suicide hypothesis for Levi’s 1987 death. In addition to Thomson, see Diego Gambetta’s exhaustive Boston Review article, ‘Primo Levi’s Last Moments.’ Originally published in La Stampa on 5 June 1983, the essay is reprinted as ‘Tradurre Kafka’ in Racconti e saggi (Turin: La Stampa, 1986). The entire quotation reads as follows: ‘[M]i sono trovato costantemente a dover litigare con me stesso, davanti alla coscienza filologica di dover rispettare Kafka e ai miei riflessi personali, alle mie abitudini personali di scrittore, quello che si chiama lo stile, ormai consolidato. Stile non molto noto a me, noto piú ai miei lettori che a me stesso, come il proprio ritratto visto di profilo. Noi ci conosciamo male di profilo, non ci vediamo quasi mai di profilo’ (188–9) ([I] found myself having to constantly fight with myself, faced with the philological awareness of having to respect Kafka and my own personal reflexes, my personal writerly habits, what you would call a style, by now gelled. A style that I didn’t know very well, that my readers know better than I do myself, like your own portrait in profile. We don’t know ourselves very well in profile, we almost never see our own profiles). ‘Ce qui signifie qu’il a toujours la foi dans la continuité du temps, alors que Kafka veut marquer une coupure après laquelle le temps n’existe plus. Levi a presque fait un contresens, et il y en a beaucoup d’autres dans sa traduction.’ As Levi writes in I sommersi e i salvati, ‘il tedesco del Lager … [e]ra una variante, particolarmente imbarbarita, di quella che un filologo ebreo tedesco, Klemperer, aveva battezzata Lingua Tertii Imperii, la lingua del Terzo Reich,

282 Notes to page 201 proponendone anzi l’acrostico LTI in analogia ironica con i cento altri (NSDAP, SS, SA, SD, KZ, RKPA, WVHA, RSHA, BDM…) cari alla Germania di allora’ (SS II. 1066) (the German of the Lager … [w]as a particularly corrupted variant of that which a German Jewish philologist had baptized Lingua Tertii Imperii, the language of the Third Reich, even proposing for it the acronym LTI in ironic analogy with the hundred others [NSDAP, SS, SA, SD, KZ, RKPA, WVHA, RSHA, BDM …] dear to the Germany of that time). In discussing The Trial, itself, years earlier, Levi explicitly linked Kafka’s ‘precocious’ understanding of the dangers of bureaucracy and the Lagers: ‘Nel Processo c’è un’intuizione precoce, che la violenza viene dalla burocrazia, questo potere crescente, questo potere irresistibile che è frutto del nostro secolo. Le sorelle di Kafka sono morte tutte nel Lager, vittime di questa macchina corrotta e abietta che lui aveva previsto’ (De Melis 192) (In the Trial there is a precocious intuition that violence is born of bureaucracy, this growing power, this irresistible power that is the product of our century. Kafka’s sisters all died in the Lager, victims of this corrupt and vile machine that he had foreseen). 38 For a particularly insightful reading of Roberto Benigni’s controversial and problematic Holocaust ‘fable’ La vita è bella, precisely in this context, see Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s 2001 article ‘The Secret Histories of Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful.’ Ben-Ghiat convincingly argues that Benigni’s projection of his (non-Jewish) father’s prisoner-of-war stories onto the landscape of the Italian Holocaust is emblematic of Italians’ unwillingness to come to terms with their own anti-Semitic past and status as a failed ally of Nazi Germany: ‘In many literary, cinematic, and journalistic accounts of the war, Germany served as the emblem of racial hatred and genocide, while Italy emerged as a collective of “brava gente” (good people) who, even during the war, had remained largely unaffected by twenty years of fascism. These historical and cultural factors must be taken into account in considering the ideological operation carried out by Benigni in his transformation of his soldier father into a Jewish bumbler. Life is Beautiful lays bare the limits of what can be told in Italy, even after fifty years, about painful subjects: not just the Holocaust, but also the saga of the millions of non-Jewish Italian soldiers who were trained by the regime to kill and command but who became, instead, as POWs, haunting reminders of military defeat, civil war, and foreign occupation’ (256). For a broader history of the myth of ‘Italiani brava gente’ see David Bidussa, Il mito del bravo italiano; for more historically and geographically specific treatments of the myth, see Nicholas Doumanis’s ‘The Italian Empire and brava gente: Oral History and the Dodecanese Islands’ and Glenda Sluga’s ‘Italian National Memory,

Notes to pages 201–2 283

39 40

41

42 43

44

45

46

National Identity, and Fascism,’ both in R.J.B. Bosworth and Patrizia Dogliani, eds, Italian Fascism. See chapter 1, n46. R.J.B. Bosworth, Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima: History Writing and the Second World War: 1945–1990, 137 [134–40], citing De Felice in the 27 Dec. 1987 edition of the Corriere della sera. As Oreste Del Buono writes in his review ‘Il nuovo processo: Primo Levi ritraduce Kafka,’ ‘si tratta … di un confronto, se non addirittura di uno scontro, di personalità’ (La Stampa, 28 Aug. 1983: 3) (it’s … a matter of an encounter, if not a clash, of personalities). See chapter 3 of Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Levi’s readership was largely domestic and European at this time, given that he did not attain the broadly international fame and audience that he hoped for until Saul Bellow’s glowing praise for The Periodic Table, published in Raymond Rosenthal’s English-language translation in 1983 (see Thomson, especially chapters 24 and 25). ‘When The Drowned and the Saved appeared in 1986 it took everyone by surprise. Primo’s campaign to escape the label of “witness-writer,” and to be accepted as a literary writer tout court, had begun to work [with the publication of Se non ora, quando? (1982)]. Then suddenly after five years it was all reversed, and Primo Levi the witness and analyst of the Holocaust was back again’ (605). There are indications of this fear within Levi’s oeuvre as early as the penning of La tregua’s troubling finale, in 1962, where the fear of contagion manifests itself in Levi’s awakening from the feeling of return and home, into the reality of an eternal Lager. But there is a discernible progression from this representation in the clearly recognizable language of trauma to a more global declaration that universalized man’s destiny is that foreseen by Kafka, one of shame and debasement even beyond the barbed-wire fence. Levi’s conclusion to the ‘La zona grigia’ chapter of I sommersi e i salvati echoes the pessimism that his process of ‘seguire’ Der Prozeß ‘al microscopio’ (‘Nota al Processo di F. Kafka,’ PS II. 1208) (following [Der Prozeß] under the microscope) confirmed for him. Subtle testament to Levi’s views on the contagion of Auschwitz by the time the Kafka translation was complete is the following Freudian slip, in which Levi puts the reality of the Lager in the present tense: ‘Io, conscio della distanza abissale di qualità che c’è tra me e Kafka, nei miei libri ho sempre battuto una strada diversa. Ho cominciato scrivendo del Lager, ho continuato a scrivere di cose che mi sono avvenute, ma cercando sempre di spiegare, di sciogliere i nodi. Mi è stata anche rimproverata questa mia tendenza al

284 Notes to pages 203–6

47

48

49

50

51

didattico. Metà di Se questo è un uomo è dedicata a cercare di spiegare a me stesso, e quindi al lettore, il perché di quella apparente anomalia che sono i Lager tedeschi’ (De Melis 189; emphasis mine) (I, conscious of the qualitative abyss that exists between Kafka and me, in my books I have always taken a different path. I began writing about the Lager, I continued to write about things that have happened to me, but always trying to explain, to loosen the knots. I have even been criticized for this didactic tendency of mine. Half of Survival in Auschwitz is dedicated to trying to explain to myself, and thus to the reader, the ‘why’ of that apparent anomaly that is the German camps). The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘palinode’ as ‘an ode or song in which the author retracts a view or sentiment expressed in a former poem. Later also (more generally): a recantation, retraction, or withdrawal of a statement.’ For a discussion of Levi’s relationship to Germans and German culture, see Rosenfeld, ‘Primo Levi and the Germans,’ in Jewish Studies at the Central European University, vol 2. Though Levi’s last work, I sommersi e i salvati, is well known for its emphasis on issues of justice (especially in the chapters ‘Vergogna,’ ‘La zona grigia,’ and ‘L’intellettuale ad Auschwitz’), I would argue that Levi’s preoccupation with issues of contagion, the fossilization of memory, the spread of historical revisionism, and the complexity of the relative positions of oppressor and victim tend to overshadow more properly juridical concerns, especially in the context of the traumatic and symbolic levels of juridical processes. Regarding the relationship between translation and the unconscious, Enzo Siciliano’s comment at the end of his ‘Quando tradurre è una medicina’ is particularly relevant: ‘Tradurre è un modo dell’immaginazione, del sentimento, appunto dell’“istinto” che la ragione può correggere, e guidare, ma non salvare’ (Translating is a mode of the imagination, of the sentiment, precisely of the ‘instinct’ that reason can correct and guide, but not save). As Levi stated in his 1986 interview with Risa Sodi, ‘Since I’m not a believer, I don’t really know what forgiveness is. It’s a concept that’s outside my world. I don’t have the authority to bestow forgiveness. If I were a rabbi, maybe I would; if I were a judge, perhaps. I believe that if someone has committed a crime, he has to pay. It’s not up to me to say, “I exempt you from punishment.” The authority does not rest with me’ (‘An Interview with Primo Levi’ 364). Als sei K. beauftragt, alles, was hier gesprochen wurde, genau in sich aufzunehmen, an einem höheren Ort die Anzeige davon zu erstatten und einen Bericht abzulegen, hörte er prüfend und überlegen zu (Kafka 209).

Notes to pages 207–11 285 52 Was für Veränderungen waren mit ihm nur schon in der letzten Stunde vor sich gegangen! War es der Prozeß, der ihn so hin und her warf und ihn nicht erkennen ließ, wo Freund un wo Feind war? (Kafka 207). 53 The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002). 54 See Felman’s exhaustive discussion of Walter Benjamin and the ‘expressionless’ in chapter 1 of The Juridical Unconscious. 55 The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988), trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (originally published as Le différend [Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1983]). 56 The English-language translation of The Differend contains an index of names organized according to the note numbers in the text, as opposed to their page numbers. 57 See Felman’s particularly convincing argument that juridical and literary moments – specifically the Eichmann trial and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah – constitute the only real ‘conceptual breakthroughs’ (106) in our understanding of the Holocaust, opposite modes that act in tension with each other to bring us alternately closer to the event (through mourning) and farther away from it (through historical distancing and thus articulation). 58 A notable exception is the conclusion to the ‘Esame di chimica’ chapter of Levi’s Se questo è un uomo. Describing his reaction to the Kapo’s base and thoughtless gesture of wiping his soiled hand on Levi’s back, he writes, ‘sarebbe assai stupito, l’innocente bruto Alex, se qualcuno gli dicesse che alla stregua di questo suo atto io oggi lo giudico, lui e Pannwitz e gli innumerevoli che furono come lui, grandi e piccoli, in Auschwitz e ovunque’ (SQ I.103-4) (he would be amazed, the poor brute Alex, if someone told him that today, on the basis of this action, I judge him and Pannwitz and the innumerable others like him, big and small, in Auschwitz and everywhere [Woolf 98]). Though Levi’s later feelings about the contagion potential of Auschwitz are certainly present in the last words of the passage, that same closing passage also indicates a larger net of culpability than the German people. By contrast, Ian Thomson views the 1950s as a phase in which Levi, through his correspondence with various German nationals interested in a mutual coming to terms with Germany’s Nazi past and his numerous business trips on behalf of the SIVA plant that he managed until the mid-1970s, was specifically interested in engaging both Germany and individual Germans in exercises of mutual understanding (see in particular chapter 16, 291). Thomson also claims that although Levi ‘regularly destroyed part of his correspondence once it created a backlog … he kept every one of his German letters. His plan was to publish them as a book some day … a

286 Notes to pages 211–16

59 60

61

62 63

64

selection of them appeared in the “Letters from Germans” chapter of The Drowned and the Saved, Levi’s last published book’ (Thomson 293). ‘Il commandante di Auschwitz,’ La Stampa, 23 Dec. 1960. Levi’s recently rediscovered publication entitled ‘Testimonianza per Eichmann,’ not included in Belpoliti’s 1997 Opere, would at first glance seem to represent this missing prose link in Levi’s treatment of the Eichmann trial. Despite its title, however, the essay treats the trial and its issues only obliquely, and only at the end; indeed Levi does not ever mention Eichmann by name. Instead, ‘Testimonianza’ focuses on the passage of time and its impact on Holocaust memory, reparations, the culpability of German industry, the Sonderkommando, and the need to show ‘ai nostri figli questo insigne esempio di giustizia storica’ (650). Affidavit of Dieter Wisliceny [Affidavit C, Document UK-81], Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression. Volume VIII (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1946), 606–19, published by the United States Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality. This affidavit is substantially the same as the testimony given by Wisliceny on direct examination before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, 3 January 1946. Accessed at http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/Wisliceny.htm, 4 June 2008. See also Simborowski for a discussion of these two pieces in the context of the key Levian concept of stylistic and psychological ritegno (43). Though this story first appeared in La Stampa on 8 March 1984 (republished in L’ultimo natale di guerra [Turin: Einaudi, 2000]), Thomson’s interviews with Hety Schmitt-Maas reveal that Levi’s interest in and correspondence with Heidebroek can be traced back to the late 1970s (405). Charlotte Ross astutely notes Levi’s indictment of German scientific experimentation in his science-fiction work, particularly stories like ‘Versamina’ and ‘Angelica farfalla’ in the Storie naturali. If we take this scientific thread as yet another possible point of entry into Levi’s work, it is difficult to ignore the link between the cocoon imagery that Levi uses in describing Müller’s intractable moral position and the basic premise of ‘Angelica farfalla.’ The story’s title is taken from a passage in Dante’s Purgatorio (10.121–9) in which the poet scolds his readers for not understanding that they are born as ‘vermi’ (worms) who, though misshapen, may still attain ‘giustizia’ (justice) or divine perfection, but only in the more evolved state of the ‘angelica farfalla’ (angelic butterfly). Levi’s fantasy, first published in August 1962 in Il Mondo, imagines that a German scientist working during the end of the Second World War has discovered the secret to human neotenics, that is, how to make humans survive beyond their ‘larval’ stage and evolve into ‘angelic butterflies.’ Similar to Müller’s emergence and crystallization in an intractable moral state that is

Notes to pages 218–19 287

65

66

67

68

69 70

condemned precisely for its arrogant fixity (the German scientist’s evolution is anything but complete, for Levi), the tortured, chained, winged figures described in the ‘Angelica farfalla’ finale have evolved into a perverse perfection thanks only to the arrogance of a frenzied German scientific project gone awry. Of course, the source passage is taken from the first terrace of purgatory, where Dante meets the penitent prideful, in a sequence noteworthy for its use of biblical and Augustinian tropes of man’s spiritual journey to God. Levi will later return to this same passage, in his 1981 La Stampa essay on ‘Le farfalle.’ I am grateful to Dennis Looney for his insight into Levi’s use of this passage. Cf the closing words of the chapter ‘Al di qua del bene e del male’: ‘Vorremmo ora invitare il lettore a riflettere, che cosa potessero significare in Lager le nostre parole “bene” e “male”, “giusto” e “ingiusto”; giudichi ognuno, in base al quadro che abbiamo delineato e agli esempi sopra esposti, quanto del nostro comune mondo morale potesse sussistere al di qua del fino spinato’ (SQ I.82; emphasis mine) (At this point we would like to invite the reader to reflect on what our words ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ could have meant in the Lager; let each person judge, on the basis of the picture that we have sketched out, and of the examples put forth above, how much of our common moral world could have survived on this side of the barbed-wire fence). Levi significantly embellished the ‘Dr Müller’ story for maximum effect. See Thomson 326–31, for a factual accounting of Levi’s contact with Ferdinand Meyer and 377–8 for mixed reactions to the Müller story. See also Angier 581–3. Though these claims are in part supported by the fact that he did indeed change the names in his story, the success or failure of Levi’s various attempts at literary trials depended only tangentially on their ever being made public. As such, the masking of Mertens’s true identity did not diminish the psychological value of Levi’s verdict nearly as much as the already fixed nature of their relationship, due to Heidebroek’s refusal to repent for his actions or to become engaged in the symbolic juridical process of Levi’s correspondence. Contrary to Thomson’s claim that the story appeared in La Stampa two years after Levi’s initial request to Schmitt-Maas in July 1979 (405), Belpoliti dates the essay to March 1984 (see Opere I. cxi [Turin: Einaudi, 1997]). The omission of Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution, cannot be casual. As Levi wrote in the first chapter of Se questo è un uomo, ‘Avevamo appreso con sollievo la nostra destinazione. Auschwitz: un nome privo di significato, allora e per noi…’ (SQ I.11) (We had learned our destination with relief: Auschwitz: a name devoid of meaning, then and for us …).

288 Notes to pages 221–3 71 In Levi’s appendix to the 1976 Einaudi scholastic edition of Se questo è un uomo, reprinted in all subsequent Einaudi editions. 72 The passage cited earlier is reproduced here in its entirety: ‘nello scrivere questo libro, ho assunto deliberatamente il linguaggio pacato e sobrio del testimone, non quello lamentevole della vittima né quello irato del vendicatore: pensavo che la mia parola sarebbe stata tanto piú credibile ed utile quanto piú aparisse obiettiva e quanto meno suonasse appassionata; solo cosí il testimone in giudizio adiempie alla sua funzione, che è quella di preparare il terreno al giudice. I giudici siete voi’ (SQ I.175; emphasis is mine) (in writing this book, I deliberately assumed the calm and sober language of the witness, not the plaintive language of the victim, nor the irate language of the avenger; I thought that the more objective my words seemed and the less impassioned they seemed, the more credible and useful they would be. Only in this way does the witness before the court fulfil his duty, which is to lay the groundwork for the judge. The judges are you). 73 In comparing the reading and spectatorial audiences of his first book, Levi states that ‘[I]l pubblico che legge, anche quello che ascolta la radio, è lontano, nascosto, anonimo: il pubblico teatrale è lí, ti guarda, ti aspetta al varco, ti giudica … Abbiamo cercato di dire tutto, ed insieme di non strafare. La materia di cui disponevamo era già fin troppo scottante: si trattava di decantarla, di incanalarla, di trarne un significato civile ed universale, di guidare lo spettatore ad una conclusione, ad una sentenza, senza gridargliela negli orecchi, senza presentargliela già fabbricata’ (‘Nota alla versione drammatica di Se questo è un uomo’ PS I.1161-2; emphasis mine) ([T]he public that reads, and even that which listens to the radio, is far away, hidden, anonymous: the theatrical public is there, it’s watching you, lying in wait for you, judging you … We have sought to tell everything, and yet to not overdo it. The material at hand was already too volatile: it was a matter of decanting it, of channelling it, of drawing from it a civil and universal meaning, of guiding the spectator to a conclusion, to a sentence, without screaming it into his ears, without presenting it to him already constructed). 74 For Levi’s involvement in legal action aimed at slave labour restitution, see Cicioni and Thomson. 75 As Lyotard writes in discussing the shift from Holocaust victims to Israeli plaintiffs, from ‘the wrong into damages and the differend into litigation’ (56). 76 In Levi’s introduction to Ad ora incerta. 77 The multilayered nature of survival guilt was at the heart of Levi’s survey of different kinds of ‘vergogna’ in the eponymously titled chapter of I sommersi e i salvati (Levi, interestingly, uses the terms ‘vergogna’ and ‘colpa’ quite interchangeably in this chapter). In ‘Vergogna,’ Levi locates – with

Note to page 223 289 surprisingly little explicit rhetorical or organizational categorization – survivor guilt in three main time frames. On the most basic level is his syllogistic explanation for the prisoners’ presence in the Lager: ‘la durezza della prigionia veniva percepita come una punizione, ed il senso di colpa (se punizione c’è, una colpa dev’esserci stata) veniva relegato in secondo piano per riemergere dopo la liberazione …’ (SS II.1050) (the harshness of our imprisonment was perceived as a punishment, and any sense of guilt [if there’s a punishment, there must have been guilt] was relegated to a position of secondary importance, only to re-emerge after liberation …), in which Levi echoes his earlier reflections on his sudden flash of understanding at the end of the ‘Canto di Ulisse’ (cf chapter 3 of the present study). Levi also discusses the prisoners’ sense of shame over their comportment once inside the camp (lacking brotherhood towards a prisoner in need, theft, the incapacity to act to the detriment of the oppressor); and finally, after liberation, over having survived at all, due to their ‘lessened’ human condition, to having seen the horrendous crimes of the perpetrators, and to having taken the place of a ‘better’ man.

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Bibliography 305 Rousset, David. L’univers concentrationnaire. Paris: Éditions du Pavois, 1946. Trans. as The Other Kingdom by Ramon Guthrie. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947. Santner, Eric L. ‘History beyond the Pleasure Principle.’ In Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution,’ 143–54. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992. Schiff, Ellen. ‘American Authors and Ghetto Kings: Challenges and Perplexities.’ Holocaust Studies Annual 1 (1983): 7–34. Schnapp, Jeffrey T. ‘18 BL: Fascist Mass Spectacle.’ Representations 43 (Summer 1993): 89–125. Scott, John A. ‘Inferno XXVI: Dante’s Ulysses.’ Lettere Italiane 23 (1971): 145–86. Segre, Cesare. ‘Introduzione.’ Intro. to Vol. II, Primo Levi, Opere, vii–xxxv. Turin: Einaudi, 1988. Rpt as ‘I romanzi e le poesie,’ in Primo Levi: Un antologia della critica, 91–116. Sereny, Gitta. In quelle tenebre. Trans. Alfonso Bianchi. Milan: Adelphi, 1975. Trans. of Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974. Shay, Arnold L. ‘Westerbork.’ The Shekel 16.2 (Mar.-Apr. 1983): 45–6. Shell, Marc. The Economy of Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. – Money, Language, and Thought. Berkeley: U of California P, 1982. Sherman, Kenneth. ‘Primo Levi and the Unlistened-to Story.’ Brick 47 (Winter 1993): 63–9. Siciliano, Enzo. ‘Quando tradurre è una medicina.’ Corriere della Sera, 8 May 1983. Simborowski, Nicoletta. ‘“Il ritegno”: Writing and Restraint in Primo Levi.’ In Secrets and Puzzles. Silence and the Unsaid in Contemporary Italian Writing, 23–48. Oxford: Legenda, 2003. Sluga, Glenda. ‘Italian National Memory, National Identity, and Fascism.’ In R.J.B. Bosworth and Patrizia Dogliani, eds, Italian Fascism, 178–94. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999. Sodi, Risa. A Dante of Our Time: Primo Levi and Auschwitz. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. – ‘An Interview with Primo Levi.’ Partisan Review 14 (1987): 355–66. Rpt as ‘Un’intervista con Primo Levi’ in Primo Levi: Conversazioni e interviste 1963– 1987. Turin: Einaudi, 1997. Stanford, William. The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954. Steinberg, Paul. Chroniques d’ailleurs. Paris: Éditions Ramsay, 2000. Trans. as Speak You Also. A Survivor’s Reckoning. Trans. Linda Coverdale with Bill Ford. New York: Metropolitan Books [Henry Holt and Company], 2000.

306 Bibliography Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. – Language and Silence. New York: Atheneum, 1967. Stern, J.P., ed. World of Franz Kafka. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. ‘War Memories: On Autobiographical Reading.’ New Literary History 24.3 (1993): 563–75. ‘Task.’ The Oxford English Dictionary. 10th ed. 1996. Terry, Jack. ‘The Damaging Effects of the “Survivor Syndrome.”’ In Steven A. Luel and Paul Marcus, eds, Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Holocaust: Selected Essays, 135–47. New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1984. Tesio, Giovanni. ‘L’enigma del tradurre.’ Interview with Primo Levi. Nuova Società, 18 June 1983: 61. – ‘Le occasioni? La memoria, un ponte, una ragnatela.’ Tuttolibri (La Stampa), 17 Nov. 1983: 3. – ‘Premesse su Primo Levi poeta.’ In Piemonte letterario dell’Otto-Novecento: Da Giovanni Faldella a Primo Levi, 197–223. Rome: Bulzoni, 1991. – ‘Ritratti critici di contemporanei: Primo Levi.’ Belfagor 34.6 (1979): 657–75. Thomson, Ian. Primo Levi. London: Hutchinson, 2002. Todorov, Tzvetan. E-mail correspondence. 19 Feb. 2006. – ‘Ten Years without Primo Levi.’ Trans. John Anzalone. Salmagundi 116/117 (1997): 3–18. Toury, Gideon. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Press, 1995. Toynbee, Paget. Dante Dictionary. Rev. ed. Charles S. Singleton. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968. ‘Translatio.’ The Oxford Latin Dictionary. 1985 ed. Trunk, Isaiah. Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation. New York: Macmillan, 1972. Turk, Horst. ‘The Question of Untranslatability: Benjamin, Quine, Derrida.’ Translation Perspectives 5 (1990): 45–56. United States Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression. Volume VIII. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1946. Urbani, Brigitte. ‘Dans le sillage de Dante. Le naufrage comme châtiment. Naufrages homérico-dantesques dans la littérature italienne.’ Cahiers d’études romanes 1(1998): 31–47. Usher, Jonathan. ‘“Libertinage” Programmatic and Promiscuous Quotation in Primo Levi.’ In Joseph Farrell, ed., Primo Levi: The Austere Humanist, 91–116. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004.

Bibliography 307 Van der Zee, Nanda. Jacques Presser. Het gelijk van de twijfel. Een biografie. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Balans, 1988. Van Hoof, Henri. ‘Dans les coulisses de la traduction.’ Meta 28.4 (Dec. 1983): 334. Trans. Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood. Venuti, Lawrence. ‘The Difference That Translation Makes: The Translator’s Unconscious.’ In Alessandra Riccardi, ed., Translation Studies: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline, 214–41. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. – The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. New York and London: Routledge, 1998. – ‘Translation, Community, Utopia.’ In The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd ed., 482–502. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. – The Translator’s Invisibility. New York: Routledge, 1994. Venuti, Lawrence, ed. The Translation Studies Reader. 2nd ed. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. Vicentini, Maria Terenzi. ‘Occorre tornare ancora sull’episodio Dantesco de [sic] Ulisse?’ Revista de Letras 31 (1991): 79–86. Von Flotow, Louise. ‘Translation Praxis, Criticism and Theory “Au Feminin.”’ Études Canadiennes / Canadian Studies 41 (1996): 181–94. Ward, David. Antifascisms. Cultural Politics in Italy, 1943–46. Benedetto Croce and the Liberals, Carlo Levi and the ‘Actionists.’ Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1996. Weissman, Gary. Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2004. Werners, Marina. E-mail correspondence. 18 Mar. 2006. White, Hayden. ‘Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth.’ In Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution,’ 37–53. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992. – Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. Wolf, Manfred. Rev. of Breaking Point, by Jacob Presser. Judaism 10.4 (Fall 1961): 383–4. Wyatt, Edward. ‘The Translation of Wiesel’s Night Is New, but Old Questions Are Raised.’ New York Times, 19 Jan. 2006, late ed.: E1+. York, Alan. ‘The Scrip Paper Money of the Netherlands Concentration Camps.’ The Shekel 15.5 (Sept.-Oct. 1982): 24–6, 45. Zampieri, Stefano. Il flauto d’osso: Lager e letteratura. Florence: Giuntina, 1996. Zuccotti, Susan. The Italians and the Holocaust. New York: Basic Books, 1987.

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Index

For page references to individual works by Levi, see the Index of Primo Levi’s Works. Adelphi publishing house, 125, 140, 142–3, 193, 252n9, 263–4n1, 264n4, 266n11, 271n41 Aeneas, 99, 100, 109 Agamben, Giorgio: Quel che resta di Auschwitz (The Remnants of Auschwitz), 255n30 ambiguity. See intermediacy Améry, Jean, 22, 107, 110, 241n12, 250n65 Ancient Mariner. See Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Ardeatine Caves massacre, 86, 257n38 Arendt, Hannah: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. See Eichmann, Adolf Babel, viii, 3, 7, 8, 17, 23, 32, 37, 38, 44, 47, 119, 226, 232, 237–8n10, 246n40, 249n51 Baer, Richard, 211, 286n59 Barthes, Roland: S/Z, 158, 166 Bayer, 30, 31, 244n29. See also IG Farben

Benjamin, Walter: and the ‘expressionless,’ 209, 285n54; ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’ (‘The Task of the Translator’), ix, 6–8, 14, 40, 237n7, 237–8n10, 246–7n40, 258n1; ‘Some Reflections on Kafka,’ 177 Bloom, Harold, 56, 57, 62 Boitani, Piero: The Shadow of Ulysses: Figures of a Myth, 95–8, 104, 121, 122, 123–4, 249n61, 259nn4, 10, 263n40 bread, as currency, 28–9, 150, 151, 152, 154–5, 243–4n25, 261n23, 272– 3n49. See also food Browning, Christopher, 251n3, 267– 8n24 Calvino, Italo, 197, 235nn5, 7, 236n10, 281n32 Caruth, Cathy, 36–7 Cavani, Liliana: The Night Porter, 252n9 Chemical Kommando, 106–7, 215

310 Index Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ x, xv, 11, 40, 43, 53, 56–8, 62–85, 89–91, 97, 110, 122–4, 125, 145, 172, 224, 228, 240n7, 247n43, 253n19, 254nn22, 24–5, 257–8n42, 263n40 contagion, 10, 181, 185, 189, 196, 202, 209, 215, 265n8, 271n39, 283n45, 283–4n46, 284n49, 285n58 corpus, of Levi’s work, vii, x, xiv, xv, 11, 55, 225, 231, 232, 250n66 currency: of Auschwitz, 152–3; counterfeit, xiii, 149, 174, 175; as figure of translation, viii, xii–xiii, 10, 11, 125, 170, 235n2; inconvertibility of, 152, 169–70, 172–5, 275n67; of Lodz ghetto, 12, 171–6, 274nn62–3, 275n65; relationship to bread, 28– 9, 151, 261n23, 261–2n25, 272– 3n49; revaluation of, 29, 170–6; and symbolic economies in the camp, 143–4, 149–51, 159, 169, 173; of univers concentrationnaire, 272n47, 275n67; of Westerbork camp, 170– 1. See also bread; economies; numismatics; translation, economic metaphors for Curtius, Ernst, 27, 93, 95, 114, 258n1. See also ineffability d’Albancourt, Nicolas, and the ‘belles infidèles,’ 39 Dante: and addresses to reader, 111– 12, 262n28; and ‘Angelica farfalla’ (‘Angelic Butterfly’), 286–7n64; and ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ (‘The Canto of Ulysses’), xv, 28, 44, 48–9, 52, 53, 72, 93–124, 125, 172, 224, 254n22, 259nn7, 9, 288–9n77; and Doré’s engravings of the Divine Comedy,

10, 231; and the inexpressibility topos, 27, 243n23; as model for Levi’s testimony, 50, 57, 62, 72–3, 115, 224, 245–6n36, 250n62, 254n22, 260n20; and De nacht der Girondijnen (Breaking Point), 126, 128, 265n9; and nautical metaphors, 93–4, 104, 259n2, 260–1n21; and poet-pilgrim duality, 81, 93, 95, 100–5, 106, 114, 228, 250n62; and strategies of accommodation, 40; and transgressive translation, 11, 40, 44, 49, 93–5, 101, 104, 105, 106, 109–10, 115, 116, 117, 122–3, 260n15; and ‘Il superstite’ (‘The Survivor’), 71–3, 74, 76, 79–80, 84– 6; and Virgil, 99–101, 105, 108, 109, 259n12, 265n9. See also Doria, Branca Dé (De nacht der Girondijnen), 135–6, 137, 166–7, 168, 169, 269n31 Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix: Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 42, 185, 201, 223–4 de Man, Paul, 7, 40, 163, 237n7, 246– 7n40 Derrida, Jacques: ‘Des tours de Babel’ (‘On Towers of Babel’), 7, 8, 14, 237n7, 237–8n10, 246–7n40 Doré, Gustave, engravings of Dante’s Divine Comedy. See Dante Doria, Branca, 80, 85–6, 181, 256– 7n37 doubles, 12, 79–80, 82, 87, 95, 101–2, 104–5, 109, 121, 124, 126, 132–3, 136, 271n42, 273n54; and CainAbel topos, 136, 266n14. See also ‘Auschwitz, città tranquilla’ (‘The Quiet City’); Doria, Branca; guides; Presser, Jacques

Index 311 Douglas, Mary: Natural Symbols, 125, 235n4, 236n3, 264n3 dreams: and the Ancient Mariner’s clashing realities, 75; Freudian analysis of, 35; reversed through Ulysses figure, 121; symbolic nature of, 175, 240–1n9; and testimony, 14–18, 21, 32–7, 50, 239n1, 245nn34–5, 254–5n28; and La tregua (‘Wstawać’), 36, 75 Dutch, as source text language of La notte dei Girondini, 263–4n1. See also Presser, Jacques economies: of camp commodities, 148–55; and the circulation of testimony, 133, 138–9, 42, 143–76, 163, 165–9, 270n36; human, 145, 155–6, 161–75; moral, 126, 148; narrative, 126, 144–6, 148; Naturalwirtschaft (natural economy), 157, 158, 159, 160; in Se questo è un uomo (Survival in Auschwitz), 128–9, 145, 146–54; sexual, 156–61; symbolic, within the camp, 148–9, 154–5, 155, 166; textual, 159, 165–9. See also bread; currency; food; numismatics; reversal, of camp economies; translation, economic metaphors for Eichmann, Adolf, 203, 204, 209, 210– 13, 215, 221, 222, 285n57, 287n69; ‘Testimonianza per Eichmann’ (‘Testimony for Eichmann’), 286n60. See also ‘Per Adolf Eichmann’ (‘For Adolf Eichmann’); German Einaudi publishing house, xiv, xvii, 42, 43, 64, 125, 126, 182, 190, 201, 231, 263n38, 264nn2–3, 264–5n6,

277–8n11, 278–9n17, 280n27; and the Scrittori tradotti da scrittori (STS) series, 187, 191–9, 201, 202, 207, 276n2, 279n22 emplotment: historical versus narrative, 130–2, 133–5, 139, 167–8, 267– 8n24; and liminality, 133, 135, 138; in Primo Levi, 267n20. See also liminality fantabiologiche, storie (biological fantasy stories), xi, 281n32 Feldman, Ruth, 253n15, 254n25 Felman, Shoshana: The Juridical Unconscious, 5, 177, 191, 208, 209, 210, 221, 224, 239n13, 239–40n6, 279n21, 285nn54, 57; and Laub, Dori: Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, 17–18, 22, 51, 53, 57, 237– 8n10. See also Laub, Dori Fenoglio, Beppe, 42, 64, 72, 77, 79, 248n47, 254n26 fixity, xii; ethical, 9, 216; juridical, 12, 216, 221–5; memorial, 238n11; moral, 136, 220, 221, 286–7n64; of source text, 230; and survivorhood, 62 Foà, Luciano, 125–6, 263n1 food, 20, 28, 29, 33, 107, 118–19, 154, 172, 239n5, 263n36, 272n48. See also bread; currency foreignization, 31–2, 39, 203, 245n31 Freud, Sigmund, 113, 186, 232, 283– 4n46; affirming negations, 78, 254– 5n28, 255n29. See also Caruth, Cathy; dreams gaze, of dead, 87–8, 251–2n5. See also Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, ‘The

312 Index Rime of the Ancient Mariner’; Lifton, Robert Jay; ‘Il superstite’ (‘The Survivor’) Genette, Gérard, 50, 142–3, 250n63, 280n29 German, culpability for the Holocaust, 185, 201, 214–15, 225, 279n18, 285–6n58, 286n60; culture, and Levi, 203, 223–4, 231, 284n48; language, as Lagerjargon superstrate, 24, 29–32; Levi’s knowledge of, 24–5. See also ‘Auschwitz, città tranquilla’ (‘The Quiet City’); juridical; Kafka, Franz; Lingua Tertii Imperii; Il sistema periodico (The Periodic Table), ‘Vanadio’ (‘Vanadium’); translation, of Se questo è un uomo into German Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah: Hitler’s Willing Executioners, 251n3 grey zone, 45, 57–9, 61–3, 144, 172, 175, 176, 185, 196, 203, 204, 216, 223, 265n8; as applied to sommersi and salvati terms, 61, 76; and De nacht der Girondijnen, 12, 126–8, 129, 132, 135–6, 157, 160, 167, 170, 252n9. See also ‘La zona grigia’ (‘The Grey Zone’) guides, 100, 104, 106–9, 126. See also Dante, ‘Canto di Ulisse’ (‘The Canto of Ulysses’); ‘Pikolo’ guilt, survivor, 9, 10, 11, 57, 60–2, 65, 67, 72, 80, 81, 86, 126, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137, 185, 196, 222, 223, 224, 238n12, 288–9n77; and absence of burial rites, 87, 252n6; and Daniele, 88, 91, 257n41; of the human condition in Il processo, 202, 283n45; Italian, for the Holocaust, 201; neurotic, 90–1; priority, 60, 86; and

redemption, 89–90, 91; rhythms of, 70; and shame, 61, 80, 88–9, 251– 2n5; universal, for historical events, 67, 89, 257–8n42. See also Lifton, Robert Jay; I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned and the Saved), ‘Vergogna’ (‘Shame’) Häftling, 25, 118, 147, 150 Heidebroek, Reinhard. See ‘Auschwitz, città tranquilla’ (‘The Quiet City’) Heine, Heinrich, xiv, 25, 30, 183, 204, 236–7n3 hologram, Levi’s oeuvre as, vii Homer: Odyssey, viii–ix, 95–101, 105, 109, 113, 115, 118–21, 235n3 Hurbinek, 23, 24, 34–5 hurbn (destruction), 23 IG Farben (IG Farbenindustrie), 216, 218, 222, 244n29 ineffability, 9, 21, 62, 73, 106, 112, 208–9, 233, 243n23, 249n59. See also Curtius, Ernst interlocutor: diegetical (as model readers) (see ‘Pikolo’ and Dé); implied, in De nacht der Girondijnen, 144; in testimonial exchange, 6, 11, 17–18, 34, 35, 43, 50, 51, 53, 65, 66, 74, 76, 79–80, 84, 111, 116, 121, 144, 254n24. See also Felman, Shoshana, and Laub, Dori intermediacy: economic, 150–1; of the ‘grey zone,’ 57–8; between historiography and narrative, 131–2, 137–8; between life and death, 83–4, 89, 91, 122; between transit camp and Auschwitz, 138; of survival, 62, 73, 81; of

Index 313 translation, 54, 97, 100–1, 106. See also emplotment ‘Italiani, brava gente,’ 201, 282–3n38 Italianness: role of, in Levi’s testimony, 33–4, 37, 41, 44–6, 47, 95 Jakobson, Roman, 5, 9, 21, 37, 38, 91, 237n7, 240–1n9 Jewish intellectualism, 112–13, 262– 3n31 Joseph K., and affinities with Levi, 178, 180–2, 199, 204–7, 223–5. See also Kafka, Franz Judenräte, 87, 257n39 juridical: translation of Der Prozeß as, 12, 184, 207–25; relationship to testimony, 92; approach to German culture, 203–25. See also Felman, Shoshana; German; ‘Per Adolf Eichman’ (‘For Adolf Eichmann’) justice, 74, 91–2, 110, 123, 177, 203–4, 208, 209, 211, 214–15, 284n49, 286– 7n64. See also juridical; Lyotard, Jean-François Kafka, Franz: Der Prozeß (The Trial), xv, 6, 10, 12, 40, 41, 42, 129, 139– 40, 141, 172, 176, 177–208, 213, 221, 223–5, 228, 265n7, 271n39, 279n20, 280n26, 283n45; alienated language of, 201, 241–2n13; as Holocaust ur–text, 177–8, 191, 192, 194–5, 275–6n1, 283n45; other Italian translations of, 187, 199– 200, 206, 279n19; ‘In der Strafkolonie’ (‘In the Penal Colony’), 177, 191; ‘Die Verwandlung’ (‘The Metamorphosis’), 191. See also Il processo

Klemperer, Victor. See Lingua Tertii Imperii Lagerjargon, 5, 8, 19, 22–4, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 41, 44–5, 49, 152, 169, 206, 224, 237–8n10, 242n15, 242–3n19, 244n28, 270–1n37 Lanzmann, Claude: Shoah, 239–40n6, 285n57 Laub, Dori: Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, 18, 22, 50, 53. See also Felman, Shoshana, and Laub, Dori Leopardi, Giacomo, 38–9 Lévi–Strauss, Claude: La vie des masques (The Way of the Masks) and Le regard éloigné (The View from Afar), 235n4, 236–7n3 Life Is Beautiful (La vita è bella), 282– 3n38 Lifton, Robert Jay, 60–2, 67, 70, 83, 86–9, 251–2n5, 252nn6, 8, 256n33 liminality, 11, 32, 56, 67, 69, 73, 138. See also emplotment, and liminality Lingua Tertii Imperii, 27, 224, 281– 2n37 list, as part of camp organizational system, 60, 86–7 Lodz ghetto, 12, 171–2, 266n12. See also currency; grey zone; numismatics; Rumkowski, Chaim Lorenzo (Perrone), 153–5, 272n45, 273nn50–1 Luther, Martin, translation of the Bible, ix Lyotard, Jean-François: Le différend (The Differend), 207, 209–10, 215, 222, 223–4, 288n75 Manzoni, Alessandro, 58

314 Index Marx, Karl, 163–4 Mertens, Doktor. See ‘Auschwitz, città tranquilla’ (‘The Quiet City’) Meyer, Ferdinand. See Il sistema periodico (The Periodic Table), ‘Vanadio’ (‘Vanadium’) midrash, 73–4, 96, 98, 255–6n31 Minerva Medica. See ‘Rapporto sulla organizzazione igienico-sanitaria del campo di concentramento per ebrei di Monowitz (AuschwitzAlta Silesia)’ (Auschwitz Report) Mr Simpson stories (Storie naturali), x, xi–xiii, xiv, 233. See also Storie naturali (Natural Histories) monetary metaphors for translation. See currency; economies; numismatics Müller, Lothar. See Il sistema periodico (The Periodic Table), ‘Vanadio’ (‘Vanadium’) ‘mussulmani’ (‘musselmen’), 81, 245–6n36 nautical, metaphor for narration, 93–4, 95, 104, 259n2. See also shipwreck Nietzsche, Friedrich: Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil), 146–7, 271n43. See also Se questo è un uomo (Survival in Auschwitz), ‘Al di qua del bene e del male’ (‘This Side of Good and Evil’) nocturnal, aspect of La ricerca delle radici, xiv numismatics, 169, 170–5, 272n47, 275n67. See also currency; economies palinode, translation of Der Prozeß as, 12, 203, 224, 225, 284n47

pidgin language (Lagerjargon as), 23– 4, 27, 30–1, 169, 243n21, 243n24 ‘Pikolo,’ x, 11, 44, 48–50, 52, 97, 106– 12, 114–18, 120, 122, 262n28. See also Dante, ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ (‘The Canto of Ulysses’); guides poetry, relationship to Levi’s prose, 69–73, 253n16 Presser, Jacob (Jacques): De nacht der Girondijnen (Breaking Point), xv, 10, 11, 12, 40–1, 125–46, 148, 155–69, 170, 176, 183, 188, 204, 224, 228, 252n9; Ondergang (Ashes in the Wind: The Destruction of Dutch Jewry), 130–2, 135, 137, 139, 167–8, 269n30 Priebke, Erich, 257n38 redemption, failed, 67, 89–91. See also Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Reidt, Heinz. See translation, of Se questo è un uomo into German remainder, 6, 139, 142, 145, 157, 184, 186, 270–1n37, 278n14. See also Venuti, Lawrence repetition, traumatic, 76, 78, 82, 83–4, 126, 134, 135, 165, 166, 170, 172, 209, 274n58 representation, crisis of, 1, 2 reversal: of dream of failed narration through Ulysses, 121; of failed economies, 145, 152–5, 173–5; of geographical orientation, 122–3; of mediation, 233; of moral universe in the camps, 123–4, 153–5; of source text, 57, 226, 229; of symbolic orders in the camps, 130; of translation hierarchies, 10 Rousset, David: L’univers concentrationnaire (The Other Kingdom),

Index 315 241n10, 275–6n1. See also univers concentrationnaire (concentrationary universe) Rumkowski, Chaim, 145, 170, 171, 172, 174–5, 266n12. See also currency; Lilít (Lilit and Other Stories), ‘Il re dei Giudei’ (‘The King of the Jews’); Lodz; I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned and the Saved), ‘La zona grigia’ (‘The Grey Zone’) salvati. See sommersi Samuel, Jean. See ‘Pikolo’ Schleiermacher, Freidrich, 39, 40, 228, 247n42 Schmitt-Maas, Hety, 218, 286n63, 287n68 science-fiction, in Levi’s oeuvre, vii, xi, 202, 236n1, 286–7n64. See also Lilít (Lilít and other Stories); Storie naturali (Natural Histories); Vizio di forma (Structural Defect) Sereny, Gitta: Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (In quelle tenebre), 127, 128, 266n11 shame. See guilt Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 38–9, 246n38 shipwreck, 63–4, 75, 93–4, 113, 117, 260–1n21, 262–3n31. See also Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; Dante, ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ (‘The Canto of Ulysses’); nautical sommersi, 72, 74, 78, 79, 80, 81, 84, 138, 254n21, 260–1n21 Steinberg, Paul (‘Henri’), 220–1 Steinlauf, 51–3, 119–20, 263n38 suicide, 136, 250n65, 251n4, 269n33, 281n33 sur-vie. See Derrida, Jacques

survivorhood, positions of, 137–43, 270n35 survivor syndrome. See guilt tattooed number: and baptism, 107; and camp signification system, 44– 6; and death identification, 86–7; and Hurbinek, 34; Levi’s camp identification (174 517), 25; and reversal of Nazi dehumanization, 34; in testimonial dream, 33, 34 temporal ambiguity, 16–17, 52–3, 112, 262n29 Toury, Gideon: Descriptive Translation Studies, 184–5 trains, as metaphorical vehicle for testimony, 15, 32–4 transgression: and Holocaust narrative, 11, 54, 62, 93–7, 104–6, 109, 113–18, 122, 222, 233; and death association, 251–2n5; against the interdiction against crossing the Pillars of Hercules, 116–18, 122; against the isolation of exchange, 154–5. See also Dante, ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ (‘The Canto of Ulysses’) translatio, 4–5, 9, 20, 31, 35–6, 37, 49, 53–4, 61, 101, 110, 113, 167; as ritual burial, 9, 61–2, 159, 245–6n36, 252n6; as synonymous with metaphor, 258n1 translation: artefacts of, 39, 54, 141, 169, 176, 182, 184, 186; back, 229; being translated, 227 (see also ‘Tradurre ed essere tradotti’ [‘On Translating and Being Translated’]); and domestication, 186, 187, 198, 201–2; economic metaphors for, 129, 143–4 (see also currency); en abyme, 9, 10, 54, 57, 79,

316 Index 82, 124, 130, 132, 136–7, 144, 166, 246–7n40, 250n62; and fear, 180–1; and inhabitation, 141, 265n7; as investment, 179–80, 228, 276nn2–3; as law, 8, 92, 246–7n40; Levi’s particularizing strategies – in Il processo, 189, 199, 224 – in La notte dei Girondini, 145, 160, 162, 164, 168–9; of Levi’s works, 183, 277–8n11, 278n12; as liminal space, 129; as lowering into, 141, 178, 180–1, 184 , 227–8; as midrashic writing practice, 73–4; practices, in the aftermath of the Second World War, 42; of Se questo è un uomo into German, 213–15, 228–31; as speech act, 5; as subjectless utterance, 129, 266n13; as traumatic return to Auschwitz, 140; as transparent process, 141, 142, 181, 183, 194, 202, 233, 276n5; as trap, viii, 177–8, 182–3, 188, 225, 226; as utopian textual space, 6; violence of, viii, 224, 225, 227, 228, 229, 230–1, 232, 233, 250n66. See also reversal; Schleiermacher; ‘Tradurre ed essere tradotti’ (‘On Translating and Being Translated’); transgression; translatio; Venuti, Lawrence trauma. See Caruth, Cathy; Felman, Shoshana, and Laub, Dori; Freud; repetition; translation

trial. See Felman, Shoshana; juridical; Kafka, Franz; Il processo Ulisse (Ulysses). See Boitani, Piero; Dante, ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ (‘The Canto of Ulysses’); Homer unexpectedness, of traumatic event, 71 univers concentrationnaire (concentrationary universe), viii, 10, 59, 98, 110, 117, 123, 126, 140, 147–8, 152, 153, 155, 162, 172, 178, 206, 216. See also Rousset, David Venuti, Lawrence, 6, 31, 39, 47–8, 179, 182, 189–90, 196–7, 245n31, 266n13, 270n37, 277n9. See also remainder Virgil. See Dante Von Schlegel, Wilhelm, 39 Westerbork transit camp, 131, 132, 133, 136, 137, 139–40, 145, 146, 156, 158, 159, 160–1, 162, 163, 167, 170– 1. See also intermediacy; Presser, Jacob Wisliceny, Deiter, 213 zero-sum construct of the Lager, 60, 86, 223, 273–4n56

Index of Primo Levi’s works

For page references for cross-referenced topics, see the main index. Ad ora incerta (At an Uncertain Hour), 68, 265n6; ‘Alzarsi’ (‘Wstawać’), 36, 75 (see also dreams); ‘Per Adolf Eichmann’ (‘For Adolf Eichmann’), 203, 211–13, 215; ‘Il superstite’ (‘The Survivor’), 56–8, 62–3, 68–9, 71–4, 76–81, 145, 181, 223, 252n5. See also Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; Dante; grey zone; guilt L’altrui mestiere (Other People’s Trades), x, xi; ‘L’aria congestionata’ (‘Congested Air’), x; ‘Auschwitz, città tranquilla’ (‘The Quiet City’) [Reinhard Heidebroek], 215, 218– 20, 221, 286n63, 287n67 (see also German; juridical); ‘Dello scrivere oscuro’ (‘On obscure writing’), 187–8, 197, 201; ‘Le farfalle’ (‘Butterflies’), xi, 287n64; ‘L’internazionale dei bambini’ (‘The Children’s International’), xi; ‘L’ispettore Silhouette’ (‘Inspector Silhouette’), x; ‘Leggere la vita,’ x; ‘La lingua dei chimici I’ (‘The Language of Chemists [I]’), xi; ‘La lin-

gua dei chimici II’ (‘The Language of Chemists [II]), xi; ‘Il libro dei dati strani’ (‘The Book of Strange Data’), xi; ‘La miglior merce’ (‘The Best Goods’), xi; ‘Le parole fossili’ (‘Fossil Words’), x; ‘Paura dei ragni’ (‘Fear of Spiders’), xi, 231; ‘Romanzi dettati dai grilli’ (‘Novels Dictated by Crickets’), xi; ‘Lo scoiattolo’ (‘The Squirrel’), x; ‘Segni sulla pietra’ (‘Signs on Stone’), x; ‘Tradurre ed essere tradotti’ (‘On Translating and Being Translated’), vii, viii, x, xiv, xv, 3, 10, 12, 129, 141, 178–80, 182–3, 188, 225, 226, 227, 228, 230 La chiave a stella (The Monkey’s Wrench), xi ‘Kafka col coltello nel cuore’ (‘Kafka with a Knife to the Heart’), 197–8 Lilít (Lilít and Other Stories), xi, xii; ‘Disfilassi,’ xii; ‘La fuggitiva’ (‘The

318 Index of Primo Levi’s works Fugitive’), x, xii; ‘Il re dei Giudei’ (‘The King of the Jews’), 129, 145, 169–76, 266n12, 274n62, 275n65 (see also ‘La zona grigia’ [‘The Grey Zone’]; Rumkowski, Chaim); ‘Una stella tranquilla’ (‘A Tranquil Star’), x Minerva Medica. See ‘Rapporto sulla organizzazione igienico-sanitaria del campo di concentramento per ebrei di Monowitz (AuschwitzAlta Silesia)’ ‘Una misteriosa sensibilità,’ 202–3 La notte dei Girondini, band, 142–3; cover, 141, 142; Levi’s preface to, 140, 142, 143; Levi’s translator’s notes for, 141; reissue of, 142–3. See also Adelphi publishing house; doubles; economies; grey zone; Presser, Jacob; Westerbork Il processo, cover, 193, 195; and inscription of Se questo è un uomo, 202; jacket, 193–4; Levi’s translator’s note for, 207, 283n45; lexical variety in, 199–200; reviews of, 191–2, 196, 279–80n24, 280n30, 280–1n31, 283n41; sentence and paragraph breaks in, 199; and shifted temporality, 200. See also Einaudi publishing house; juridical; Kafka, Franz; ‘Kafka col coltello nel cuore’; palinode ‘Rapporto sulla organizzazione igienico-sanitaria del campo di concentramento per ebrei di Monowitz (Auschwitz-Alta

Silesia)’ (Auschwitz Report), 41, 221–2, 247n44, 267n20 La ricerca delle radici (The Search for Roots), xiv–xv, 10, 228, 231–2, 236– 7n3, 250n66 Se non ora, quando?, xi, 283n44 Se questo è un uomo (Survival in Auschwitz), vii, viii, x, 3, 11, 12, 13, 24, 26–7, 28, 32–6, 41, 48–53, 60, 93–4, 106–22, 123, 195, 202, 213, 218, 221–2, 232, 241n11, 283–4n46, 287n70; ‘Al di qua del bene e del male’ (‘This Side of Good and Evil’), x, 128–9, 145, 146–53, 154, 156, 161, 170, 173, 206, 222, 287n65; ‘Esame di chimica’ (‘Chemistry Exam’), 214–15, 285n58; ‘Ottobre 1944’ (‘October 1944’), x, 273–4n56; publication history of, 42–3, 126, 264–5n6, 281n32; scholastic version of 1973, 112, 222, 288nn71–2; ‘Shemà,’ 43, 112, 166, 213, 255–6n31; ‘I sommersi e I salvati’ (‘The Drowned and the Saved’), 72, 92, 220; theatrical version, 64, 71, 92, 222, 288n73; translation of, into German (see translation). See also currency; Dante, ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ (‘The Canto of Ulysses’); dreams; economies; Lagerjargon; Lorenzo (Perrone); Pikolo Il sistema periodico (The Periodic Table), 283n44; ‘Argon’ (‘Argon’), xi, 235n5; ‘Carbonio’ (‘Carbon’), 281n32; ‘Cromo’ (‘Chrome’), 65–7; ‘Vanadio’ (‘Vanadium’) [Lothar Müller], 9, 215–18, 219, 221, 286– 7n64, 287n66

Index of Primo Levi’s works 319 I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned and the Saved), vii, 9, 18–20, 24–6, 27– 32, 57, 58, 68, 90, 127, 202, 224, 240n7, 254n27, 260–1n21, 261n23, 261–2n25, 281–2n37, 283n41, 284n49; ‘Comunicare’ (‘Communicating’), 239n5, 242n17, 272–3n49; ‘L’intellettuale ad Auschwitz’ (‘The Intellectual in Auschwitz’), 241n12, 250n65; ‘Lettere a tedeschi’ (‘Letters to Germans’), 228; ‘La memoria dell’offesa’ (‘The Memory of the Offence’), 9, 206 – and translation, 225, 228–31; ‘Vergogna’ (‘Shame’), 79, 88–9, 223, 241n11, 258n45, 288–9n77; ‘La zona grigia’ (‘The Grey Zone’), 58– 9, 126–7, 129, 172, 175, 204, 265n8, 274nn62–3, 283n45, 284n49; See also grey zone; guilt; Rumkowski, Chaim Storie naturali (Natural Histories), x, xi, xii, xiii, 202, 278n1; ‘Alcune applicazioni del Mimete’ (‘Some

Applications of the Mimer’), xi, xii, xiii; ‘Angelica farfalla’ (‘Angelic butterfly’), 286–7n64; ‘I mnemagoghi’ (‘The Mnemogogues’), xiii–xiv; ‘L’ordine a buon mercato’ (‘Order on the Cheap’), xi, xii, 235–6n8; ‘Pieno impego’ (‘Full Employment’), xi; ‘Trattamento di quiescenza’ (‘Retirement Fund’), xi, xiii–xiv; ‘Versamina’ (‘Versamina’), 286– 7n64; ‘Il Versificatore’ (‘The Versifier’), xi, xii La tregua (The Reawakening), 35–7, 88, 195, 283n45 Vizio di forma (Structural Defect), xi; ‘Ammutinamento’ (‘Mutiny’), xi; ‘Lavoro creativo’ (‘Creative Work’), xi–xii; ‘Nel parco’ (‘In the Park’), xii; ‘Psicofante’ (‘Psychophant’), xi; ‘Visto di lontano’ (‘Seen from Afar’), xi