by Clive James
One of Levi’s several triumphs as a moralist – for once, the word can be used with unmixed approval – is that he has analysed these deep and complicated feelings of inexpungible shame without lapsing into the relativism that would make everyone guilty. If everyone was guilty, then everyone was innocent, and Levi is very certain that his persecutors were not innocent. The Nazis were as guilty as the Hell they built. The good citizens who decided not to know were less guilty but still guilty. There were many degrees of guilt among those who were not doing the suffering. Some of them were as innocent as you can be while still being party to a crime. But parties to a crime they all were. The victims of the crime had nothing at all in common with those who planned it or went along with it. The victims who survived, and who were ashamed because they did, were not responsible for their shame, because they were driven to it. Even if they did reprehensible things – in the area of behaviour that Levi calls the Grey Zone – they could reasonably contend that they would never have contemplated such conduct in normal circumstances, from which they had been displaced through no fault of their own.
Levi has no harsh words even for those most terribly contaminated of survivors, the Sonderkommando veterans. The few still alive decline to speak. Levi believes that the right to silence of these men, who chose to live at the price of co-operating with the killers, should be respected. He is able to imagine – able, momentarily, to make us imagine – that the chance of postponing one’s own death was hard to turn down, even at the cost of having to attend closely upon the unspeakable deaths of countless others. Levi manages to sympathize even with the Kapos, not all of whom were sadists, and all of whom wanted to live. Levi has no sympathy for the persecutors, but he is ready to understand them, as long as he is not asked to exonerate them. His patience runs out only when it comes to those who parade their compassion without realizing that they are trampling on the memory of the innocent dead. As a writer, Levi always keeps his anger in check, the better to distribute its intensity, but occasionally you sense that he is on the verge of an outburst. One such moment is when he reproves the film director Liliana Cavani, who has offered the opinion ‘We are all victims or murderers, and we accept these roles voluntarily.’ Faced with this brand of self-indulgent vaporizing, Levi expresses just enough contempt to give us an inkling of what his fury would have been like if he had ever let rip. To confuse the murderers with their victims, he says, ‘is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation or a sinister sign of complicity; above all, it is precious service rendered (intentionally or not) to the negators of truth.’
Levi might have written like that all the time if he had wished. But his sense of proportion never let him down. The offence was too great for individual anger to be appropriate. Emerging from his discussion of the Grey Zone of behaviour, in which the survivors, pushed to the edge of the pit, were excusably reduced to base actions that they would not have dreamed of in real life, he goes on to discuss the inexcusably base actions of those engineers of cruelty who made sure that even the millions of victims murdered immediately on arrival would have an education in despair before they died. In a chapter called ‘Useless Violence’, Levi reminds us that we should not set too much store by the idea that the Nazi extermination programme was, within its demented limits, carried out rationally. Much of the cruelty had no rational explanation whatsoever. No matter how long it took the train to reach the camp, the boxcars were never provided with so much as a bucket. It wasn’t that the SS were saving themselves trouble: since the boxcars had to be sent back in reasonable shape to be used again, it would actually have been less trouble to provide them with some sort of facility, however crude. There was no reason not to do so except to cause agony. Old people who were already dying in their homes were thrown onto the trains lest they miss out on the death the Nazis had decided was due them, the death with humiliation as a prelude.
You would expect Levi’s voice to crack when he writes of such things, but instead it grows calmer. He doesn’t profess to fully comprehend what went on in the minds of people who could relish doing such things to their fellow human beings. His tone of voice embodies his reticence. He is not reticent, however, about any commentator who does profess to fully understand, without having understood the most elementary facts of the matter. After the protracted and uncertain journey recorded in ‘The Reawakening’, Levi at last returned to Italy, and there was told that his survival must surely have been the work of Providence: fate had preserved him, a friend said, so that he might testify. In this book Levi characterizes that idea as ‘monstrous’: a big word for him – almost as big as any word he ever uses about the events themselves.
He is firm on the point, but this firmness is only a subdued echo of how he made the same point at the end of the ‘October 1944’ chapter of Survival in Auschwitz, where the prisoner Kuhn, after the terrifying process of selection for the gas chambers has once again passed him by, loudly and personally thanks God. In the earlier book Levi was scornful of Kuhn’s selfishness in believing that the Providence that had ignored so many should be concerned to preserve him. (‘If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.’) In this book, the same argument is put no less decisively, but more in sorrow than in anger, as if such folly were ineradicable, a part of being human. Though Levi was never a fatalist, at the end of his life he seems to have been readier to accept that human beings are frail and would prefer to misunderstand these things if given the opportunity. Wonderfully, however, he remained determined not to give them the opportunity. At the very time when he feared that the memory and its meaning might slip from the collective human intelligence and go back into the historic past that we only pretend concerns us, Levi’s trust in human reason was at its most profound. Transparent even in its passion, level-headed at the rim of the abyss, the style of his last book is an act of faith.
From the translation, however, you can’t always tell. Raymond Rosenthal has mainly done a workmanlike job where something more accomplished was called for, and sometimes he is not even workmanlike. The Drowned and the Saved ranks with Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope as a testament of the age, but Nadezhda Mandelstam’s translator was Max Hayward, whose English was on a par with her Russian. One doesn’t want to berate Mr Rosenthal, who has toiled hard, but one might be forgiven for wishing that his editors had noticed when he needed help. If they weren’t aware that a paragraph by Levi always flows smoothly as a single rhythmic unit, they should at least have guessed that a sentence by Levi is never nonsense – and when it comes down to detail the translation all too often obscures what Levi took pains to make clear, dulls the impact of his most precisely calculated effects, and puts chaos back into the order he achieved at such cost.
There doesn’t seem to have been much editorial control at all. Punctuation is arbitrary and spellings have been left unchecked. In the original Italian text, Levi left a handful of German words – part of the uniquely ugly vocabulary of Naziism – untranslated, so that they would stand out with suitable incongruity. In this Englished version they are treated the same way, but some of them are misspelled, which might mean either that Mr Rosenthal does not read German or that he does not read proofs, but certainly means that the editors were careless. A Geheimnistrager is a bearer of secrets. If Geheimnisfräger means anything, it would mean an asker of secrets, which is the opposite of what Levi intended. This kind of literal misprint can happen to anyone at any time and is especially likely to be introduced at the last moment while other errors are being corrected, but another piece of weird German seems to have originated with the translator himself. ‘There is an unwritten but iron law, Zurüchschlagen: answering blows with blows is an intolerable transgression that can only occur to the mind of a “newcomer”, and anyone who commits it must be made an example.’ The word should be zurückschlagen, with a lower case ‘z’ because it is not a noun, and a ‘k’ instead of the first ‘h’. Worse, and probably because the word has not been understood, the first comma and the colon have
been transposed, thereby neatly reversing the sense. What Levi is saying is that it was against the law to strike back. The English text says that this law was called: to strike back. An important point has been rendered incomprehensible.
The translator’s Italian is good enough to make sure that he usually doesn’t, when construing from that language, get things backward, but he can get them sidewise with daunting ease, and on several occasions he puts far too much trust in his ear. To render promiscuità as ‘promiscuity’, as he does twice, is, in the context, a howler. Levi didn’t mean that people forced to live in a ghetto were tormented by promiscuity. He meant that they were tormented by propinquity. The unintentional suggestion that they were worn out by indiscriminate lovemaking is, in the circumstances, a bad joke. Similarly, the Italian word evidentemente, when it means ‘obviously’, can’t be translated as ‘evidently’, which always implies an element of doubt; that is, means virtually the opposite. ‘Also in the certainly much vaster field of the victim one observes a drifting of memory, but here, evidently, fraud is not involved.’ Thus a point about which Levi is morally certain is made tentative. Again, the word comportamenti is good plain Italian, but ‘behaviours’ is sociologese: the translator has left room for the reader to suspect that Levi was prone to jargon, when in fact he eschewed it rigorously, out of moral conviction.
Sometimes neglect attains the level of neologism. When Levi says that the daily life of the Third Reich was profoundly compenetrato by the Lager system, the word compenetrato is hard to translate; ‘penetrated’ isn’t comprehensive enough, but you certainly can’t render it as ‘compentrated’, which looks like a misprint anyway and, even if it had an ‘e’ between the ‘n’ and the ‘t’, would still send you straight to the dictionary – and it would have to be a big one. Such a verbal grotesquerie, however, at least has the merit of being easy to spot. More insidious are transpositions of meaning which sound plausible. There are sentences that have, under a troubled surface, an even more troubled depth. ‘But it is doubtless that this torment of body and spirit, mythical and Dantesque, was excogitated to prevent the formation of self-defence and active resistance nuclei: the Lager SS were obtuse brutes, not subtle demons.’ Here nuclei di autodifesa o di resistenza attiva, which could have been translated in the same word order and sounded like good English, has been pointlessly inverted to sound like sociologese; and escogitato has been taken straight when it needed, for naturalness, to be turned into some simpler word, such as ‘planned’ or ‘devised’. But you could make these repairs and still leave the deeper damage undisturbed. The word ‘doubtless’ should be ‘doubtful’. Retroactively this becomes clear. The rest of the paragraph eventually tells you that its first sentence is nonsensical. There is the satisfaction of solving a brainteaser. It is an inappropriate pleasure; Levi was not writing Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Having actually been through the looking-glass into the realm of perverted logic, he came back with an urgent commitment to lucidity. Watching his helpers frustrate him in this aim is not pleasant.
Most of these glitches are at the level of vocabulary and grammar. Another inadequacy, though it matters less for the purpose of initial comprehension, has the eventual effect of denying us knowledge of Levi’s intimacy with the literary tradition to which he contributed and by which he was sustained. As his book of essays Other People’s Trades explicitly reveals, Levi was cultivated in the literatures of several languages. But the literature of his own language had cultivated him. He was compenetrato with the poetry and prose of his national heritage. In this book he acknowledges quotations from Manzoni and Leopardi, but, like most Italian writers, he assumes that allusions to Dante need not be flagged. It was foolishly confident of the editors of this English edition to assume the same thing.
Levi often echoes Dante. All too frequently, the translator fails to alert us that this is happening. To leave the allusions unexplained is to weaken the central meaning, because they are always functional. A typical instance is in the passage about those Nazis who for ideological reasons had ended up among the prisoners: ‘They were disliked by everyone.’ The word spiacenti, which would not occur in everyday language, is a reference to ‘Inferno’ III, 63, where it describes those who have been rejected by both God and God’s enemies. By the translator’s simply rendering what is said, without explaining what is meant, a powerful use of literary allusion has been turned into patty-cake. Still, the sense survives, and there are worse faults in a translator than to be occasionally clueless. It is worse to be careless. Levi may have literally said that he was ‘intimately satisfied by the symbolic, incomplete, tendentious, sacred representation in Nuremberg’, but sacra rappresentazione means a medieval morality play and can’t be used here in its literal form without making Levi sound mystical at the very moment when he is making a point of sounding hard-headed.
In Italy, the school editions of Levi’s books are thoroughly annotated – in several cases, by Levi himself. It would have been better if his English-language publishers had waited for the school editions to come out and then had them translated, notes and all. Unfortunately, the world of publishing has its own momentum. One can’t complain about there having been so much eagerness to get Levi’s books translated, but a side-effect of the haste has been that his achievement, so coherent in his own language, looks fragmented in ours. He has had several translators, of varying competence. His carefully chosen titles have sometimes been mangled in translation – especially by his publishers in the United States, who have on the whole been less sensitive than his publishers in Britain to his delicate touch. Se Questo
È un Uomo, called If This Is a Man in Britain, in the current United
States edition is called Survival in Auschwitz – a journalistic come-on that no doubt has its merits as an attention-getter but can’t be said to prepare the way for a narrative that dedicates itself to avoiding stock responses. In the UK, the title of La Tregua is translated as The Truce, which is accurate, but in the United States it appears as The Reawakening, which is inaccurate, because the whole point of the book is that Levi’s long voyage home was merely a pause between two periods of struggle – one to survive physically and the other to cope mentally. As for his important novel La Chiave a Stella, it can only be regretted that his publishers across the Atlantic tried so hard to help him. A chiave a stella is indeed a kind of wrench, but it is not a monkey wrench. ‘The Monkey Wrench’, however, would not have been as awkward a title as the one that the book was given, The Monkey’s Wrench. To translate ‘La Chiave a Stella’ literally as ‘The Star-Shaped Key’ might have been too poetic for Levi – who is always too truly poetic to be enigmatic – but a momentary puzzle would have been better than a lasting blur. Levi’s exactitude, after all, is not incidental to him. It’s him.
Books have their fortunes. If the transmission of Levi’s body of work into our language might have gone better, it could also have gone worse. Clearly, all concerned tried their best. It is impossible to imagine that anyone involved – whether translator, editor, designer, or executive – thought lightly of the task. Presumably, Levi’s approval was sought and obtained for those clumsy titles: he could read English, and in the last years of his life he attended evening classes, so that he might learn to speak it more fluently. He was vitally interested in guarding the safe passage of his books to a wider world. Yet the results of the transference – in our language, at any rate – are less than wholly satisfactory. Thus we are given yet further evidence that the declension that Levi said he most feared – the way the truth ‘slides fatally toward simplification and stereotype, a trend against which I would like here to erect a dike’ – is very hard to stem.
How worried should we be about this tendency? Obviously, we should be very worried. But in what way should we be worried? The answer to that, I think, is not so readily forthcoming. Most of us choose our friends according to whether or not they understand these matters – or, at any rate, we decline to keep any friends who don’t. We
are already worried, and might even protest, if pushed to it, that we are worried enough – that if we were any more worried we would get nothing done, and civilization would collapse anyway. What we are really worried about is all those people who aren’t worried, especially the young. We assume, along with Santayana, that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Anything written or filmed about the Holocaust – any essay, play, novel, film documentary, or television drama, from this brilliant book by Levi all the way down to the poor, stumbling, and execrated miniseries Holocaust itself – is informed by that assumption. Critical reaction to any such treatment of the Holocaust is governed by that same assumption. When it is argued that a rendition of the experience must be faithful to the experience, and that the effectiveness of the rendition will be proportionate to the fidelity, the argument is based on that same assumption. An assumption, however, is all it is. Hardbitten on the face of it, on closer examination it looks like wishful thinking.
It is undoubtedly true that some people who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But some people who can’t remember the past aren’t. More disturbingly, many of those who can remember the past are condemned to repeat it anyway. Plenty of people who remembered the past were sent to die in the extermination camps. Their knowledge availed them nothing, because events were out of their control. One of the unfortunate side-effects of studying German culture up to 1933, and the even richer Austrian culture up to 1938, is the depression induced by the gradual discovery of just how cultivated the two main German-speaking countries were. It didn’t help a bit. The idea that the widespread study of history among its intellectual elite will make a nation-state behave better is a pious wish. Whether in the household or in the school playground, ethics are transmitted at a far more basic level than that of learning, which must be pursued for its own sake: learning is not utilitarian, even when – especially when – we most fervently want it to be.