by Primo Levi
Many years have passed: the book has had many vicissitudes, and it has positioned itself, oddly, like an artificial memory, but also like a defensive barrier, between my very ordinary present and the savage past of Auschwitz. I say this with hesitation, because I wouldn’t want to seem cynical: when I remember the Lager today, I no longer feel a violent or painful emotion. On the contrary: the much longer and more complex experience of a writer and witness has been superimposed upon the brief and tragic experience of the deportee, and the sum is distinctly positive; overall, that past has made me richer and more confident. A friend of mine, deported as a young woman to the women’s Lager at Ravensbrück, says that the camp was her university. I think I could say the same—that, by experiencing and then writing about and reflecting on those events, I have learned many things about men and the world.
I should, however, hasten to make clear that this positive outcome was a good fortune that only a very few had: of the Italian deportees, for example, only about 5 percent returned, and among these many had lost their family, their friends, their possessions, health, equilibrium, youth. The fact that I survived, and returned unharmed, in my view is due principally to luck. Preexisting factors played only a small role, such as my training in mountain life, and my profession as a chemist, which allowed me some privileges in the last months of prison. Maybe an unfailing interest in the human spirit also helped me, and the will not only to survive (which was common to many) but to survive for the precise purpose of recounting the things we had witnessed and had endured. And perhaps, finally, what also counted was the will, which I tenaciously preserved, to always recognize, even in the darkest days, in my companions and myself, men and not things, and thus to avoid that total humiliation and demoralization that led many to spiritual shipwreck.
November 1976
1. Giacomo Matteotti (1885–1924) was a Socialist member of the Italian Parliament. He was kidnapped and murdered after denouncing the fraud and violence perpetrated by the Fascists during the elections of 1924. It soon came out that the Fascists were responsible for the crime, but Mussolini nevertheless was able to inaugurate his dictatorship several months later.
Translator’s Afterword
Primo Levi had a passion for languages, as well as for words. It emerges very clearly in the text of If This Is a Man, in the repeated references to the Babel of tongues in Auschwitz, in the repetition of commands and words in the camp, in the recognition of the inadequacy of language itself to express “this offense, the demolition of a man.” Describing the Carbide Tower, he gives the word for “brick” in eight languages, and says, “They were cemented by hate, hate and discord, like the Tower of Babel; and that is what we call it: Babelturm, Bobelturm.”
Levi, having established his reputation as a writer, in his later works often explored the potential of changes and permutations in language and dialect. Understandably, he turned primarily to Piedmont, his home region. In the story of Argon, the first element of The Periodic Table (1975), he recalled, with a certain nostalgia, the distortion of Hebrew words in the language of Piedmontese Jewish families. The experiences and travels to foreign parts recounted by Faussone, the rigger hero of The Wrench (1978), provided the appropriate setting in which to render the impure syntax of Italian translated from Piedmontese dialect: “Nowadays, in factories here in Turin, a different Italian-Piedmontese has emerged, child of a peasant culture, where new expressions, new words, new metaphors have replaced the earlier vocabulary.” When he visited New York in 1985, he was attracted by the “rudimentary hybrid” language of Italian immigrants—fruttistoro for “fruit store” (or greengrocer), tracca for “truck,” a house “senza stima” (without heating, or steam). In his second book, The Truce (1963), in which he described the long return journey from Auschwitz (via Poland and Russia), he tried to converse in Yiddish and was ironically amused when he was laughed at by young Jewish Russian girls: “You don’t speak Yiddish, so you aren’t Jews!” In an interview twenty years later, he explained: “I travel linguistically. The languages I know (I speak them badly, but read them fluently) are French, English, German, and I would add Piedmontese (I have a passion for linguistics, albeit unreciprocated, which consists of an amateurish but continuous study of these languages and dialects). They, too, serve me in my writing. One cannot know one’s own language or use Italian correctly if one doesn’t know other languages: it is a concrete, even a tangible experience, above all when one translates.”
Already at Auschwitz, but above all in the many months he spent at Katowice and elsewhere in Poland, Levi discovered what he called the “archipelago” of the Ashkenazi communities destroyed by the Nazis. From Lithuania and Poland to Moldavia and Ukraine, these communities all spoke Yiddish; only Jewish immigrants in the United States continued to speak it, but, as Levi observed, it endured as a written language in the works of novelists such as the Nobel Prize–winning Isaac Bashevis Singer. The intense religious and social life of the Ashkenazi Jews was “a cultural universe that was unknown in Italy, and today has disappeared.” Levi was so struck by this world that, soon after his return to Turin, in February 1946, he wrote a poem entitled “Ostjuden.” For Levi “the slaughter and dispersion of Judaism in Eastern Europe has been of irreparable damage to all humanity.” He was certainly responsible for proposing the Congress on Judaism in Eastern Europe, which took place in Turin in February 1984, and which he described as the largest meeting on the theme held in Italy, and perhaps anywhere in Europe, since the Second World War. Throughout his life, Levi read, reflected, and wrote about the cultural world of the Ashkenazi; and he dedicated to them his only novel, If Not Now, When? (1982), the story of a Russian-Polish Jewish resistance group that vindicated the ability of the Jews to defend themselves militarily. In a conversation with the novelist Philip Roth, Levi explained that he had wanted to counter the commonplace that Jews were meek and had been humiliated by centuries of persecution: “I also nurtured the ambition of becoming the first Italian writer to describe the Yiddish world.”
Levi was not religious, as he repeatedly explained: “I constructed a Jewish culture not because my parents were Jewish, but much later, after the war, when I found that I had come to possess a supplementary culture, and I tried to develop it. But this has never been the case of religion. It is as if my religious sensibility had been amputated; I never had it.” It is evident that Levi was fascinated by the practices based on the traditions that characterized the daily life of Ashkenazi Jews, from the “onerous and obsessive” religious teaching of children, based on the interpretation of the Talmud, to eating kosher according to the precepts of the rabbis that Levi had found in a book by a Kraków rabbi, Shulkhàn arùkh (The Table for a Banquet). But only when he was in Poland did he begin to feel a need to learn Yiddish, “a fascinating language for linguists (and not just for them) that is intrinsically a multi-language . . . the language of a wandering people.”
The first edition of Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man) was published in 1947 by a small anti-Fascist publisher in Levi’s native city, Turin. It did not circulate widely, except in the cultural circles there, probably because of the urgency of reconstructing the city, which had suffered heavy Allied bombings during the war. When I arrived in Turin, in 1956, to start my doctoral research on Piedmontese history, the city was still only of middling size, with half a million inhabitants. It was a very hospitable place, especially to a young Englishman from Oxford, and I rapidly made friends. By then, I had met my future wife, Anna Debenedetti, and her family, including her uncle, Leonardo De Benedetti, who had returned from Auschwitz with Levi, and who lived with Anna’s family for some years. Levi brought Leonardo the first drafts of what would be the chapters of Se questo è un uomo in the months that he wrote them. Anna remembers reading them on thin, closely typed paper.
Levi wrote with a sense of urgency, “without hesitations and without order,” immediately after his return to Turin, in December 1945, and continuing until January 1947. Many years la
ter he recalled the driving need to recount the experience while he was still in Auschwitz, in the Chemical Kommando, to the point where he took the risk of jotting down notes with pencil and paper (which he then destroyed), “an absurd and futile audacity.” The hope of survival was identified with a different, more precise hope: “We did not hope to live and recount, but to live in order to recount.” He recalled that he had become “a tireless, overbearing, maniacal narrator,” repeating his story dozens of times to friends, enemies, and strangers. If This Is a Man was written both as a personal “act of liberation” and as a testimonial, to bear witness. As he later explained in The Truce, he had an overwhelming need to recount “an avalanche of urgent things to tell the civilized world, my own but belonging to everyone, things of blood, things that, it seemed to me, would shake every conscience to its foundations.” Many years afterward, he explained with characteristic irony that, in the immediacy of his survival, he felt like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner (a literary reference dear to Levi), “who grabs the wedding guest on the way to the wedding, to inflict on him his story of evil.” The need to recount the atrocity of Auschwitz remained with him throughout his life: “I realized that the only way to save myself was to describe it. Writing was an act of liberation, if I had not written the book probably I would have remained a damned soul.”
Levi, working, and living, from Monday to Saturday at a factory outside Turin, wrote the chapters of If This Is a Man on the train as he traveled to work, through the lunch break, in the factory itself despite the din of the machines, and during the night; then he typed the text. He later described how he wrote The Truce in the evenings, after a day’s work: “I needed on average a full hour to change my skin, that is, to become a writer in place of a chemist.” I have little doubt that he had in mind Machiavelli’s description of his change of clothes before entering his study.
Even after the publication of If This Is a Man, Levi never lost the compulsion to testify. In addition to his writings, he tirelessly visited schools to talk about Auschwitz, and in 1972 he suggested to his Italian publisher a school edition of If This Is a Man, for which he wrote a preface and notes, and which was hugely successful; he was also ready to give interviews, especially in his later years. It was an obligation, he explained, to “assume the calm, sober language of the witness.” In The Periodic Table, the book that—published thirty years after If This Is a Man—brought him an international reputation, he reflected that in the camp “I must have developed a strange callousness, if I was then not only to survive but also to think, to register the world around me.” On various occasions, in later years, he ascribed the clarity and concision of his language to the “mental habits” of his training as a chemist: “My model was that of the weekly reports, a normal practice in factories: they must be concise, precise, and written in a language accessible to all levels of the firm’s hierarchy.” He attributed to that model his remarkable capacity to describe persons, places, and “events” as if they were “samples,” “specimens in sealed packages, to be identified, analyzed, and weighed.” But in a broader sense, already in If This Is a Man, and subsequently in all his books, Levi’s observations expressed an ethnological sensibility toward his immediate surroundings, from the pavements of Turin to the joggers in New York’s Central Park. It’s not surprising that, later, he translated into Italian two books by Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Initially the chapters that Levi wrote on his return to Turin were not conceived as a book; some were published in a provincial political weekly. In 1958, the preeminent Italian publisher Giulio Einaudi contracted to republish the original 1947 edition of If This Is a Man, and that became the standard edition. Levi made substantial additions and then continued to introduce small changes and modifications to the text, even at the proof stage and, subsequently, in later editions. I have become particularly aware of this through the occasional discrepancies between my original translation of If This Is a Man and the Italian text in Levi’s complete works (Opere I), edited by Marco Belpoliti and published by Einaudi in 1997. We now know that this was intrinsic to Levi’s mode of writing, with minor changes not only in the successive editions of his first book but in many of the short stories subsequently collected in books, and (perhaps most notably) in his final book, The Drowned and the Saved.
I read the first edition of Se questo è un uomo soon after I came to Turin, and was convinced, no doubt influenced by the fact that I am Jewish, that the book needed to circulate in English. In the arrogant innocence of my youth, I think I had already decided that I would translate the book myself; certainly I did not consider how to find a publisher. My impression was (and still is) that, until well after the Eichmann trial in 1961, knowledge of the Nazi extermination camps was not widespread in England, except among Jews. The term “Holocaust,” which has become generalized since the late 1970s, is—as Levi pointed out—improper, since it is derived from the Greek word for “sacrifice.” “‘Holocaust’ means literally ‘wholly burnt’ and refers to the sacrifice of animals to the gods. When it first appeared it irritated me considerably.” The Hebrew word Shoah entered into general usage only after Levi’s death, in 1987.
The Debenedetti family introduced me to Primo, who was obviously delighted at the prospect of an English translation. He took me at my word, without any knowledge of my capacities as a translator (nor for that matter did I know anything about them). He told me early on that he had not been consulted about the French translation and that he was very dissatisfied with it. Perhaps this underlay his proposal that we work together closely. It was fundamental for Levi that his descriptions of and ethical reflections on the Nazi extermination camps not lose their efficacy in translation. Compared with that of most authors, his interest in the translation of his books was exceptional. Years later, when Se questo è un uomo had been translated into a multitude of languages, he told me that he had bought a grammar and dictionary in Romanian so as to be able to read the translation. Most important of all was the translation into German, which was published very soon after my English translation. Levi insisted on a clause in the contract saying that the translator send him each chapter as soon as it was ready. The translation had to be “intimately faithful,” for the obvious reason that it was a book to be read by Germans about their recent past. “Perhaps it is my presumption,” he wrote to the translator (in a letter published subsequently as the preface to the German edition), that “I, prisoner number 174517, am able to speak to the Germans through you, to remind them of what they did, and to say to them: ‘I am alive, and I would like to understand you so that I can judge you.’”
We arranged to meet regularly in the evenings in his flat, just around the corner from the Debenedetti home. His timetable was fashioned by his employment as an industrial chemist in a factory at Settimo, just outside Turin. Every Tuesday and Thursday evening for the best part of a year, I went to Levi’s apartment with the latest pages of my translation. The commitment to our regular meetings worked effectively in obliging me not to interrupt my rhythm of translation. In reality, I never felt it as a burden, least of all in the sense of the splendid description by the Italian writer Luciano Bianciardi (La vita agra; It’s a Hard Life) of the obligation to translate a daily quota of pages in order to earn a living. In different circumstances (not as a source of income), this was something I was later to experience with other translations in which I found myself engaged professionally as a historian.
Initially when I brought my translated pages to Primo, we concentrated almost exclusively on them. The unusual circumstances of our arrangement, and the mutual pleasure that we increasingly derived from it, created for us a particular moment of insulated detachment from the normality of routine. I cannot remember the exact year, but (on the basis of the textual differences) it must have coincided with the Einaudi edition in 1958.
Primo and I always spoke in Italian. His spoken English was then still fairly poor; I imagine he became fluent as he traveled increasingly as an industrial che
mist. He had read exceptionally widely in English, as well as in French, still normal in Turin in those years, and, after his return from Auschwitz, in German. He put to good use his remarkable memory when he was not fully convinced that I had adequately rendered the precise weight of his wording. He had astonishing recall and I was regularly amazed at the range and aptness of the English phrases that he quoted to me as providing possible alternatives for what he regarded as too flat a translation. Readers of his works will not be surprised that Melville and Conrad, as well as Coleridge, were present; far more unusually—which is why I still remember it—was a phrase from the 1611 Authorized Version of the Bible. Even though for the most part I rejected his suggestions, essentially as not sounding right, or not reading well in the specific context, they served the purpose of making me search for what would be right.
Perhaps at this point it is opportune to recall that half a century ago the complexities, ambiguities, and compromises that have become inherent in the expression of one culture in the language of another were not yet discussed; even less had the techniques of translation acquired the status of a specialized discipline. Professional translators were of course present in Italy, as in England and the United States, but the quality of their production was extremely variable. At the most humdrum level, the “false friends” trap of translation was probably more common than today (I remember my mother-in-law’s delight in reading in an Italian translation that “oysters [ostriche, in Italian] bury their head in the sand”); at the other extreme, some distinguished Italian writers—such as Cesare Pavese in his translation of Moby-Dick—took inventive liberties in a stylish and effective rendering of the original text. I had never received literary training, primarily because of the excessive specialization in English grammar schools, particularly marked during what were the years of transition to a new national system of examination. I was, and remain, impressed by the breadth and quality of the education provided by the Italian liceo (as by the French lycée), which leaves a lifelong cultural imprint, visible to the present day in the reading habits and musical interests of Italian bourgeois families. I had always read reasonably widely, particularly the great Western and Russian novelists and prose writers, but never poetry. I note, somewhat to my embarrassment, that the only cut pages in my 1951 edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy are those of the Canto of Ulysses, which I read with new understanding after a discussion with Primo. When, at the end of our collaboration, I explained to him that I did not feel capable of translating his powerful and essential introductory poem, he reassured me and translated it himself.