by Primo Levi
January 9, 1946
1. Cf. Inferno III:57, Purgatory V:134, and T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: “I had not thought death had undone so many.” Thomson (225) calls this a love poem secretly addressed to Vanda Maestro, a fellow chemistry student at Turin University arrested with Levi at Amay, with whom he had fallen in love on their journey to Auschwitz. She was gassed there on October 30, 1944.
Song of the Crow I
“I’ve come from very far away
To bring bad news.
I crossed the mountain,
I flew through the low cloud,
I saw my belly mirrored in the pond.
I flew without rest,
A hundred miles without rest,
To find your window,
To find your ear,
To bring you the sad news
To take the joy from your sleep,
To spoil your bread and wine,
To sit in your heart each evening.”
So he sang obscenely dancing
Outside the window, on the snow.
When he stopped, he stared malevolent,
Etched a cross on the ground with his beak,
And spread his black wings.
January 9, 1946
Shemà1
You who live safe
In your heated houses
You who come home at night to find
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man,
Who toils in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for half a loaf
Who dies by a yes or a no.
Consider if this is a woman,
With no hair and no name
With no more strength to remember
With empty eyes and a womb as cold
As a frog in winter.
Ponder that this happened:
I consign these words to you.
Carve them into your hearts
At home or on the street,
Going to bed or rising:
Tell them to your children.
Or may your house fall down,
May illness make you helpless,
And your children turn their eyes from you.
January 10, 1946
1. Shemà means “Hear” in Hebrew. It is the first word of the basic prayer of Judaism, which affirms the unity of God. Some lines of this poem paraphrase it. Originally titled “Psalm,” this poem was written as the Nuremberg trials were getting underway. It eventually became the epigraph to If This Is a Man, and is the source of its title.
Get Up1
In the savage nights we dreamed
Dense and violent dreams
Dreamed with soul and body:
Of returning; eating; telling.
Until the dawn command
Resounded curt and low:
“Wstawa”;
And our hearts broke in our breasts.
Now we’re home again.
Our bellies are full,
We’ve finished telling.
It’s time. Soon we’ll hear again
The strange command:
“Wstawa.”
January 11, 1946
1. Wstawa means “get up” in Polish. This poem was eventually used as the epigraph for The Truce (1963).
Monday
What is sadder than a train?
That leaves on time,
That only makes one sound,
That only goes one way.
Nothing’s sadder than a train.
Unless it is a cart horse.
It’s locked between two poles.
It can’t even look askance.
Its whole life is plodding.
And a man? Isn’t a man sad?
If he lives alone for long
If he thinks time is over,
A man’s a sad thing, too.
January 17, 1946
Another Monday1
“I’ll tell you who’s going to hell:
American journalists,
Math teachers,
Senators and sacristans,
Accountants and pharmacists
(Most if not all);
Cats, financiers,
Executives,
Whoever gets up early
Without having to.
“And here’s who’s going to heaven:
Fishermen and soldiers,
Babies, naturally,
Horses, lovers,
Cooks and railway men,
Russians and inventors;
Wine tasters;
Charlatans and shoeshine boys,
People on the first train in the morning
Yawning into their scarves.”
So Minos snarls horrifically
From the megaphones of Porta Nuova
In the anguish of Monday morning
That one has to know to understand.
Avigliana, January 28, 1946
1. For the last line, cf. Vita Nuova, XXVI, “Tanto gentile . . .” In January 1946 Levi became assistant head of the research laboratory at DUCO-Montecatini, a subsidiary of Dupont situated in Avigliana, a few miles outside Turin, which manufactured paints and varnishes. Minos, with his giant tail, sits at the entrance to the second circle of hell in Dante’s Inferno.
After R. M. Rilke1
Lord, it is time: the wine’s fermenting now.
The time has come to have a house,
Or to go without one a long time.
The time has come to not be alone,
Or we’ll live alone for a long time:
We’ll spend the hours at our books,
Or writing letters to far away,
Long letters from our solitude;
And we’ll pace up and down the avenues,
Restless, while the leaves fall.
January 29, 1946
1. Cf. “Herbsttag,” from Das Buch der Bilder.
Ostjuden1
Our fathers on this earth,
Merchants of many gifts,
Shrewd wise men whose fertile progeny
God sowed across the world
As mad Ulysses sowed salt in the furrows:
I have found you everywhere,
As many as the sands of the sea,
You stiff-necked people,
Poor tenacious human seed.
February 7, 1946
1. In Nazi Germany, this was the name for Polish and Russian Jews, traditionally used by Gentiles and German Jews alike.
Sunset at Fòssoli1
I know what it means not to come back.
Through barbed wire I’ve seen
The sun go down and die.
I’ve felt the old poet’s words
Tear at my flesh:
“Suns can set and rise again:
For us, once our brief light is spent,
There’s one endless night to sleep.”
February 7, 1946
1. Cf. Catullus, V, 4. Fòssoli, near Carpi, was the site of the transit camp for prisoners bound for deportation.
February 11, 19461
I looked for you in the stars
When as a child I questioned them.
I asked the mountains for you
But all they gave me were a few moments
of solitude and short-lived peace.
Since you weren’t there, those long evenings
I contemplated the mad blasphemy
That the world was one of God’s mistakes,
And I was one of the world’s.
But when, in the face of death,
I shouted no with every fiber,
That I wasn’t through,
That I still had too much to do,
It was because you were there in front of me,
You with me beside you, as today,
A man a woman under the sun.
I came back because you were there.
February 11, 1946
1. Though addressed to his future wife, Lucia Morpurgo, the poem (Thomson, 228) is shadowed by th
e lyric “February 25, 1944,” for Vanda Maestro.
The Glacier
We stopped, and dared to look
Into the grieving green jaws below,
And the courage in our hearts went slack
As happens when one loses hope.
A sad power sleeps in him;
And when, in the silence of the moon,
At night he sometimes screams and roars,
It’s because, torpid giant dreamer that he is,
He’s trying to turn over but cannot
In his bed of stone.
Avigliana, March 15, 1946
The Witch1
A long time under the covers
She hugged the wax to her breast
Until it was soft and warm.
Then she got up, and gently, carefully,
With a loving patient hand
Molded the living effigy
Of the man who was in her heart.
When she was done, she threw oak
And grape and olive leaves on the fire
With his image, so it would melt.
She felt she was dying from the pain
Because the charm had worked,
And only then could she cry.
Avigliana, March 23, 1946
1. The poem is based on the tales of Felice Fantino, an associate of Levi at DUCO who loved to tell about the settimina, or wise woman, to be found in every Piedmontese village (Thomson, 220).
Avigliana
Woe unto him who wastes the full moon,
Which comes just once a month.
Damn this place,
Damn this stupid full moon
Shining placid and serene
Just as if you were with me.
. . . And there’s even a nightingale,
As in the books of the last century;
But I chased him away,
Far away, on the other side of the ditch:
Him singing while I’m alone
Is truly something unacceptable.
The fireflies, I’ve let them stay
(There were so many, all down the path):
Not because their name resembles yours,
But they are little things so mild and dear
That they make all thought evaporate.
And if we want to separate one day,
Or if one day we want to marry,
I hope that day will be in June,
And that fireflies will be everywhere
The way they are tonight, when you’re not here.
June 28, 1946
Wait
This is the time of lightning without thunder,
This is the time of unheard voices,
Restless sleep and pointless sleeplessness.
Comrade, let’s not forget the days
Of long easy silences,
Of friendly streets at night,
And calm contemplation,
Before the leaves fall,
Before the sky shuts down again,
Before the familiar clang of iron feet
Rouses us again
Outside our doors.
January 2, 1949
Epitaph1
You, traveler on the hill, one among many
Who leave marks on this no longer lonely snow,
Listen to me: pause for a few moments
Here where my comrades buried me without tears:
Where every summer, fed by me, the tender field grass
Grows thicker and greener than elsewhere.
It’s not many years that I’ve been lying here, Micca the partisan,
Killed by my comrades for my not insignificant crime,
And I hadn’t lived many more when the shadow took me.
Passerby, I don’t ask forgiveness of you or others,
No prayer or lament, no special observance.
I ask just one thing: that this peace of mine will last,
That heat and cold will alternate above me always,
And no new blood filtered through the soil
Seeps down with its deadly warmth
To wake to new pain these bones now turned to stone.
October 6, 1952
1. The poem recalls the two teenage partisans who were executed on the eve of Levi’s arrest in Amay (Angier, 598).
Song of the Crow II1
“What is the number of your days? I’ve counted them:
Few and brief, and each one heavy with cares;
With anguish about the inevitable night,
When nothing saves you from yourself;
With fear of the dawn that follows,
With waiting for me, who wait for you,
With me who (hopeless, hopeless to escape!)
Will chase you to the ends of the earth,
Riding your horse,
Darkening the bridge of your ship
With my little black shadow,
Sitting at the table where you sit,
Certain guest at every haven,
Sure companion of your every rest.
“Till what was prophesied has been accomplished,
Until your strength disintegrates,
Until you too end
Not with a bang but in silence,
The way the trees go bare in November,
The way one finds a clock stopped.”
August 22, 1953
1. Cf. T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men: “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.”
They Were a Hundred
They were a hundred men at arms.
When the sun rose in the sky,
They all took a step forward.
Hours passed, without a sound:
They didn’t bat an eye.
When the bells rang,
All of them took a step ahead.
So the day went, it was evening,
But when the first star blossomed in the sky,
All at once, they took a step ahead.
“Get back, get away, foul ghosts:
Back to your old night.”
But no one answered; so, instead,
They took a step ahead, all in a ring.
March 1, 1959
For Adolf Eichmann
The wind runs free across our plains,
The live sea beats eternal on our beaches.
Man feeds the earth, the earth gives him flowers and fruit:
He lives in torment and in joy, he hopes and fears, he bears sweet children.
. . . And you have come, our precious enemy,
Abandoned creature, man encircled by death.
What can you say now, before our congregation?
Will you swear by a god? What god?
Will you leap joyfully into the grave?
Or will you grieve the way the busy man grieves at last,
Whose life was short for his too long art,
For your sad, unfinished art,
For the thirteen million still alive?
O son of death, we do not wish you death.
May you live longer than anyone ever lived:
May you live sleepless for five million nights,
And every night may you be visited by the suffering of everyone who saw
The door that closed off the way back click shut,
The dark around him grow, the air thicken with death.
July 20, 1960
The Last Epiphany1
Your land was closest to my heart:
So I sent you message after message.
I came down among you in strange and different guises,
But you didn’t recognize me in any of them.
I rang your bell at night, a pale Jew fleeing,
Barefoot, in rags, hunted like a wild animal:
You called the cops, you fingered me to the spies,
And said in your heart: “So be it. It is God’s will.”
I came to you as a mad old crone,
Trembling, my throat full of a silent cry.
You talked of blood, of the generatio
ns to come,
But my ashes were all that came out your door.
Little orphan boy of the Polish plain
I lay at your feet, begging bread.
But you were afraid of some future vendetta of mine,
And turned your eyes away, and gave me death.
And I came as a prisoner, as a slave in chains,
To be sold, to be whipped.
You turned your back on the livid slave in rags.
Now I come as a judge. Do you recognize me now?
November 20, 1960
1. Translation from the “Dies Irae” cycle of Werner Bergengrün.
Arrival1
Happy the man who’s come to port,
Who leaves behind him seas and storms,
Whose dreams are dead or never born;
Who sits and drinks by the fire
At the beer hall in Bremen, and is at peace.
Happy the man like a flame gone out,
Happy the man like estuary sand,
Who has laid down his burden and wiped his brow
And rests by the side of the road.
He doesn’t fear or hope or wait,
But stares intently at the setting sun.
September 10, 1964
1. Cf. H. Heine, Buch der Lieder, “Die Nordsee,” II, 9: “Glücklich der Mann, der den Hafen erreicht hat . . .”
Lilith1
Lilith our second relation
Created by God with the same clay
That was used for Adam.
Lilith lives amid the undertow,
But she comes out with the new moon
And restless flies across the snowy nights
Undecided between earth and sky.
She whips and whirls,
Brushes suddenly against the windows
Where newborns sleep.
She’s searching for them, searching to destroy them:
Which is why you’ll hang the medal
With the three words over their beds.