by Primo Levi
Impetuous skittish stag
I ran through woods that are ashes today, and gloried in my strength.
I was drunk cicada, astute horrendous tarantula,
And salamander and scorpion and unicorn and asp.
I suffered the whip
And heat and cold and the desperation of the yoke,
The donkey’s silent vertigo at the millstone.
I was a girl, hesitant in the dance;
Geometer, I sought the secret of the circle
And the dubious ways of clouds and winds:
I knew tears and laughter and many loves.
Don’t deride me, then, men of Agrigento,
If this old body is engraved with strange signs.
November 12, 1980
Voices1
Voices still forever, or since yesterday, or just now quieted;
If you cock your ear you can still catch their echo.
Hoarse voices of those who can speak no longer,
Voices that speak and no longer say a thing,
Voices that believe they’re saying something,
Voices that speak and are not understood:
Choruses and cymbals to smuggle
A meaning into the message with no meaning,
Pure babble that pretends
That silence isn’t silence.
À vous parle, compaings de galle:
I speak for you, raucous companions
Drunk like me on words:
Words-as-swords and words-as-poison
Key and picklock words,
Words of salt, mask and nepenthe.
The place we’re going to is quiet
Or deaf. The limbo of the lonely and the deaf.
You’ll have to run the last lap deaf,
You’ll have to run the last lap on your own.
February 10, 1981
1. Cf. F. Villon, Le Testament, l. 1720.
Unfinished Business
Sir, please accept my resignation
As of next month,
And, if it seems right, plan on replacing me.
I’m leaving much unfinished work,
Whether out of laziness or actual problems.
I was supposed to tell someone something,
But I no longer know what and to whom: I’ve forgotten.
I was also supposed to donate something—
A wise word, a gift, a kiss;
I put it off from one day to the next. I’m sorry.
I’ll do it in the short time that remains.
I’m afraid I’ve neglected important clients.
I was meant to visit
Distant cities, islands, desert lands;
You’ll have to cut them from the program
Or entrust them to my successor.
I was supposed to plant trees and I didn’t;
To build myself a house,
Maybe not beautiful, but based on plans.
Mainly, I had in mind
A marvelous book, kind sir,
Which would have revealed many secrets,
Alleviated pains and fears,
Eased doubts, given many
The gift of tears and laughter.
You’ll find its outline in my drawer,
Down below, with the unfinished business;
I didn’t have the time to write it out, which is a shame,
It would have been a fundamental work.
April 19, 1981
Partigia1
Where are you, partisans of all the valleys,
Tarzan, Curly, Sparrow Hawk, Arrow, Ulysses?
Many sleep in honored graves,
Those still living are white haired
And tell their grandchildren
How, in that long-gone time of certainties,
They broke the Germans’ siege
There where the chairlift rises.
Some speculate in property,
Others nibble at their government pensions
Or grow wrinkled at town meetings.
Rise and stand, old men: for us there is no discharge.
Let’s meet again. Let’s go back into the mountains,
Slow, out of breath, stiff-kneed,
With many winters in our curving spines.
The steep trail will be difficult for us,
The cot, the bread.
We’ll stare without knowing each other,
Mistrustful, argumentative, and dour.
Just as then, we’ll be watching out
So the enemy won’t surprise us at dawn.
What enemy? Everyone’s everyone’s enemy,
Everyone’s riven by his own frontier,
The right hand the enemy of the left.
Rise and stand, old men, your own worst enemies:
Our war is never over.
July 23, 1981
1. Abbreviation prevalent in Piedmontese for partigiano (modeled on burgu for “borghese,” Juve for “Juventus,” prepu for “prepotente,” cumenda for “commendatore,” etc.) to designate a partisan, especially one without compunctions, decisive, swift-handed.
Arachne
I’m going to weave myself another web,
Be patient. I’ve got long patience and a little mind,
Eight legs and a hundred eyes,
But a thousand spinning teats,
And don’t like fasting,
I like flies and males.
I’ll rest for four days, seven,
Hiding in my hole,
Until I feel my abdomen get heavy
With good viscous shiny thread,
And I’ll weave myself another web,
Just like the one you shredded, passerby,
Just like the project printed
On the minimal ribbon of my memory.
I’ll sit in the center
And wait for a male to come,
Suspicious but drunk with desire,
To fill my stomach and my womb
At one and the same time.
Fast and furious, as soon as it gets dark,
Quickly quickly, knot by knot,
I’ll weave myself another web.
October 29, 1981
2000
A thousand and a thousand: a finish line,
A white wool string, no longer that far off,
Or maybe black or red. Who can say?
It’s bad luck to know. We’re not allowed
To ask about the Babylonian numbers.
January 11, 1982
Passover1
Tell me: how is this night
Different from all other nights?
Tell me, how is this Passover
Different from other Passovers?
Light the light, unbar the door
So that the traveler may enter,
Be he Gentile or Jew:
Perhaps the prophet is hidden under his rags.
Enter and sit with us,
Listen, drink, and sing and celebrate Passover.
Eat the bread of affliction,
Lamb, sweet mortar, and bitter herbs.
This is the night of differences,
When we put our elbows on the table,
Because the forbidden is prescribed
So that evil may turn into good.
We’ll spend the evening telling tales
Of age-old wonderful events,
And because of all the wine
The hills will prance like rams.
Tonight the wise, the heathen, the fool, and the child
Ask each other questions,
And time changes direction,
Today flows back into yesterday,
Like a river silted up at its mouth.
Each of us has been a slave in Egypt,
Has soaked straw and clay with sweat
And crossed the sea with dry feet:
You, too, stranger.
This year in fear and shame,
Next year in strength and justice.
April 9, 1982
1. Contain
s various references to the traditional Jewish ritual of Passover.
In Mothballs
Late and alone an old keel rocks,
Among the many new ones, in the slicked,
Oil-iridescent water of the harbor.
Its wood is leprous, its iron rusty orange.
Its hull knocks blind against the dock, obese
Like a belly pregnant with nothing.
Under the water’s surface
You see soft seaweed, and the slow, slow drills
Of teredos and stubborn barnacles.
On the torrid deck, white splotches
Of calcined gull guano,
Tar oxidized by sun, and useless paint,
And brown stains, I’m afraid, of human excrement,
With spider lines of salt; I didn’t know
Spiders too nested in mothballed ships.
I can’t say what prey they’re after, but they must know their work.
The tiller creaks and lazily obeys
The secret whims of all the little currents.
On the stern that saw the world,
A name and motto no longer legible.
But the mooring line is new,
Yellow and red nylon, taut and glossy,
Just in case the mad old dame
Had the wild idea of going to sea.
June 27, 1982
Old Mole1
What’s so strange? I didn’t like the sky,
So chose to live alone and in the dark.
I was given good hands to dig with,
Concave, clawed, but sensitive and strong.
Now I voyage sleepless,
Unseen under the meadows,
Where I never feel the cold or heat
Or wind or rain or day or night or snow
And where my eyes are no longer any use.
I dig and turn up tasty roots,
Tubers, rotten wood, mushroom hyphae,
And if a boulder blocks my way
I find my way around it, laboring but calm,
Because I always know where I want to go.
I find earthworms, slugs and salamanders,
A truffle once,
Another time a viper, a good meal,
And treasures buried by who knows whom.
In the past I used to chase the females,
And when I heard one digging
I’d dig my way to her:
No longer; if it happens, I change course.
But the new moon excites me,
And sometimes then I entertain myself
emerging suddenly to scare the dogs.
September 22, 1982
1. Cf. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, act I, scene 3. Thomson (427) calls this “surely a veiled portrait of Kafka.”
A Bridge
It’s not like other bridges,
Which survive the snowfall of the centuries
So flocks can cross to water and pasture
Or revelers can go from place to place.
This is a different kind of bridge,
Happy if you stop halfway
And stare into the depths and ask yourself
If it’s worthwhile to be alive tomorrow.
It’s dull but alive
And never at rest.
Maybe because a poison slowly
Drips from its hollow pier,
An old maliciousness I won’t describe;
Or maybe, as they said it late at night,
Because it’s the product of a dirty deal.
Which is here why you never see the current
Tranquilly reflect the bridge’s span,
But only cresting waves and eddies.
Which is why it’s always scoured by sand,
Screaming, stone on stone,
And pushes pushes pushes against the banks
To break the earth’s crust open.
November 25, 1982
The Work
Look, it’s finished: nothing more to do.
How my pen is heavy in my hand!
It was so light a little while ago,
Live as quicksilver:
All I had to do was follow it,
It led my hand
The way a man who sees will lead the blind,
The way a woman leads you to the dance floor.
Enough, the work is done,
Perfected, spherical.
If I took another word away
There would be a hole that oozes lymph.
If I were to add one
It would stick out like an ugly mole.
If I were to change one it would grate
Like a dog barking at a concert.
What now? How to let it go?
Every work that’s born you die a little.
January 15, 1983
A Mouse
A mouse got in, I don’t know through what hole;
Not quiet, as they usually are,
But presumptuous, arrogant, bombastic.
It was talkative, sententious, condescending:
It climbed to the top of the bookcase
And preached me a sermon
Citing Plutarch, Nietzsche, and Dante:
That I mustn’t waste time,
Blah, blah, that time is growing short,
That wasted time won’t come again,
That time is money,
And that he who has time shouldn’t wait for time
Because life is short and art is long,
And that at my back he seemed to hear
Some winged, scythed chariot hurrying near.
Such shamelessness! Such insolence!
It made the gorge rise in my throat.
Does a mouse know what time is?
He’s the one who’s wasting it for me
With his cheeky lecturing.
If he’s a mouse then let him preach to mice.
I told him to get lost:
I know what time is very well,
It plays a part in lots of equations in physics,
Even squared in some instances,
Or with a negative exponent.
I can take care of myself,
I don’t need someone else to run my life:
Prima caritas incipit ab ego.1
January 15, 1983
1. Charity begins at home.
Nachtwache1
“Watchman, what of the night?”
“I’ve heard the owl repeat
Its hollow warning note,
The bat shriek as it hunted,
the slither of the water snake
Under the pond’s sodden leaves.
I’ve heard wine-soaked voices,
Garbled, angry, while I dozed,
From the bar next to the chapel.
I’ve heard lovers whispering,
The laughter and breathlessness of satisfied longing;
Adolescents murmuring in their sleep,
Others tossing sleepless with desire.
I’ve seen silent heat lightning,
I’ve seen the nightly terror
Of the girl who’s lost her mind
And can’t tell bed from bier.
I’ve heard the raucous heaving
Of a lonely old man wrestling with death,
Of a woman torn in childbirth,
The wail of a newborn.
Lie down and sleep, citizen,
All is well: this night’s half over.”
August 10, 1983
1. “Night watchman” in German (it was a technical term in the Lager). The first line is from Isaiah 22:11.
Agave
I’m not useful and not beautiful,
I have neither happy colors nor odor;
My roots eat into cement,
And my leaves, which are edged with needles,
Watch out for me, as sharp as swords.
I’m silent. I speak only my plant language,
Hard for you, a man, to understand.
It’s a tongue that’s out of use,
Exotic, sin
ce I come from far away,
From a cruel country
Full of wind, of poisons and volcanoes.
I waited many years before expressing
This very tall, despairing flower of mine,
Ugly, woody, rigid, but aimed at the sky.
It’s our way of shouting,
I’m going to die tomorrow. Now do you hear me?
September 10, 1983
Meleagrina1
You, impulsive, lumbering hotblood,
What do you know of these soft limbs of mine
Beyond their taste? Yet they
Feel cool and warm,
And impurity and purity in the bosom of the sea;
They contract and expand, obeying
Silent inner rhythms,
They enjoy their food, and cry out in hunger
As yours do, stranger of lightning movements.
And if, walled up among my rocky valves,
I, like you, had memory and feeling,
And, cemented to my shoal, divined the sky?
I’m more like you than you think,
Condemned to secrete secrete
Tears sperm mother-of-pearl and pearl.
Like you, if a shard should harm my mantle
I repair it day by day in silence.
September 30, 1983
1. The meleagrina (pearl oyster) is a different species from the common edible oyster.
The Snail
Why hurry, when you’re well defended?
Is one place better than another
As long as it has damp and grass?
Why run and run adventure’s risks,
When it’s enough to close up and find peace?
And if the universe becomes unfriendly
It knows to shut itself up silently
Behind its shell of gleaming limestone
Denying the world and denying itself to it.
But when the meadow’s drenched in dew,
Or rain has softened the earth,
Every trail is its highway,
Paved with lovely shining spume
Bridge from leaf to leaf and stone to stone.
It travels careful safe and secret,
Tests its way with telescopic eyes
Graceful repellent logarithmic.
Now it’s found its boy/girl mate
And fearfully