The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  8.To become rich. I never understand why there are people whose reaction is either indignation or astonishment when they learn that Collodi, Balzac, and Dostoyevsky wrote to earn money, or to pay off gambling debts, or to shore up struggling business ventures. It seems reasonable to me that writing, like any other useful occupation, should receive compensation. But I believe that writing for money alone is dangerous, because it almost always leads to a facile style, too compliant with the tastes of the larger public and the fashions of the moment.

  9.Out of habit. I left this motivation, the dreariest of all, for last. It’s not pretty, but it happens: it happens that a writer runs out of steam, losing his narrative drive, his desire to endow the images he has conceived with life and shape; that he stops conceiving images; that he has no more desires, even for glory or cash; and that he goes on writing all the same, out of inertia, out of habit, just “to keep the name alive.” Let him pay attention to what he’s doing: along that path he won’t travel far; he’ll inevitably wind up copying himself. Silence is more dignified, whether temporary or definitive.

  Congested Air

  Italian, as we have become accustomed to repeating for a long time now, is a rich and noble language, and at the same time a rigid and impermeable one, reluctant to take in new words to describe new things. But for the past 150 years, and today with dizzying frequency, new things in ever-greater numbers have been appearing on the horizon, entering our everyday life, and demanding that we baptize and incorporate them. For the most part, the new things and new ideas come from the worlds of science and technology; now, our country appears to lack the simplifying imagination of English-speakers, who are so good at condensing complex concepts into a single word borrowed from ordinary language (“jet,” “clutch,” “gear,” “kit,” “bit,” the recent “big bang”), or coining monosyllabic words that are full of meaning and quickly enter into universal use. To that end, the most unconventional linguistic procedures are put into operation: analogies, metaphors, onomatopoeia, and so on. One notorious example is “smog,” the urban fog caused by industrial or domestic smoke; the word was created by merging the terms for its two component parts (“smoke” and “fog”). Such words, which are quite numerous in English, are called portmanteau words, a reference to the type of suitcase, designed to carry suits, that opens into two symmetrical halves. We can pin down the birth certificate of some of those words: “galumph,” which means to gallop in triumph, was coined by Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland.

  In contrast, here in Italy (though not only here) things work differently. Carrying on the humanist tradition in a heavy-handed and indiscriminate manner, we avail ourselves of old languages, Latin and Greek, to describe new things. Now, it does not appear that the results are always accepted by the users, that is, all those who speak the language; indeed, they find themselves faced with patently “unnatural” words, imposed from above, prefabricated, far too long and not very clear, devoid of any suggestion of analogy, and in fact frequently overburdened with false suggestions and analogies. To judge from the effects, well-known to anyone who’s spent time in a medical clinic or a chemistry laboratory or a machine shop, it is clear that the ordinary speaker recoils from words that he is compelled to use but which are unfamiliar to him. They constitute genuinely foreign bodies, forcibly making inroads into his language or dialect, and the unwilling user unconsciously tries to modify them: in short, he behaves more or less like the oyster, which, when seeded with a sharp-edged grain of sand, refuses to tolerate it and expels it, or else turns it over and over, incubating it, smoothing it, and eventually transforming it into a pearl. Typically, the speaker attempts to reconstruct the “real” meaning of the word by distorting it to a greater or lesser degree: this process, known as a false etymology or a folk etymology, is a time-honored mechanism found in all languages, and illustrated by ancient examples (melancholia, that is, “black bile,” altered in Italian to malinconia by a false association with male, bad), by dozens of other wonderful instances, eagerly gathered on the fly by Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli1 (brodomedico for protomedico, mormoriale for memoriale, formicare for fornicare, sgrassazione for grassazione), all the way down to more recent ones, which spring up around us every day or even inside each of us.

  Of these, some are of humble extraction, and entail a subconscious process that is as obvious as it is elementary; others are more daring, and attest to higher-level associations; still others contain a flash of poetry, or sarcasm, or humor. Riflettario, mobildeno, acqua portabile were all coined by people who work with their hands, and they are the product of simple common sense. Riflettario (in place of refrattario—“refractory,” that is, to the heat of the flame) is so appropriate, in the case of a reverberatory furnace, for instance, that it could safely be adopted, and perhaps one day will be. Mobildeno (for molibdeno, or “molybdenum”) echoes the word mobile, or “furniture,” given the use of this metal in special steels, and marks the Italian speaker’s dislike of the juxtaposition of b and d, an occurrence that he would like to repair. Acqua portabile—or “portable water”—contains an implicit accusation against the ravagers of the Italian language. Since the Latin verb potare (“to drink”) no longer exists in Italian, why should the bureaucracy of the nineteenth century have dug up this abstruse term, acqua potabile (“potable water”), unknown to the ancient Romans and alchemistic in origin (aurum potabile)? Wouldn’t acqua da bere (“drinking water”) have been adequate, and shorter into the bargain? Hence the bafflement and the understandable amendment: portable water is the water that is brought to your home through the pipes of the water system, with no effort on your part.

  Frequently, and especially in the case of words related to medicine, the rejected neologism contains a potent emotional charge, again of disgust—no longer for the word but, rather, for the thing itself, or perhaps an element of mistrust, or mockery. Many of these “wrong” words mirror a typical situation: the condition of the patient sitting openmouthed in the presence of a doctor who spouts difficult words, like Don Abbondio or Professor Azzeccagarbugli,2 and who will eventually present a bill; and it is impossible to escape the suspicion that those difficult words are used purposely, to conceal ignorance and helplessness, so that the obligation to pay is an added and unjustified burden. After all, it is the patient who suffers, not the incomprehensible oracle; it is the patient who, as indemnification for his pain, should get the fee.

  Raggi ultraviolenti, or “ultraviolent rays.” The deformation of this word refers to the well-known effects of prolonged exposure; moreover, the rays are not violet at all. Puz, in place of “pus,” is all too painfully self-explanatory. Iniezioni indovinose for “endovenous injections”: because it is necessary to guess—indovinare—where the vein is, and the guessing is not always immediately successful; we should also note in this connection that in current parlance “to diagnose” is expressed as “to guess (indovinare) the disease,” and the doctor is viewed as a sort of indovino, or fortune-teller. Intercolite (for enterocolite, or “enterocolitis”) seems to contain a very widespread and archaic concept of pathogenesis, according to which all diseases are confusions, mixtures, aberrant interminglings of fluids that ought to remain separate: bile in the blood, blood in the urine, and so forth. The same model, on a subconscious level, of course, may be the source of mescolazioni. The verme solitario—or “tapeworm”—is often called the verme salutario or verme sanitario—the “salutary worm” or the “sanitary worm”—because it makes more sense to connect it to the concept of health than to any idea of solitude. An analogous line of reasoning led to the term tifo pidocchiale (in place of tifo petecchiale: “epidemic typhus” or “petechial fever,” in which the petechiae are the distinctive exanthems produced by the disease), because it is spread by lice—pidocchi—found in clothing.

  Flautolenze, quite widespread, strikes a comic pose that is at once crass and subtle, filthy and innocent, bringing together “flautist” and “flatulence.” You’d almost c
all it the work of an astute, whimsical poet, rather than some anonymous and collective composition. Dolori areonautici—a slightly misspelled mistaken reference to “aeronautic pains”—refer to the well-known influence of atmospheric conditions on rheumatism (less clear in origin is the twin form dolori aromatici, or “aromatic pains”). There is no mistaking the stamp of rejection in tintura d’odio—“tincture of odium.”

  Similar rejections can be detected in many terms from chemistry, which are used to designate noxious substances, or substances believed to be noxious: cloruro demonio for cloruro d’ammonio—roughly “demonium chloride” for “ammonium chloride”—or stelerato (which sounds like scellerato, “wicked”) for stearate. In much the same way, during the age of the Crusades, the name of Mohammed, in Italian Maometto, the great enemy of Christendom, was distorted to Malcometto, and in the late sixteenth century a pestilence was commonly referred to as a pistolence, as if it could be as lethal as a firearm. To go back to chemistry, there is no mistaking the connection in bacalite between bakelite, the most venerable of all plastic materials, stiff, yellowish, and foul-smelling, and the inexpensive codfish, baccalà, so rigid from the salt in which it’s preserved that it has been given the name “stick-fish” (Stockfisch in German, which, again through a folk etymology, with a continuing emphasis on its stiffness, has led to the Italian word stoccafisso). Note, in any case, the stereotypical expression “duro come un baccalà,” “stiff as a cod.”

  Leprite—which sounds like leprosy—stands for iprite, or “mustard gas,” the aggressive chemical agent first used at Ypres in the First World War. The word couldn’t have originated in northern Italy, where both mustard gas and leprosy are known only by name. It was coined in the thirties, in a factory in Abruzzi, where this sinister substance was being manufactured secretly, and where the memory of the equally sinister disease, which produces vaguely similar sores, had not yet died out.

  In some mines in the Canavese area, pirite (pyrite) is called perite. In Piedmontese pera means pietra (“stone”): even pyrite, with all the false splendor that makes it similar to gold, is nothing but a rock.

  Adelaide, for aldeide (“aldehyde”), is a curious case because, unlike all the previous examples, it seems to have originated in a misreading rather than a mishearing. Still, it would seem that there exists a sort of preconceived hostility against the word aldeide, possibly prompted by its unusual and very un-Italian sound: in a factory where I worked for a long time, formaldehyde (“formic aldehyde”) was commonly called Forma Dei, a splendid Latin term that has a theological flavor. Another misreading led to the distortion of Prosérpina into Prosperina: in fact, the young woman depicted in the frescoes is pink and buxom—prosperosa—and in no way resembles the serpent that seems embedded in her actual name. The shift of the accent proves that the expert who thus pronounced the goddess’s name must have misread it in some treatise, and had never heard anyone else pronounce it.

  The Italian word bestemmia is also the product of a false etymology. It was derived from the Latin and Greek roots of the Italian blasfemia (“blasphemy”), which is more or less equivalent to “insult,” with a transparent reference to bestia (“beast”), since it is an act considered more suited to a beast than to a man.

  Lingua sinistrata (for lingua salmistrata, or “brined tongue”) is almost never heard anymore. It comes from wartime, and it expresses the mistrust of the made-in-Italy canned meats available back then. Aria congestionata—“congested air,” for “air-conditioning”—is more recent, and it, too, is the product of a generalized rejection of the deviltry of wholesale progress, innovative architects, buildings with too many stories and windows that don’t open. Concedenza stands in for coincidenza (“connecting trains”). The connection—or the fact that the arrival of one train and the departure of another happens to coincide—is ensured only in the most enigmatic terms by the scheduling of the railroad. Often, it does not occur: therefore, when one is able to make one’s connection, it is seen as a gift of fate, a benevolent concession.

  There is no sense of rejection in anellina, anitrina, and borotalcol; rather, there is simply an attempt to interpret them by connecting them to the Italian term—“ring,” “duck,” “alcohol”—that most closely resembles them: respectively, they stand for “aniline,” “anhydride,” and “borated talc.”

  Sanguis is virtually universal in Italy for “sandwich,” which purists would call a tramezzino. A tramezzino has little to do with blood (sangue, except perhaps through the phrase for a rare steak: bistecca al sangue), and nothing to do with the harsh syllables that make up the name of its inventor, Lord Sandwich, who, as legend would have it, was so obsessed with card-playing that he never slept, and ate nothing but sandwiches while continuing to play with his free hand. For that matter, the “correction” of foreign words is a very common phenomenon in all languages. The Latin name of Milano, Mediolanum, which (probably) meant “in the middle of the plain,” was not understood by invaders of Germanic descent and tongue, and they corrected it to Mailand, that is, “land of May,” a lovely name that the Germans still use. In the sixteenth century, the French, confronted by the Italian word partigiana (a kind of dagger), did not hesitate to transform it into pertuisane, with clear reference to pertuis, a narrow opening, given the fact that a dagger is designed to perforate. Likewise in France, the German name for bitter cabbage, Sauerkraut, was—given the well-known tendency of the French to pronounce foreign words according to their own phonetics—pronounced more or less as sorcròt; but, since it was still a cabbage, this last name was distorted into choucroute, that is, literally, “cabbage-crust,” even though it hasn’t a trace of a crust.

  I don’t know whether Defoe knew Italian or Spanish; but he certainly attributes ignorance of both languages to his hero Robinson, and has him write runagate in place of renegade (a word that is, of course, of Italian and Spanish origin): now, to an English ear runagate means something like “run away from the gate.” The “true” meaning of the word is thus reestablished.

  Viturinari and fastudi, for veterinario (“veterinarian”) and fastidio (“annoyance”), are ingenious attempts on the part of the Piedmontese dialect to give meaning to two relatively difficult-to-understand terms, connecting them respectively to vettura (“carriage” or “coach”) and studio (“study”): words with which they have nothing in common, according to the etymologies that have been ascertained. Last of all, I’d like to point out that Mauthausen, the name of the grim concentration camp, is pronounced in Italy exclusively as Matàusen, probably in connection with mattatoio (“slaughterhouse”); and that in Piero Caleffi’s memorable autobiography, Si fa presto a dire fame (It’s Easy Enough to Say Hunger), we read that the term Stubendienst, “barracks orderly (duty),” was Italianized by the Italians who didn’t know German into stupidino or stupendino.

  1. A nineteenth-century poet famous for his sonnets written in Romanesco, the dialect of Rome.

  2. Both are characters in Alessandro Manzoni’s novel The Betrothed (1842).

  Guncotton Stockings

  The salary they offered was barely enough to live on, but the accommodations, given the times, and, especially, the places I’d come from, seemed princely to me. The paint factory where I would be working was old, filthy, and full of rubble and mud; not far away, though, set between two verdant hills, was a dynamite plant that had been modernized during the war. There, in the guesthouse, I’d been assigned a bright clean room with a view of the mountains; I was authorized to eat dinner in the company cafeteria. Meat and butter were still being rationed: that authorization was no small privilege.

  Until just a few months before, the dynamite plant had been anything but a peaceful place. There had been air raids, attacks by partisan bands starving for explosives, roundups by the Germans (in fact, the guesthouse had been built for the Germans, so living there struck me as a payback in some sense), black market trade, inspections, thefts, and a grim rosary of on-the-job accidents, which meant explosions. T
he marks of those blasts were still evident, and not only on the buildings and the equipment: many workers, both blue- and white-collar, and all the delivery people and porters, were scarred or crippled.

  Now the storm had passed, and there was a graveyard atmosphere of peace and oblivion. The cafeteria was run by a middle-aged married couple, hardworking, sober, and reserved; she did the cooking, he scoured the valley in a broken-down van, returning with foodstuffs procured both legally and otherwise. He was tall, skinny, and solemn, and to me he called to mind Wodehouse’s ingenious manservant Jeeves; but a length of twine ran out of one nostril and was fastened to his cheek with a bandage. “It’s holding up his trachea,” the man sitting next to me said, as if it were the most natural thing. I turned to the man on my other side, who was the plant physician; but he ignored my glance and said nothing. I decided that in the past few years he’d seen worse.

  One night, instead of the cook, a woman in her early thirties came to serve our table; her body was already shapeless: she was pale, a dirty blonde, and she never looked the diners in the eye. The doctor, ruddy-cheeked and jovial, a hearty eater and drinker, with a reputation as a ladies’ man, greeted her in dialect, with a thunderous “Well, look who’s here!”; the young woman replied in a faint voice, and hastened to disappear with the empty plates. “That’s Marisa,” he told me, with the air of one about to tell a good story. “The one who knit herself a pair of guncotton stockings.