by Primo Levi
He is ashamed of having quarreled with the tribunal of the cathedral and, at the same time, of not having stood up to the tribunal of the garrets with sufficient force. Of having wasted his life in petty office jealousies, in false love affairs, in morbid timidity, in static and obsessive accomplishments. Of existing when, by now, he should no longer exist: of not having found the strength to kill himself by his own hand when all was lost, before the two inept death-bearers visited him. But I sense, in this shame, an element that I am familiar with: Josef K., at the end of his anguished journey, feels ashamed that this secret, corrupt tribunal exists, pervading everything around it; even the prison chaplain and the precociously dissolute girls who importune the painter Titorelli belong to it. In the end it is a human, not a divine, tribunal: it is made of men and by men, and Josef, with the knife already planted in his heart, is ashamed of being a man.
June 5, 1983
1. Max Brod was Kafka’s friend and first biographer.
2. David Wyllie’s 2007 translation from the German.
Rhyme on the Counterattack
Anyone who has been in touch with the world of the printed page knows how great the supply of poetry is today (though not only today), and how scarce, by comparison, is the demand. It follows that, as with any product, poetry is undervalued. The contenders for the very numerous prizes number in the hundreds, even when the prize itself is purely symbolic: perhaps only a medal or a certificate.
There are various reasons for this oversupply. In the first place—and this is fundamental—the need to compose poetry is common to all countries and all eras. Poetry resides within us, like music and song. No civilization is without it; and it is undoubtedly older than prose, if by poetry is meant any account, oral or written, in which the voice rises in tone, the expressive tension is elevated, and attention to the sign and its density are equally elevated. To achieve this result, every “poetics” has developed its own code. The codes are different from one another, but they all have in common a system of signals intended to put the reader on notice: “Watch out, I’m not just talking; my words, though modest, are meant to be heard and remembered.”
Incidentally, it is significant that the codes are almost always formulated after the fact; that is, when a particular poetics has already borne fruit. For that matter, the same thing is true of all codes, even those in the strict sense of the word, which, engraved in bronze or in stone, are meant to ratify rules and regulations that already existed. We do not know who the inventor of ottava rima or the sonnet was; we do know who codified them. The legislator of poetry is not the poet but the grammarian. Indeed, the poet tends to break the rules: at times he transgresses owing to incompetence; at other times because he feels the rules are restrictive; at still others out of a conscious will to violate them. He therefore retraces the path that the poetics of the moment traveled, introducing violations into plain language. Since poetry is intrinsically violence done to everyday language, it’s understandable that every true poet feels the urge to become a violator, that is, an innovator, in his own right: to invent a poetics of his own, which stands in relation to the current one as the latter stands to prose.
This is why poetry writing is not taught in school, for the same reasons that talking and walking are not taught. They are all activities that we are genetically predisposed to, and that we learn to carry out with ease and pleasure, even if not spontaneously. It’s not necessary to study; what’s necessary (and sufficient) is the model. Starting from that, each of us develops that personal style which informs his words, his stride, and his verse. Just as we all talk and walk, we are all poets, at least potentially. To compose poetry is to innovate, and innovation cannot be taught.
Another reason for the oversupply of poetry lies in the upheaval that poetic technique has undergone since the beginning of this century, that is, since people began talking about the crisis of civilization and the decline of the West. Not coincidentally, parallel earthquakes shook music, psychology, physics, linguistics, economics, and, in short, our entire way of life. In appearance (though only in appearance) European poetry of our century is free of every constraint. Classical metrics and prosody, after centuries of almost undisputed authority, have faded. No one has officially dismissed them, but there is no doubt that they are generally felt to be outmoded, or actually afflicted by a negative mark. Anyone who today writes a sonnet that conforms to the prescribed rules would be judged an incompetent, or a relic of the past, or a parodist.
This apparent freedom has opened the doors to the legion of born poets: and, as I said, we are all such. From these two sources—the need for song and enchantment that we all have, and the decline of formal constraints—comes the flood of poetic texts. It’s a harmful phenomenon, because it threatens to distract attention from the authentic new voices that surely exist, scattered among the crowd.
For this reason, though it’s not the only one, I’m hoping for a spontaneous return (it’s not a paradox) of rules, and, in particular, rhyme. Indeed, I predict that it’s close at hand, since in all human affairs there are reactions that correct the deviations. Rhyme is a fairly late invention but a “likely” one: that is to say, it’s one of those inventions which are in the air, and then materialize in various places. In fact, it is found in poetic traditions that are quite distant from one another in time and space. Its present-day eclipse in Western poetry seems inexplicable to me, and is surely temporary.
Rhyme has too many virtues, it’s much too beautiful to disappear. It discreetly marks the end of a line or stanza. It reestablishes the ancient relationship between poetry and music, both daughters of our need for rhythm: there are some who maintain that we acquire it before birth, listening to the beating of our mother’s heart, so that we must all be poets from the womb. Rhyme underscores the key words, those which the reader’s attention should be drawn to. But I would like to emphasize two other advantages of rhyme, one for those who read verse, the other for those who write it.
Anyone who reads good poetry wants to carry it with him, to remember it, to possess it. Often he does not even need to study a poem: it all happens as if the memorizing had occurred spontaneously, naturally, painlessly (whereas memorizing texts whose beauty we do not perceive is painful, or at least laborious). Now, rhyme is of fundamental assistance in committing lines to memory: one line pulls along another, or others, the forgotten line can be reconstructed, at least approximately. The effect is so strong that, in the mysterious but limited storehouse of our memory, poetry without rhyme often yields its place to rhymed poetry, even if the latter is less noble. A pragmatic consequence follows: poets who wish to be remembered (ricordati, “carried in the heart”; in many languages to learn “by memory” is rendered to learn “by heart”) should not overlook this virtue of rhyme.
The other virtue is more subtle. Anyone who intends to compose in rhyme imposes on himself a constraint, though one that is rewarding. He commits himself to ending a line not with the word dictated by logical discourse but with another, more unusual one, drawn from the few that end “the right way.” He is thus forced to deviate, to stray from the path that is predictable and therefore easy. Now, reading what is predictable bores us and doesn’t tell us anything. The constraint of rhyme obliges the unexpected on the poet’s part: it forces him to invent, to “discover”; to enrich his vocabulary with uncommon terms; to twist his syntax—in a word, to innovate. His situation is similar to that of the bricklayer who agrees to use irregular, polyhedral, or prismatic bricks mixed in with the common ones; his structure will be less smooth, less functional, perhaps even less solid, but it will say more to the imagination of the one who looks at it, and will bear the mark of the one who built it.
Rhyme and rules in general therefore acquire the further function of revealing the personality of the writer; and in fact it can be seen that the differences among poets are greater than those among prose writers. The attribution of a poem is easier than that of a prose work. Faced with the obstacle of
meter, the author is forced (or forces himself) to a height that is acrobatic, and whose style is strictly his own: he signs every line, whether he wants to or not, whether he knows it or not.
March 26, 1985
Dear Horace
Dear Horace,
I’ve decided to write to you now, a few years before the bimillennium of your death, so as to get in before my more authoritative competitors, or, rather, the accredited experts, as they say today; besides, choral celebrations, on a fixed date, surely didn’t appeal to you, either. In any case, the idea came (or came back) to me while rereading—with great effort but also with enjoyment—one of your satires: the one in which you encounter a tiresome bore on the Via Sacra who is angling for recommendations. You try in vain to get rid of him, until a timely accident comes to your rescue.
I congratulate you: as you predicted, you didn’t die completely. Your poems, as you can see, are still studied and remembered; some have actually become proverbial, and even those who have never studied Latin cite them. Indeed, by now we speak a very corrupt Latin, and if we want to understand the Latin of your times, which we call “the Golden Age,” we have to study it. Nevertheless, your carpe diem, for example, has never been as fashionable as it is today. And Signor Fumagalli, a praiseworthy contemporary of ours, a retired librarian who has devoted his life to collecting famous maxims, assigns you second place among the minters of quotations, after a certain Dante Alighieri, whom I’ll tell you about some other time. In a word, that monument “more lasting than bronze” which you patiently constructed is still standing,1 even if it is a little eroded by time and by our pollution, and if few tourist guides point it out.
With great effort, I was saying. And I’m ashamed, because I studied Latin for a good eight years, diligently, with fine teachers and decent marks. I’m sure that you will have less difficulty reading this letter of mine than I have deciphering your poems. As you can see from my writing, we neo-Latins have taken many liberties. We’ve massacred the declensions and the cases, all of us except the Romanians, I mean the Dacians, who have preserved some traces of them. Odd, isn’t it? But they always were an odd people. And then we are Latins, true, but meanwhile people of all races have got underfoot, and have also left their marks, not only on the language.
In any case, it seemed proper to avoid in this letter of mine certain words (parabolae, paràule: in short, the verba) that might be difficult for you. The articles, no, I could not avoid them, even if your Latin did not “require” them. Please forgive me, I am writing not only to you and for you but also for my readers of today, and I would not want to excessively distort our language, which is not without merit.
But let’s leave matters of language aside for the moment. I cannot conceal from you the fact that many things have happened in the intervening time. The Roman Empire grew out of all proportion and then collapsed. A Jew, born a few years after your death, preached important things and swept away the gods of Olympus, who for that matter I don’t think were of great concern to you. Now a single God is worshipped throughout almost the entire world, but morals have not improved as a result. We have abolished slavery, at least theoretically. Germans, Huns, and Arabs came from the Alps and from the sea; they brought carnage and wars, but also new laws, and they curbed our arrogance.
There have been a great many wars: in every century and every region, and, since we have become ingenious, we have invented weapons that are increasingly ingenious. The most recent ones, I mention to you in passing, would have startled Lucretius. If instead of leaving atoms whole as in the nature of things, you split them or fuse them in a certain way, you can blow up the world, and every single person can be killed a hundred times over. At this very moment we are trying to disinvent this invention from hell. But it’s nothing new; I seem to think that it happened before, in your time. The most artful inventors are those who construct war machines, and war is what inspires the most artful inventions.
The world is round, this you already suspected. But it so happened that we went to see if it was true, it was, and along the pathways of the sea we encountered a new land, larger than Europe and Africa put together. We named it America, quickly massacred the inhabitants, who went naked, and made it a colony. But now the colonists have become so rich and powerful that they are colonizing us in turn. Their language is all the rage, and you’re in trouble if you don’t understand it. It seems to me that something of the sort happened with Greece in your time, right?
Other things have occurred as well. We have a way to manufacture ships that sail without wind or oars, craft that fly with hundreds and hundreds of passengers inside, chariots that operate without horses. Indeed, if you could see present-day Rome, you would find it invaded: these vehicles are swift, but they make noise, give off fumes, clog the streets, and from time to time run over a pedestrian. In short, it’s a very different city. That Via Sacra from your satire is still there, amid the ruins of the Forums, but it’s a good three meters (a meter, pardon me, is three feet) below street level. In fact, what with shards, rubble, and asphalt, the streets in all of our cities rise a few centimeters every century. For the moment, the vehicles I was telling you about are forbidden to travel on the Via Sacra: only idle people go there, whom we call tourists, along with some scholars. They come from far away, from America, Britain, Scandia, and even from certain islands east of the Seres, whose very existence was unknown in your time. They carry with them a little gadget that portrays images as a painter might, but smaller and more quickly.
We have other mirabilia. We sail beneath the sea. There is no mountain that we haven’t climbed. We know how to trigger lightning and harness it to our wheels. We can see atoms, the frontiers of the universe, the inside of our abdomen. We have sent explorers to the Moon. We know how to futuere (today we use a slightly different word, but if I were to write it here in plain language the newspaper might not accept the piece) without impregnating. We know how to cure old diseases, although we have unleashed new ones. We have the newest poisons, which produce ecstasy.
But you will be pleased to know that tiresome bores and recommendation seekers are still numerous, and that your Venosa2 still exists, although it’s overrun by the above-mentioned vehicles, and the majority of the Venosini today live in America. Recently we even rediscovered your Sabine villa (in a somewhat sorry state, as it happens), the one that was in your Elegies: come now! it’s not as modest as you describe it. Today we would call it a second home, and would make you pay taxes that you would have trouble earning from royalties or obtaining from Maecenas. You could, of course, have a telephone installed (you know Greek, an explanation of the term would be superfluous) and perhaps speak every evening with your friends in Rome and Mantua. But you would be disturbed by the railroad, which passes close by, and by the motocross races (moto + cross: here indeed an explanation is needed, but it would take much too long) held by the young people in the neighborhood. For us silence has become a rare and costly commodity.
The succession of the seasons has not changed. Spring still gladdens us, chasing away the snow and restoring grass to the meadows, as you once said with your customary elegance;3 the approach of autumn and then winter still wrenches our hearts, reminding us each year of the final winter that each of us faces. Our lives are longer than yours, yet neither happier nor more secure, nor do we have any certainty that the gods will grant a tomorrow to our yesterdays. We, too, will join our father Aeneas, and Tullius, and Ancus, and you, in the shadow realm. We, too, arrogant, overconfident, will return to dust and shadow.
April 14, 1985
1. The reference is to Horace’s Ode 3:30 (“I have created a monument more lasting than bronze”).
2. When Horace was born there, the town was known as Venusia.
3. The reference is to Horace’s Ode 4:7.
Bacteria Roulette
A reading of the autobiography of Salvador Luria, the Turin-born winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize in Medicine, so absorbed me that I am induced to overcome
the reserve stemming from my incompetence. Luria is a geneticist, that is, an expert on those long strings of eloquent molecules on which our identity (and, in large part, our destiny) is written. My now distant past as an organic chemist led me to spend time with other long molecules, those of synthetic polymers, which, however, being hopelessly monotonous, were mute and brutish. They have practical virtues, but they don’t “say” anything, or, rather, they repeat the same message endlessly. The first are to the second as a novel would be to a hypothetical volume that from the first page to the last repeated the same syllable over and over.
This autobiography, recently published by Boringhieri as Storie di geni e di me (literally, Stories of Geniuses and Me), has a different title in the American original: A Slot Machine, a Broken Test Tube: An Autobiography.1 It seems more meaningful than the Italian title because it refers to two of the fundamental themes of the book, and, more generally, to two classic lines of scientific research.
Contrary to current opinion, which favors teamwork and the aid of computers, the commitment and the intuition of the individual have a determining influence on the end result, today as in the past. Besides, if this were not so, what sense would there be in continuing the Nobel Prizes? On this point, Luria has no doubts or false modesties, and in relating his triumphs he does not hesitate to say “I.”
Beyond the imposing scientific and technological institutes, or perhaps in spite of them, the brain of the lone scientist, the “adventurer,” isolated in his study or laboratory, remains the instrument of choice, without which the work is merely routine. True innovation is not a group effort; it is the product of reason, and this is individual. Nonetheless, research does not lie entirely within the bounds of pure rationality: the latter is necessary, but vastly insufficient. Reason requires external nourishment, stimuli, which can come from the least expected sources. This is the allusion contained in the slot machine of the original title.