by Primo Levi
As a newly hired editor at W. W. Norton & Company in 1998, having started to prepare The Complete Works of Isaac Babel with Nathalie Babel, one of Babel’s daughters, I began to contemplate doing the same for Levi’s canon, aware that his Italian publisher, Einaudi, had brought out his collected works the preceding year. My undertaking began in earnest in 1999 (with the first of my more than 5000 e-mails devoted to this project), but the Levi copyright situation was so daunting as to become an Augean stable, since his books had been published in America by at least seven different publishers, some only through distribution from England. It took Norton another six years to come to terms with all of Levi’s English-language rights holders, as well as with Einaudi, which held the rights to the unpublished material that appears in this edition. Only later, once the translator Ann Goldstein had agreed to edit the Complete Works, did we jointly decide that all the books would be retranslated with the exception of If This Is a Man, which was revised for this edition.
The publication of The Complete Works marks, then, the beginning of a new chapter in the story of Primo Levi’s publication history in English. Among the works of thousands of survivors who have written about their harrowing ordeal in this most unimaginable and unspeakable of twentieth-century horrors, Levi’s sovereign volumes stand out for their understanding of the human condition, for their philosophical exploration of the polarities of good and evil, and for the grotesque nexus that can bind these two human forces. The exquisite subtlety of Levi’s insights, so acute they seem to belong to someone who has seen too much, to someone who has so obviously suffered from severe depressions himself, come with a prose style so lyrical and memorable that they position this self-effacing Italian chemist as one of the most original and universal, even one of the most enduring, of all twentieth-century writers.
To quote Levi himself in his posthumously published short story “A Tranquil Star,” translated by Goldstein, “We still don’t know much about the convulsive death-resurrection of stars: we know that, fairly often, something flares up in the atomic mechanism of a star’s nucleus and then the star explodes, on a scale not of millions or billions of years but of hours and minutes; we know that these events are among the most cataclysmic that the sky today holds; but we understand only—and approximately—the how, not the why. We’ll be satisfied with the how.”
ROBERT WEIL
Adapted from a speech given at Yale University as part of the conference “Primo Levi in the Present Tense: New Reflections on His Life and Work Before and After Auschwitz,” February 29, 2008
The Publication of Primo Levi’s Works in the World
Primo Levi is among the best-known of modern Italian writers in the world. He is an icon in the debate on the Holocaust, and his works have been translated into more than forty languages. Yet the process by which he achieved his fame did not follow a straight line; rather, the international translation and publication of his works came about sporadically and often long after their original appearance in Italian.
There is no single reason for this. For one thing, the editorial market varied in different places, depending on such factors as the degree of independence of the press with respect to the government; the popularity of Italian literature and Holocaust literature; and the presence or absence of good translators. In some countries, individuals—intellectuals, publishers, journalists, translators—played a crucial role in promoting and furthering the publication of Levi’s works in their home language and territories. One must also consider the geopolitical context: for example, repressive regimes banned the publication of works on the Holocaust, and there was also some resistance to the diffusion of such literature on the part of some democratic countries, which may have been unwilling to disturb the equilibrium of the cold war. A final obstacle to publication of Levi’s works, again varying from place to place and with different degrees of consciousness, has been a desire to repress the memory of the past: a reluctance to face their culpability not only on the part of the nations directly involved in the extermination of the Jews but also—in radically different geographic contexts—on the part of countries that for years have perpetrated similar crimes against their own political, ethnic, or religious minorities.
The first translation of Levi into any language was the English-language version of If This Is a Man, published in 1959 by Orion Press, an American publisher that also had offices in Florence. The translator, the young British historian Stuart Woolf, had the friendly support of Levi, who was very happy with the result. Five years later, Woolf translated The Truce for the British publisher Bodley Head (and in the United States for Atlantic Monthly Press). Although both received positive reviews, the two works had almost no circulation in the United Kingdom until the 1980s, partly because Italian literature was considered a niche market, and partly because the Anglo-Jewish community played only a small role in British intellectual life. Similarly, both translations received little attention in the United States.
In 1961, the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who had been captured in Argentina and transferred to Israel, took place in Jerusalem. This proceeding was instrumental in bringing the subject of the Holocaust, relegated to the background since the late 1940s, back into the world’s consciousness.
That same year, German and French translations of If This Is a Man came out. Levi was especially attentive to the German edition; he had the good fortune to find a uniquely qualified translator in Heinz Riedt, who had deserted from the German Army and taken part in the Italian Resistance; the two men established an intense working relationship. Thanks to Riedt’s linguistic skills and his empathy, Levi was able to satisfy a requirement that was very important to him: preserving the harsh slang of the German that he had been forced to learn in the Lager. The volume was published—in the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) only—by Fischer Verlag, with a preface by the author: a letter from Levi to Riedt and, through him, to all Germans. Yet Levi’s hope of establishing a real dialogue with the German people was realized only in part: while he did receive affirmations of solidarity and regret (but also, from some, declarations of a lack of culpability), in Germany his fame has been mainly posthumous.
If This Is a Man was brought out in France by the publisher Buchet-Castel as J’étais un homme (I Was a Man). This unfaithful, ineffectual title reflected the level of a translation (by Valentina Montel and Michèle Causse) that was extremely disappointing to Levi, who had had great expectations for it. He attributed the book’s lack of success to the poor quality of the translation. The mistakes and other infidelities were for the most part corrected in a second translation, by Martine Shruof-
feneger, but it did not appear until 1987, from Éditions Julliard.
These first three translations were followed by versions in Finnish (1962), Dutch (1963), and Turkish (1967; the text, based on the German translation, was heavily altered). Meanwhile, The Truce appeared in German (1964), French (1966), Dutch (1966), and Japanese (1969), and excerpts were published in a Polish journal (1963). A collection of twelve stories from Natural Histories came out in German (1965).
After the initial burst of international publication, the seventies and the early eighties did not see many new translations. This limited interest was manifested in two ways: in some places it was years before any of Levi’s work was published (Israel and most of Eastern Europe) and in others, after a first translation (usually in a small printing), years passed before a second work appeared—or, as in France in the case of If This Is a Man, a better translation of the same work—and began to establish Levi’s reputation. In fact, the situation resembles the fate of If This Is a Man in Italy as well (see page 2813).
More of Levi’s works came out in French (The Wrench, in 1980) and in English (two collections: Shemà, a collection of poems, in 1976, and The Sixth Day and Other Tales, a selection of stories taken from Natural Histories and Flaw of Form, in 1977). In 1972, for the first time, his work appeared in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), with a
collection of stories taken from Natural Histories and, seven years later, The Periodic Table (1979). If This Is a Man was published in Romania and Poland (1974 and 1978). There was a Czech version of The Periodic Table in 1981; a Finnish translation of The Truce the same year (but almost twenty years after the Finnish translation of If This Is a Man); and in Poland in 1983 a volume that included Natural Histories and Flaw of Form.
The most surprising situation is undoubtedly that of Israel. The dramatic circumstances leading up to its independence, in 1948, pushed the experience of the Shoah into the background, and only after the Eichmann trial did books on the subject begin to come out there. Nonetheless, the trip that Levi made to Israel, in 1968, went unnoticed, and his efforts to find a publisher for If This Is a Man (whose appearance in Hebrew was important to him) were in vain. For one thing, the experience of the Holocaust was more familiar there. Also, at that time, just after the Six Day War of 1967, Israeli society clung to a national identity marked by heroism, and, as some historians have noted, the figures of the former deportees and the millions who had died in the gas chambers roused conflicting feelings; there was even a belief among some that those victims had let themselves be massacred, “like lambs led to the slaughter.” The Yom Kippur War of 1973 represented the start of a new phase of reflection on the past and on the Shoah in particular: the silence of the forties and fifties, and an interest that in the sixties had sometimes had a self-serving streak (the Holocaust as a historical legitimatization of Zionism), yielded to reconsiderations of the founding myths. Such considerations became even more painful after Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 and relations with the Palestinian population soured. In this reading of events, it’s perhaps not remarkable that the first translation of a work by Levi did not appear until 1979, and that it was The Truce (with a preface by Levi written for the Hebrew edition), not If This Is a Man. The latter did not come out for nine more years—until 1988, a year after Levi’s death.
In Eastern Europe, Levi’s reception was late, sporadic, and beset by difficulties. For one thing, there was little interest in the Holocaust. The most atrocious crimes against the Jews had been perpetrated in these countries, in too many cases with the complicity of local populations; at the same time, the peoples crushed by Nazism tended to recall their own sufferings rather than those of the Jews. In the Soviet Union, the Second World War was celebrated as an anti-Fascist patriotic epic, and the racist foundation of Hitler’s regime was undervalued. Finally, in the countries in the Soviet sphere, the memory of Nazi barbarism was soon replaced by the experience of Stalinist brutality.
In this historical and political context, which inevitably influenced the autonomy of the publishing market, it’s not hard to understand why in Eastern Europe most of Levi’s work appeared only after 1989. The fate of his work in East Germany is emblematic: The Periodic Table was butchered by censorship (many references to life in the Lager were removed), while neither If This Is a Man nor The Truce could be published at all, because of the “bourgeois” mentality attributed to the author and the false image of the Russians that, according to those censors, it presented. They also found intolerable Levi’s insistence on the tension between the prisoners in the Lager and the “fluctuating” border that he traced separating victims and torturers: the theme, in other words, of the “gray zone.”
Moreover, it should be recalled that Levi was considered a problematic writer in authoritarian regimes of another stripe. The military dictatorships of Portugal, Spain, and Greece wished to repress the tragedy of the Shoah: in the two Iberian countries because it involved Nazism and fascism, which both regimes had been inspired by; in Greece because Levi’s work compelled a reckoning with the country’s responsibility in the persecution of its own Jewish population. Besides, the suffering of the Jews was overshadowed in the collective memory by what the opposition on the left had endured in the years after the war.
The American publication of The Periodic Table, in 1984 (thanks to the insistence of the Jewish history scholar Alvin Rosenfeld and of Raymond Rosenthal, an accomplished and experienced translator), can be considered a turning point. It not only smoothed the road to the translation, in the United States, of seven more works by Levi but stirred an international wave of interest in him. His sudden and tragic death, three years later, further focused attention on his works.
Between 1986 and 1990, in Scandinavia and Finland, If Not Now, When? and If This Is a Man were published and, in Denmark and Finland, The Periodic Table. In Sweden, the Italophile intellectuals Göran and Ingrid Börge played a crucial role: Göran was the first to write about Levi, in 1969, and Ingrid was his main translator into Swedish.
In the countries of southern Europe that returned to democracy in the mid-1970s and early 1980s, there were translations of If This Is a Man (Castilian, 1987; Portuguese, 1988), The Periodic Table (Portuguese, 1988; Catalan and Greek, 1990), and If Not Now, When? (Portuguese, 1988).
A Czech translation of The Drowned and the Saved came out in 1989, printed in Cologne by a publisher in exile; it was reissued, this time in Czechoslovakia, in a new translation, in 1993.
Levi’s major works were finally published in Israel between 1987 and 1991, along with a collection of stories. In Brazil (whose population was for the most part ignorant of the extermination of the Jews), the military dictatorship in power from 1964 to 1984 had discouraged publication of authors who reported on violations of human rights. If This Is a Man did not come out until 1988; other translations followed in the nineties.
Interest in Levi was consolidated in the nineties, with new translations almost everywhere in the West, as well as in Turkey and Japan. The most remarkable phenomenon, however, was the numerous translations finally published in Eastern Europe, once the Berlin Wall had fallen and the process of the breakup of Yugoslavia was under way. The post-1989 translations appeared in Hungary (with an unusual choice as a first work, The Drowned and the Saved, 1990), in Croatia (The Periodic Table, 1991, and If This Is a Man, 1993), and in Slovenia (The Periodic Table, 1992).
In Bulgaria, If This Is a Man and The Truce came out in a single volume in 1995. In the Bulgarian literary world, the philosopher Tzvetan Todorov, who was born in Sofia but had immigrated to Paris, made an important contribution to Levi’s success by devoting a chapter to him in his book Facing the Extreme (1991). The work of the translator and literary critic Božan Hristov also played a major role.
Indeed, it was relationships with other intellectuals that helped Levi achieve international fame: the praise of Saul Bellow, who had a decisive role in assuring Levi’s large-scale fortunes, and of Alvin Rosenfeld; the friendships with the Romanian-born writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and with Philip Roth; the long-distance dialogues with the philosopher Jean Améry and the writer Jorge Semprún; and his posthumous relationship with the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (the 1998 book in which Agamben compares himself with Levi came out in the United States in 1999, under the title Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive).
In the twenty-first century, knowledge of Levi’s work has become widespread in the places where it first appeared, and has, in addition, reached new and sometimes far-flung audiences. Today almost all of Levi’s works have been translated into English, French, and German.
In Spain, most of Levi’s works have been translated (into Castilian), including the stories, the poems, and the interviews; in Greece, the major works have been published but not the poems or the short stories. In Portugal, on the other hand, attention to Levi has been limited.
In Holland, a single publisher, Meulenhoff, has published almost all of Levi’s works, including several collections of his stories; in 2001 all of the stories, many translated for the first time, were brought out in a single volume.
The major works have been translated into Danish and Swedish (thanks to the Italian Cultural Institute in Stockholm, Levi’s book of poems Ad ora incerta has also appeared in Swedish). In 2012 the Danish publisher Rosinante collected
If Not Now, When?, The Truce, and The Drowned and the Saved in a single volume. A similar, very successful trilogy was issued in 2013 by Bonniers, Levi’s main publisher in Sweden, which reprinted If This Is a Man and The Truce, together with the first Swedish translation of The Drowned and the Saved. Although Norway and Finland are small countries with small publishing markets, they still seem—somewhat surprisingly, considering their involvement in the Second World War—farther behind in the promotion of Levi’s works.
The number of countries of the former Soviet bloc where Levi’s works are finally appearing is growing: Albania, Slovakia, Macedonia, Serbia, Russia, Estonia, and Lithuania. In these countries, too, the preferred volumes have been If This Is a Man, The Truce, The Drowned and the Saved, and The Periodic Table. There continue to be translations into Croatian, Slovene, Polish, and Hungarian. If This Is a Man was also published in a Romansch-language edition in Switzerland, in 2011.