The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  Levi’s publisher, Einaudi, wasn’t interested in Levi as a poet, but his collected poems easily found a different home, with Garzanti, in Milan. The book’s title, Ad ora incerta (At an Uncertain Hour), was, significantly, drawn from Coleridge’s ballad of witness, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It came out in October 1984 and included sixty-three poems and ten translations. Previously unpublished were seven of the translations and three poems of a private nature, two of them dedicated to his wife, Lucia (“February 11, 1946” and “July 12, 1980”), and one with a Jewish-religious inspiration (“Passover”). On the other hand, Levi did not include in the book three poems that had already appeared in La Stampa: “To the Muse” (September 5, 1982), “Casa Galvani” (May 3, 1984), and “The Decathlete” (September 7, 1984). In this volume, they open the section “Other Poems.” Levi wrote jacket copy for At an Uncertain Hour that he signed with the initials P.L., and which appears at the start of the poems in Opere, and here.

  In 1985, At an Uncertain Hour won the Abetone Prize, given by the province of Pistoia, and the national Giosuè Carducci Prize, in Pietrasanta. Ironically, the penultimate poem in the collection, “Pious,” consists of a parodic reversal of Carducci’s famous “Il bove” (“The Ox”), a poem that all Italian children of Levi’s generation learned by heart in elementary school.

  In 1976, Menard Press, in London, published an English version of The Beer Hall in Bremen, under the title Shemà: Collected Poems of Primo Levi. In 1988 Faber & Faber published, in both Great Britain and the United States, a Collected Poems that included all the poems of Ad ora incerta except “The Last Epiphany” (a translation, going back to 1960, from the cycle “Dies Irae” of Werner Bergengrün) and “Pious”; obviously it did not include Levi’s translations. The volume ended with “Date Book” (La Stampa, January 2, 1985), which was written after the publication of Ad ora incerta. In the 1992 reprinting of Collected Poems by the same publisher, a section of eighteen “Previously Uncollected Poems” was added, opening with “Gedale’s Song,” from the novel If Not Now, When? For the present edition, Jonathan Galassi has retranslated and annotated all of Levi’s poems.

  Thus, Collected Poems fully reflects the original structure of Ad ora incerta, with one significant exception. The latter ends with a group of translations of the following works: the ballad “Sir Patrick Spens”; eight poems from Heine’s Buch der Lieder: “Junge Leiden,” 4 (“Im Traum sah ich ein Männchen, klein und putzig”); “Lyrisches Intermezzo,” 33 (“Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam”); five poems from “Die Heimkehr”: 19 (“Ich trat in jene Hallen”), 20 (“Still ist die Nacht, es ruhen die Gassen”), 54 (“Teurer Freund, du bist verliebt”), 58 (“Zu fragmentarisch ist Welt und Leben!”), and “Donna Clara”; and “Die Nordsee” I, iv, “Die Nacht am Strande”; and “L’Envoi,” also known as “The Long Trail,” from Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads. These have been omitted here, as have the three “Other Poems” (“A Valley,” “The Thaw,” and “To My Friends”) that are part of Stories and Essays, and “Gedale’s Song” from If Not Now, When?

  Galassi (who has expressed his indebtedness to his predecessors, Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann) writes:

  Levi makes no great claims for his work in verse in the introduction to his collected poems, yet some see his poems as the place where he gave voice to his deepest, least repressed fears and concerns. As one of his biographers, Carole Angier, puts it, Levi’s poetry, which often reflects the clear influence of one of the greatest Italian pessimists, Giacomo Leopardi, “was where his darkness found expression: his sadness and isolation, his anger and fear—everything his moral and rational self suppressed.”

  Levi once said that poetry simply came naturally after Ausch-

  witz and after the publication of his novel about partisans and resistance fighters, If Not Now, When?, in 1982. Angier suggests that he wrote poems “in his ancient mariner moments, whenever ‘that agony returned’” and he felt the overwhelming need “to tell,” as he puts it in “Get Up.”

  The telling came at a significant cost. Angier comments: “To write, he said, was to bare oneself to the world, even in one’s most careful, polished work. How much more must this be so, for him, in poetry . . . which ‘caught him in flagrante,’ which struck him like ‘a rash,’ like ‘an infection’?” Indeed, his friend and biographer Giovanni Tesio asserted that Levi’s collected poems should be paired with The Drowned and the Saved, his late meditation on the meaning of the Nazi exterminations, as representative of the writer’s dark side.

  OTHER PEOPLE’S TRADES

  Two books bear witness to the fact that, by the mideighties, Levi was considered a legitimate writer, as much by his publisher, Einaudi, as by the general reading public (academic criticism was the last to acknowledge this), and not only as the witness to a tragedy who later published works of fiction.

  The first of these books, The Search for Roots: A Personal Anthology, appeared in 1981. The idea came from Giulio Bollati, the editorial director of Einaudi, who asked certain Einaudi writers (Italo Calvino, Leonardo Sciascia, and Paolo Volponi, in addition to Levi) to draw a map of the books that had shaped them. The project was intended for students, but Levi—who was the only one to complete it, and did so rapidly—delivered a work so personal and so “adult” that Einaudi decided to publish it for the general public.

  The second book, Other People’s Trades, was published by Einaudi in February 1985. It is a collection of fifty-one essays, on a broad range of subjects. The two books are, like If This Is a Man, The Truce, and The Periodic Table, autobiographical, but in this case they make up an intellectual autobiography. This autobiography includes praise of François Rabelais, of the precision of the language of chemists, and of clear writing, along with an interest in rites and games, in adventure (in an active life as well as in novels or epic poems), in the behavior of animals and the mysteries of the cosmos, and, finally, in the moral choices of human beings.

  One theme is noticeably absent from Other People’s Trades: the Lager. Levi did not include in the new book the various writings on the Shoah that he had not yet collected, such as his many reviews of books on the subject. In Other People’s Trades Auschwitz is a sensory memory that appears only in the essay “The Language of Odors.”

  Other People’s Trades is a book that originated almost entirely in the pages of newspapers. The oldest piece is the one on Rabelais: it dates to October 7, 1964, when Levi was contributing science fiction stories and literary articles to the Milan daily Il Giorno. Three other essays—on Huxley, Tartarin of Tarascon, and the moon landing—are from the sixties. Forty-three of the essays first appeared in La Stampa between 1969 and January 1985; “Ex-Chemist” came out in the spring of 1980 in a trade paper, Noi Chimici, and three pieces (“Novels Dictated by Crickets,” April 1976; “Why Do We Write?” August 1981; and “Going Back to School,” April 1983) in the house organ of a bank, Notiziario della Banca Popolare di Sondrio.

  The essay that opens the book, “My House,” had not been published before. Levi probably wrote it for the occasion, as a last, eccentric autobiography, constructed through the rooms and objects of a life. The “involuntary interruptions” in living in the house he was born in, which he mentions in the first lines of the text, are an ironic allusion to the calamity of the Lager and to his professional travels as a chemist.

  It might be said that in the first essays of Other People’s Trades Levi wanted to bear witness to his own prehistory as an essayist and, at the same time, set out the themes that were important to him. Then, from “Leggere la Vita” (August 29, 1979) to the end of the volume, the sequence is almost perfectly chronological. The book’s final essay, “The Eclipse of the Prophets” (July 8, 1984), is a warning, and its tone is more solemn than that of the rest of the book.

  Many of the essays in Other People’s Trades touch on several subjects at the same time. The scientific element and the literary citation—often precious and odd—are almost always present, as is the synthesis of a mora
l. Perhaps the book’s most characteristic piece is “The Squirrel,” an ethical meditation wrapped in an autobiographical tale, whose subject is an animal, and which starts off from the language of the city of Turin. Nineteen of the essays contain autobiographical elements, and in seven Turin appears. Levi’s Jewish roots are visible in only two pieces, but they are among the most memorable: “Ritual and Laughter” and “The Best Merchandise.” He discusses science and technology in eleven essays, work in seven, and chemistry in six. But the fact that in this book Levi prefers to focus on professions that are not his is confirmed by his interest in animals (eleven essays), games (eight), literature (ten) and, especially, language as such, with eighteen essays.

  The history of words, linguistic oddities, games connected to verbal expression are the most surprising aspect of Other People’s Trades, and, significantly, the first part of the collection culminates in a stand against “obscure writing,” published in La Stampa on December 11, 1976. The themes and the language of the book confirm Levi’s choice of clear but not simplistic writing, limpid but complex, accessible but precise—writing that is democratic, in every sense of the word.

  The first edition of Other People’s Trades in English came out in 1989, published by Michael Joseph (London) and Summit Books (New York). It contained thirty-nine essays from the Italian volume, plus four taken from Stories and Essays. The twelve essays that were left out, perhaps not unexpectedly, all have to do with language (“Aldous Huxley,” “Tartarin of Tarascon,” “Congested Air,” “Guncotton Stockings,” “Leggere la Vita,” “The Squirrel,” “To Translate and Be Translated,” “Queneau’s Cosmogony,” “Inspector

  Silhouette,” “Masters of Our Fate,” “Fossil Words,” and “The Language of Odors”), and here they return to their places for the first time in English.

  STORIES AND ESSAYS

  In the 1970s, some Italian daily papers began to put together collections of articles by their most prestigious contributors. Some, like La Stampa, to which Primo Levi had contributed regularly since 1968, even created a book series: Stories and Essays was the second volume of the series Third Page. (The series took its name from the fact that, from the start of the twentieth century, page 3 in Italian newspapers was traditionally devoted to culture and books.) Appearing in November 1986, this is the last book that Levi published in his lifetime. Apart from the review of the memoirs of Rudolf Höss (1960) and the article on Apollo 8 (1968), the fifteen stories and twenty essays in the volume had all appeared in the paper between 1977 and 1986 and are placed in chronological order in each of the two sections. But in the first edition of the book there were twenty stories as well. Levi reintroduced five stories that had already appeared in Lilith: “Disphylaxis,” “Bridge Builders,” “The Molecule’s Defiance,” “In Due Time,” and “The Soul and the Engineers.” They were placed in chronological order, between “Made for Each Other” and “The Great Mutation.” Here, the decision was made to avoid the repetition.

  Including poems in a book of prose had been Levi’s habit ever since If This Is a Man. The three in Stories and Essays had appeared first in La Stampa: the book’s epigraph, “To My Friends,” on December 31, 1985, “The Thaw” (which opens the section “Stories”) on April 3, 1985, and “A Valley” (which opens the section “Essays”) on February 20 of the same year. These translations are by Jonathan Galassi.

  Eleven of the stories and sixteen of the essays were published in English by Schocken Books in 1986, under the title The Mirror Maker: Stories and Essays, and two stories appeared that same year in Moments of Reprieve, published by Summit Books. Two stories (“An Erector Set Made with Love” and “Frogs on the Moon”) and two essays (“A Bottle of Sunshine” and “The Hidden Player”) from the original Italian edition were included in the English version of Other People’s Trades, published in 1989 by Michael Joseph, in London, and Simon & Schuster, in New York. Two stories (“Peroxide Blonde,” and “‘Fair as a Flower’”) are collected here for the first time.

  The first Italian edition of Stories and Essays was reserved for readers of La Stampa and was not sold in bookstores. This circumstance means that The Drowned and the Saved remains Levi’s true “last book”: it is such because of its value as an ultimate reflection on Auschwitz, and it is in fact. For this reason it has been placed after Stories and Essays.

  THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED

  On May 13, 1960, Levi wrote a letter to Heinz Riedt, who had just completed the German translation of If This Is a Man: “I am glad, and satisfied with the result, and grateful to you, and at the same time, a little sad. You see, this is the only book I wrote, and now that we have finished transplanting it into German I feel like a father whose son has come of age and leaves, and no longer needs his care.” The Preface that Levi wrote specifically for the German edition, which came out in November 1961, ended with a passage from that letter. In the year after the book’s publication, Levi received dozens of letters from his new German readers, and soon had the idea of collecting them in a book, along with his replies. In late 1962, he proposed to Einaudi what he called the “German project”; there wasn’t enough material for an entire book, however, so the idea was never realized.

  “Letters from Germans,” the eighth and final chapter of The Drowned and the Saved, is thus at the origin of what we could consider Levi’s last book. This is not the only inversion of chronology and structure. The title itself—which comes from the opening of Canto XX of Dante’s Inferno: “Di nova pena mi conven far versi / e dar matera al ventesimo canto / de la prima canzon, ch’è d’i sommersi” (“I must make verses of new punishment / and offer matter now for Canto Twenty / of this first canticle—of the submerged”)—had been conceived initially as the title for If This Is a Man. It was still useful, and even more appropriate, decades later.

  The Drowned and the Saved was published by Einaudi in May 1986. Right at the start of “Letters from Germans” Levi observes: “If This Is a Man is a book of modest dimensions, but, like a nomadic creature, it has left behind a long and tangled trail for forty years now.” It’s no coincidence that the sentence comes here, given that the final chapter is the earliest nucleus of the work. But it will be useful to ask when the idea of a postscript to If This Is a Man was transformed into the idea for a new book, and to reconstruct the steps that, in the course of twenty-five years, from 1961 to 1986, led Levi from the “German project” (that is, documenting his dialogue with the readers he was most eager to have) to a completely new reflection on Auschwitz, one that treated themes that were new or barely touched on in If This Is a Man, and which, emerging within a new historical-political context, found a public belonging to a new generation.

  In the interviews that Levi gave after the publication of The Truce (1963), he frequently vowed that he would write nothing more about Auschwitz. Fortunately, he didn’t keep his promise. But those statements attest to the fact that he considered the “German project,” which he had not yet set aside, something that had to do mainly with his German readers and their relationship to the legacy of Nazism. It would have been a book written by others rather than by Levi. Paradoxically, we have to look farther back in time for the earliest source of The Drowned and the Saved.

  “The Deported. Anniversary” (in Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1949–1980) was published in 1955, in a small-circulation review, at a time when the memory of the Shoah had faded, in Italy as in Europe. In the essay, Levi examined the silence of the few survivors of the Lagers, pointing courageously to the root of that silence: “It is shame. We are men, we belong to the same human family that our executioners belong to. Before the enormity of their crime, we feel that we, too, are citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah, and cannot be exempted from the charge that an otherworldly judge, on the basis of our own testimony, would bring against all humanity.” Shame was a new subject for reflection. In the following decades, others were added to it.

  New ideas were likely suggested to Levi by the radio and theater versions of If T
his Is a Man (1964 and 1966). Both focused on the confusion of languages and the deadly harm that came to those who, like the Italians and the Greeks, didn’t know German, Yiddish, or Polish. Here should be sought the roots of the chapter “Communication.” Another new element was the fact that in the 1960s Italian publishers were bringing out more books that dealt with the Shoah. Levi himself proposed to Einaudi a translation of the most important of these—Menschen in Auschwitz, by Hermann Langbein (1972)—even before it came out in German, the original language. Einaudi didn’t listen. The book was published elsewhere, with a foreword by Levi, only in 1984, but, three years earlier, he had included a passage in his personal anthology, The Search for Roots, translating it himself. Menschen in Auschwitz was important because it drew the moral map of Auschwitz: it described the acts and the persons, the rules and the roles, the order and the disorder. Langbein confirmed for Levi that the inhabitants of the Lagers were a varied population, difficult to describe and to judge, and Levi was encouraged by this to elaborate the idea of what would ultimately be called the “gray zone.”

  A key theme of The Drowned and the Saved, the collaboration of the Jewish prisoners with the German oppressors, emerges in the chapter “The Drowned and the Saved” in If This Is a Man, and, later, in The Truce, in characters like Henek and old Thylle and the Kleine Kiepura. In 1967 Levi heard of a short novel that in the original Dutch version, De nacht der Girondijnen (The Night of the Girondists), published in 1957, had appeared anonymously. The author was Jacob Presser (1899–1970), a historian who later published the most thoroughly documented history of the Nazi extermination in his country (Ondergang, 1965). Translated into German as Der Nacht der Girondisten, the novel was published, under the author’s name, by Rowohlt, in Hamburg, in 1959, together with another Dutch story of the war, Het bittere kruid (The Bitter Herb), by Marga Minco, the pseudonym of Sara Menco, which had also first appeared in 1957. According to Marco Belpoliti, on April 30, 1967, in a letter to Hety Schmitt-Maas (Levi’s principal interlocutor, Hety S., in the chapter “Letters to Germans”), Levi declared that he would get that volume directly from Rowohlt, and advised Hety to read it and then hand it on to others who might be interested.