by Primo Levi
The Monkey’s Wrench, published here as The Wrench; The Reawakening, published here as The Truce; If Not Now, When?; The Drowned and the Saved; Other People’s Trades, published here in Other People’s Trades and Stories and Essays; Moments of Reprieve, published here in Lilith and Other Stories, Stories and Essays, and Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1981–1987; and The Sixth Day and Other Tales, published here in Natural Histories and Flaw of Form, are included by arrangement with Simon & Schuster, Inc.
The Mirror Maker: Copyright © 1989 by Schocken Books, Inc. The Periodic Table: English translation copyright © 1984 by Schocken Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
The Mirror Maker, published here in Stories and Essays and Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1981–1987, and The Periodic Table are included by arrangement with Pantheon Books and Schocken Books, imprints of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
English translation of the story “Quaestio de Centauris” first appeared in The New Yorker.
English translation of the essay “To Translate and Be Translated” first appeared in Yale Review.
About the Translators
ANN GOLDSTEIN (The Truce, The Periodic Table, and Lilith and Other Stories) is the editor of The Complete Works of Primo Levi, an eleven-year undertaking that began in 2004. She also edited and was one of the translators of A Tranquil Star, a 2007 collection of Levi short stories (all of which appear in The Complete Works) published by W. W. Norton & Company.
Goldstein has been involved with Italy and the Italian language for nearly thirty years. She has translated works by, among others, Pier Paolo Pasolini (Petrolio), Alessandro Baricco (Silk, Emmaus, Mr. Gwyn), Romano Bilenchi (The Chill), and Elena Ferrante (The Days of Abandonment and the tetralogy My Brilliant Friend), and was part of the team that translated Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone.
An editor at The New Yorker, Goldstein has worked with such writers as John Updike, Janet Malcolm, and Ian Frazier. She is the recipient of a PEN Renato Poggioli translation award and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
ANNE MILANO APPEL (Stories and Essays) has translated many works from the Italian, including Paolo Giordano’s The Human Body, Andrea Canobbio’s Three Light-Years, Goliarda Sapienza’s The Art of Joy, Claudio Magris’s Blindly, and Giovanni Arpino’s Scent of a Woman. Most recently, her work was awarded the John Florio Prize for Italian Translation (2013) and two consecutive Northern California Book Awards Translation Prizes for Fiction (2013 and 2014).
FRANCESCO and ALESSANDRA BASTAGLI (Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1949–1980 and Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1981–1987) are a father-daughter translation team. Francesco is a former assistant secretary-general at the United Nations and the former head of the EU Border Assistance Mission to Moldova and Ukraine. He lives in Milan. Alessandra is the translator of Jurek Becker’s The Boxer. She works as a book and news editor in New York.
JONATHAN GALASSI (Collected Poems) is a publisher and writer who has also translated the poetry of Eugenio Montale and Giacomo Leopardi. He is currently working on a translation of Montale’s later work.
JENNY McPHEE (Natural Histories and Flaw of Form) is the author of the novels A Man of No Moon, No Ordinary Matter, and The Center of Things. Her translations include Paolo Maurensig’s Canone Inverso, Crossing the Threshold of Hope by Pope John Paul II, and A Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg. She also contributed to the translation of Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone.
MICHAEL F. MOORE (The Drowned and the Saved) is the chair of the PEN/Heim Translation Fund. His most recent translations from the Italian include the novels Lost Words by Nicola Gardini, Agostino by Alberto Moravia, and Live Bait by Fabio Genovesi. He has recently completed a new translation of the nineteenth-century classic The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni.
NATHANIEL RICH (The Wrench) is the author of two novels, Odds Against Tomorrow and The Mayor’s Tongue. His essays and journalism appear regularly in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and Harper’s.
ANTONY SHUGAAR (If Not Now, When? and Other People’s Trades) is a translator from Italian and French, as well as a writer with a special interest in Mediterranean culture. He is currently working on a book about translation for the University of Virginia Press and is a contributing editor to Asymptote. His work has appeared, in print or online, in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The New York Review of Books, and many other publications.
STUART WOOLF translated If This Is a Man directly with Primo Levi in Turin in the late 1950s. The current translation is of the final, definitive text, into which Levi introduced minor changes.
About the Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi
The research activities of the Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi (the International Center for Primo Levi Studies) are aimed at all readers and scholars of Levi’s work, in every part of the world. Based in Turin, the city where Levi lived, the center has an ever-growing repository of editions of his works, including the numerous translations published in dozens of languages; critical and biographical works; and every form of written and audiovisual documentation of Levi and the reception of his work. It offers assistance for scholarly research and also undertakes its own initiatives, such as the Primo Levi Lecture, which is presented every year to foster debate on themes important to the writer and their connection with the world of today; the text of the lecture is regularly published in an Italian-English bilingual edition.
The center is an association established in 2008. Its partners are the Piedmont Region; the Commune and City of Turin; the Company of San Paolo; the Jewish community of Turin; the Foundation for Books, Culture, and Music; and the children of Primo Levi.
For more information, go to www.primolevi.it/Web/English.
About the Author
Born in Turin, Italy, in 1919 and trained as a chemist, Primo Levi was arrested during the Second World War as a member of the anti-
Fascist resistance and, in February 1944, was deported to Auschwitz. After spending eleven months in Monowitz, one of the three main camps in Auschwitz, Levi was liberated by the Red Army, and was eventually able to return home, after a circuitous odyssey through Eastern and Central Europe, which he wrote about in The Truce. Upon returning to Turin, he resumed his career as a chemist, and met his future wife, Lucia. They married in 1947, and eventually had two children, Lisa and Renzo. He also began to write about his wartime experiences. If This Is a Man, initially published in Italy in 1947, was one of the first books to document the experience of the Nazi death camps; in time, it was recognized as one of the most important books not only of the Holocaust but also of twentieth-century literature.
Although his first book was translated into English and published in America in 1959, Primo Levi, while already recognized as a distinguished writer in Italy, rose to international prominence only in the early 1980s, after his autobiographical The Periodic Table was championed by, among others, the critic Irving Howe, the literary scholar Alvin Rosenfeld, the translator Raymond Rosenthal, and Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow. Writing of this work, in which Levi frames his life through the elements of the periodic table, Bellow remarked, “There is nothing superfluous here, everything this book contains is essential.”
As a result of this new attention, Levi’s other major literary works—including the novel The Wrench; a collection of poems; and his most philosophical work, The Drowned and the Saved—were all published in English. Italo Calvino called Levi “one of the most important and gifted writers of our time.” Levi died in Turin in April 1987.
Levi’s collected works were first published in Italian in 1987–1990 by his Italian publisher, Giulio Einaudi Editore, and, in a new edition, in 1997. After his death, his fame continued to grow with the publication of biographies by Carole Angier and Ian Thomson; the appearance of Primo, a theatrical work and film, adapted and performed by Antony Sher; and the serialization of two of Levi’s short stories in The New
Yorker in 2007.
The Complete Works of Primo Levi, which is based on the 1997 Einaudi edition, contains writings that have never appeared before in English, and presents Levi’s entire body of work in English for the first time.
This book has been published with a translation grant awarded by the
Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Published by arrangement with Giulio Einaudi Editore
Copyright © 2015 by Liveright Publishing Corporation
Introduction copyright © 2015 by Toni Morrison
Translator’s Afterword by Stuart Woolf copyright © 2015 by Stuart Woolf
“Primo Levi in America” copyright © 2015 by Robert Weil
“Chronology,” maps of places relevant to Primo Levi in Turin and Piedmont,
“The Publication of Primo Levi’s Works in the World,” “Notes on the Texts,”
and “Select Bibliography” copyright © 2014 by Centro Internazionale
di Studi Primo Levi, Torino, Italy. All rights reserved.
All rights reserved
If This Is a Man by Primo Levi, translated by Stuart Woolf. Copyright © 1958 by Giulio
Einaudi Editore s.p.a. Published by arrangement with Viking Penguin,
an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
Frontispiece photograph copyright © by Gianni Giansanti / Sygma/Corbis
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