The Complete Works of Primo Levi Read online

  The Complete Works of

  Primo Levi

  CONTENTS

  VOLUME I

  Introduction

  Toni Morrison

  Editor’s Introduction

  Ann Goldstein

  Editor’s Acknowledgments

  Chronology

  Ernesto Ferrero

  1.IF THIS IS A MAN

  Translated by Stuart Woolf

  Appendix

  Translator’s Afterword

  2.THE TRUCE

  Translated by Ann Goldstein

  3.NATURAL HISTORIES

  Translated by Jenny McPhee

  4.FLAW OF FORM

  Translated by Jenny McPhee

  VOLUME II

  5.THE PERIODIC TABLE

  Translated by Ann Goldstein

  6.THE WRENCH

  Translated by Nathaniel Rich

  Translator’s Afterword

  7.UNCOLLECTED STORIES AND ESSAYS: 1949–1980

  Translated by Alessandra Bastagli and Francesco Bastagli

  8.LILITH AND OTHER STORIES

  Translated by Ann Goldstein

  9.IF NOT NOW, WHEN?

  Translated by Antony Shugaar

  Author’s Note

  Translator’s Afterword

  VOLUME III

  10.COLLECTED POEMS

  Translated by Jonathan Galassi

  11.OTHER PEOPLE’S TRADES

  Translated by Antony Shugaar

  Translator’s Afterword

  12.STORIES AND ESSAYS

  Translated by Anne Milano Appel

  Translator’s Afterword

  13.THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED

  Translated by Michael F. Moore

  Works Cited

  Translator’s Afterword

  14.UNCOLLECTED STORIES AND ESSAYS: 1981–1987

  Translated by Alessandra Bastagli and Francesco Bastagli

  Primo Levi in America

  Robert Weil

  The Publication of Primo Levi’s Works in the World

  Monica Quirico

  Notes on the Texts

  Domenico Scarpa

  Select Bibliography

  Domenico Scarpa

  Copyrights and Permissions

  INTRODUCTION

  The Complete Works of Primo Levi is far more than a welcome opportunity to reevaluate and reexamine historical and contemporary plagues of systematic necrology; it becomes a brilliant deconstruction of malign forces. The triumph of human identity and worth over the pathology of human destruction glows virtually everywhere in Levi’s writing. For a number of reasons his works are singular amid the wealth of Holocaust literature.

  First, for me, is his language—infused as it is with references to and intimate knowledge of ancient and modern sources of philosophy, poetry, and the figurative uses of scientific knowledge. Virgil, Homer, Eliot, Dante, Rilke play useful roles in his efforts to understand the life he lived in the concentration camp, as does his deep knowledge of science. Everything Levi knows he puts to use. Ungraspable as the necrotic impulse is, the necessity to “tell,” to describe the “monotonous horror of the mud,” is vital as he speaks for and of the throngs who died in vain. Language is the gold he mines to counter the hopelessness of meaningful communication between prisoners and guards. A pointed example of that hopelessness is the exchange, recounted in If This Is a Man, between himself and a guard when he breaks off an icicle to soothe his thirst. The guard snatches it from his hand. When Levi asks “Why?” the guard answers, “There is no why here.” While the oppressors rely on sarcasm laced with cruelty, the prisoners employ looks, glances, facial expressions for clarity and meaning. Although photographs of troughs of corpses stun viewers with the scale of ruthlessness, it is language that seals and reclaims the singularity of human existence. Yet the response to visual images collapses before language—its stretch and depth can be more revelatory than the personal experience itself.

  Everywhere in the language of this collection is the deliberate and sustained glorification of the human. Long after his eleven months in what he calls the Lager (Auschwitz III), as a survivor, Primo Levi understands evil as not only banal but unworthy of our insight—even of our intelligence, for it reveals nothing interesting or compelling about itself. It has merely size to solicit our attention and an alien stench to repel or impress us. For this articulate survivor, individual identity is supreme; efforts to drown identity inevitably become futile. He refuses to place cruel and witless slaughter on a pedestal of fascination or to locate in it any serious meaning. His primary focus is ethics.

  His disdain for necrology is legend. Dwelling on memories—his and others’—of survival rather than on the monstrous detritus of suffering, he is compelled by how suffering is borne whatever its consequence. Time and time again we are moved by his narratives of how men refuse erasure.

  Melancholy and sorrow often reside more in his poetry than in his prose. There we find insects, accusatory ghosts, and the sadness of place. In two of his poems, “Song of the Crow I” and “Song of the Crow II,” desolation is an inner reality monitored by a malevolent companion.

  In the first, memory and sorrow are fixed and eternal.

  “I’ve come from very far away

  To bring bad news.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  To find your window,

  To find your ear,

  To bring you the sad news

  To take the joy from your sleep,

  To spoil your bread and wine,

  To sit in your heart each evening.”

  The second “Song of the Crow” is even more resonant of despair.

  “What is the number of your days? I’ve counted them:

  Few and brief, and each one heavy with cares;

  With anguish about the inevitable night,

  When nothing saves you from yourself;

  With fear of the dawn that follows,

  With waiting for me, who wait for you,

  With me who (hopeless, hopeless to escape!)

  Will chase you to the ends of the earth,

  Riding your horse,

  Darkening the bridge of your ship

  With my little black shadow,

  Sitting at the table where you sit,

  Certain guest at every haven,

  Sure companion of your every rest.”

  Clearly exposed in Primo Levi’s work, the violent guards, whatever their power, come across as cowards who are more dangerous than the brave. It is also clear that, upon reflection, defiant humanism must share its sphere with the Crow.

  TONI MORRISON

  January 2015

  EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

  Primo Levi is known to English-speaking readers mainly for his writings on the Holocaust, If This Is a Man, The Truce, and The Drowned and the Saved, and for the autobiographical The Periodic Table. Yet he did not want to be characterized only as a Holocaust writer, and the label does him a regrettable injustice, for he was also a prolific writer of stories, essays, novels, and poems, on a wide range of scientific, literary, and autobiographical subjects. He liked to refer to himself as a centaur: a chemist and a writer, a witness and a storyteller, an Italian and a Jew. Saul Bellow, referring to The Periodic Table, noted: “There is nothing superfluous here, everything this book contains is essential.” The same could be said of virtually all Levi’s works, even the so-called minor ones.

  One of the reasons for Levi’s specialized reputation may be that until now his works have been available to the English-speaking audience only in piecemeal fashion. Some stories and essays had not been translated; some that had been translated were hard to find; and, perhaps most crucial, there was no single edition in English that brou
ght together his diverse writings in the form in which they originally appeared. There has thus been a real need for his works to be collected, scrupulously translated, and presented to an audience—both the general public and academia—that has long awaited access to his complete oeuvre. These three volumes are intended to address that need.

  The project began some fifteen years ago, when Robert Weil, now the editor in chief of the newly revived Liveright imprint at W. W. Norton, had the idea for such an edition and began assembling the English rights to Levi’s works. I joined the project in 2004. When we started looking at the current English editions, we realized that, given their incomplete nature, we had an opportunity to present Levi as he presented himself—that is, to present the books as they had appeared in Italian, chronologically and in the same format. Levi published most of his stories and essays—and, indeed, many of the chapters of his books—in newspapers and periodicals. Over forty years, he himself put together three collections of stories (Natural Histories, Flaw of Form, and Lilith and Other Stories), one of essays (Other People’s Trades), and one mixed (Stories and Essays). In addition, there were dozens of pieces—fiction, forewords, reviews, comments on and reactions to current events—that he did not organize into volumes himself but that were collected posthumously, as part of the Italian Opere, or Complete Works, edited by Marco Belpoliti and brought out by Levi’s publisher, Einaudi, in 1997. None of the collections made by Levi had been published in English in their entirety. A selection of stories from Natural Histories and Flaw of Form was published as The Sixth Day and Other Tales, in 1990, and one section of Lilith, “Present Perfect,” was published as Moments of Reprieve, in 1986. A version of Other People’s Trades came out in 1989, containing thirty-nine of the original fifty-one essays plus four from Stories and Essays, and a selection of pieces from the latter was published in English as The Mirror Maker, in 1989. An Italian volume culled from the previously uncollected essays came out in English in 2005 as The Black Hole of Auschwitz. And A Tranquil Star, published in 2006, includes previously untranslated stories from Flaw of Form and Lilith, as well as some previously untranslated and uncollected stories.

  In essence, the three volumes of this new Complete Works follow the Opere brought out by Einaudi in two volumes in 1997. In accord with the idea of a uniform edition, and in the interest of achieving a high degree of consistency and accuracy, we decided not only to translate new material but also to retranslate what had been previously translated. (The one exception is If This Is a Man: here we were fortunate to discover that Stuart Woolf, the original translator, had always wanted to revise his 1959 translation, and the revised version is the one that appears in this volume.)

  In the Einaudi volumes, the books proceed chronologically, and the same has been done here. The material previously uncollected in Italian appears in two parts, entitled Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1949–1980 and Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1981–1987. In addition, If This Is a Man is followed by an appendix in which Levi answered readers’ questions, and which, starting in 1976, was, by Levi’s wish, part of every edition of the book. The various story and essay collections—Natural Histories, Flaw of Form, Other People’s Trades, and Stories and Essays—are presented for the first time in English in the formats that Levi gave them. And we have given the original titles to Levi’s first two works, If This Is a Man and The Truce, which had been published in America under what at the time were considered the more commercially viable titles of, respectively, Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening. The Wrench, published in America as The Monkey’s Wrench, has also had its original title restored. (Unlike the Italian Opere, this new English edition does not include The Search for Roots, an anthology of passages, chosen by Levi, from writers important to him.)

  The first volume of the Complete Works contains If This Is a Man, Levi’s memoir of Auschwitz, and The Truce, his account of the nine-month journey home after the liberation of the camp, along with Natural Histories (1966) and Flaw of Form (1971). These two collections, which appear at the end of the first volume, include stories in a gentle science fiction vein, of a type that Levi had been writing since the forties, each one based on a technical idea originating in the laboratory or the factory. The first volume also contains a chronology and maps showing Levi’s world of Turin and Piedmont.

  The second volume begins with The Periodic Table, an autobiography in which each chapter has the name of, and is based on, an element of the periodic table. It is followed by The Wrench, a cycle of stories in which a rigger named Faussone recounts his adventures on the job at construction sites all over the world, from India to Alaska; the first series of Uncollected Stories and Essays, covering the years 1949 through 1980; and Lilith and Other Stories, a three-part collection of tales written in the 1970s and 1980s. The first section of Lilith, “Present Perfect,” consists of stories based on the Holocaust; the second, “Future Anterior,” of Levi’s particular sort of science fiction; and the third, “Present Indicative,” of stories based in everyday life. This volume concludes with Levi’s only real novel, If Not Now, When?, a “Western,” as he called it, about a band of Jewish partisans in Russia and Poland during the war.

  The third and final volume contains the Collected Poems; the essay collection Other People’s Trades; the two-part Stories and Essays; Levi’s more philosophical reflection on the Holocaust, The Drowned and the Saved; and Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1981–1987. Levi may be least well-known as a poet, but upon his return from Ausch-

  witz, as he was intensely writing the chapters of what became If This Is a Man, he was also writing poems about the experience, and he continued to write poems steadily, if irregularly, throughout his life. In a 1979 interview, he noted that his natural state was not that of a poet but that every so often “this curious infection appears . . . which erupts in a rash. . . . One finds the kernel of a poem in one’s body, the first line or a line, then the rest comes out.” Other People’s Trades is a collection of essays on a broad array of topics, ranging from the characters in Aldous Huxley’s novels to the origin and use of lac (the resinous substance used chiefly in shellac), and from why poets and chess players are irritable to the language of smells. Stories and Essays is made up of pieces originally published in the Turin daily La Stampa between the midseventies and the mideighties. In the highly influential ethical and moral meditation The Drowned and the Saved, Levi examined the experience of Auschwitz forty years later, confronting such themes as the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed, the importance of memory and of bearing witness.

  The third volume also contains notes on the texts, which provide the bibliographic and publishing history for each book; essays on Primo Levi in America and in the world; and a select bibliography. We did not want to overwhelm the text with annotation, but throughout we have supplied, in footnotes, basic information about literary and other works, people, places, and events that might not be familiar to the English-speaking reader. Each work has been considered a separate unit, and thus certain notes are repeated.

  One of the first things that Levi realized upon arriving in Auschwitz was how crucial language can be: even his rudimentary German, his ability to grasp orders that, if not followed, could lead to death, gave him an advantage. At another extreme of language is the child Hurbinek of The Truce, encountered in a makeshift Russian hospital after the collapse of Auschwitz. Hurbinek has no language, yet is desperate to speak: “His eyes, lost in his pinched, triangular face, flashed, terribly alive, full of demand, of insistence, of the will to be unchained, to shatter the tomb of his muteness. The speech that he lacked, that no one had taken care of teaching him, the need for speech, persisted in his gaze with explosive urgency.” Hurbinek dies: it is only through Levi’s words that he speaks—that he exists.

  Levi’s fascination with language and words is powerfully evident in “Argon,” the first chapter of The Periodic Table, in which he discusses the vocabulary of his Piedmontese-Jewish forebears, but also,
on another level, in a story like “Dizzying Heat,” in which he invents a series of palindromes. He strove in his writing for lucidity, precision, conciseness—qualities that he attributed in part to his training and profession as a chemist. He cited as a model the weekly report in the paint factory where he worked: clear, to the point, and understandable by everyone. Yet there is nothing cold or detached about this clarity; the tone is that of a scientific observer who is often humorous and sometimes moralistic but never pedantic or condescending. Although the structure of Levi’s sentences can be complex, it is not convoluted, and although he is not a fancy or elaborate writer, he often uses unusual words, especially technical and scientific ones, and so we find phenolic and maleic resins, a bevel gear and a centrifugal pump, the chemical formula for alloxan. He also liked to make up words, such as “disphylaxis” or “mnemagog.” His descriptions, whether of actual experiences or invented ones, are always meticulous; in a few pages he can create an entire world. In “Cladonia Rapida” (from Natural Histories) he gives us the full history of an automobile parasite, while in a single sentence, in the chapter “Zinc,” from The Periodic Table, we learn all the qualities of the element: “Zinc, zinco, Zink: laundry tubs are made of it, it’s an element that doesn’t say much to the imagination, it’s gray and its salts are colorless, it’s not toxic, it doesn’t provide gaudy chromatic reactions—in other words, it’s a boring element.”

  Levi’s works have been newly translated here by Anne Milano Appel, Alessandra Bastagli and Francesco Bastagli, Jonathan Galassi, Ann Goldstein, Jenny McPhee, Michael F. Moore, Nathaniel Rich, Antony Shugaar, and Stuart Woolf, many of whom have also added an afterword to their translations. In an essay on translation, Levi enumerates some of the pitfalls in transferring a text from one language to another—false friends, idiomatic phrases, local terms—and points out that it’s not enough simply to avoid the traps: that the translator’s most effective weapon is “a linguistic sensibility.” In a note to his own translation of Kafka’s The Trial, he said that he had tried to find a middle course between a propensity “to smooth what was rough,” retelling the story in “a language that has nothing to do with the original,” and offering a line-for-line, word-for-word transcription: “I made a determined effort to balance faithfulness to the text with the flow of expression.” Some of the specific problems of translating Levi have been indicated above: the sometimes complicated syntax; the science, including not just technical terms but descriptions of intricate biological or chemical processes or operations; the essays specifically about words or language, in which the English-language reader’s need for explanation might overwhelm the point, as in discussions of differences between Italian and the Piedmontese dialect. Finally, there is the obvious difficulty in these volumes of many voices attempting to represent the voice of a single writer, albeit in different works. We believe that the talents and the efforts of the individual translators and their sensitivity to the language and to the texts, guided by a uniform editorial standard, have resulted in a tone that is consistent and consistently recognizable, if you will, as Levian, and our hope is to have demonstrated that “linguistic sensibility,” keeping to a rigorous degree of accuracy without losing the eloquence, and purity, of the original.