The Complete Works of Primo Levi by Primo Levi

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Complete Works of Primo Levi by Primo Levi Stefania Benini The Complete Works of Primo Levi By Primo Levi. Edited by Ann Goldstein. New York: Norton, 2016. 3008 pp. We can speculate on what Primo Levi would have thought about the American edition of his complete works that appeared on the shelves in late summer 2015. In an essay on translation, titled "On Translating and Being Translated," Levi claims: "Linguistic friction tends to become racial and political resistance, another of our maledictions. It should follow that whoever practices the trade of translator or interpreter should be honored, insofar as he labors to limit the damage of Babel's curse; but this doesn't usually happen because translating is difficult work." Primo Levi himself was a translator and had a very troubling experience translating into Italian Jacob Presser's 1962 novella, De Nacht der Girondijnen, and Franz Kafka's The Trial. Levi writes about this experience in the project Ricerca delle Radici (In search of roots) that has not been translated in Ann Goldstein's edition of the complete works, modeled upon the complete Italian edition edited by Marco Belpoliti in 1997. This missing text is a significant absence in the American anthology because it does not allow readers to explore in a deeper fashion Levi's thought about translation and language, important because the concept of translation encompasses Levi's experience in the extermination camps. I am following here the thesis of Lina N. Insana in her Primo Levi, Translation, and the Transmission of Holocaust Testimony (2009). According to Insana, her volume, "sees in translation a signpost for Levi's reflection on language, on language in the camps and within the project of the Final Solution, on the challenges of testimony, and on the transmissive process, revealing the essential difficulty of translation and thus the challenges of survival-testimonial writing: the utter arduousness of the testimonial task" (11). The importance of the concept of translation for transmitting the babelic Lagersprache of Auschwitz, and for expressing the unutterable horror of the Lager's experience makes the task of the Primo Levi's translator even more arduous. Translating Levi with accuracy is crucial: it is necessary to honor his effort to write the unwritable with clarity, concision, and with a clear sense of [End Page 145] observation and attention to detail. To convey Levi's ability to portray a situation or a personality with few traits, with a moral sense of the weight of language that, in the extermination camp, was a matter of life and death, becomes a foundational task for the translator. If translation, as Insana claims, is a "necessary metaphor for Holocaust witnessing," Goldstein's anthology of Primo Levi's works comes forth as a crucial step for Levi's project of translating survival. It will fulfill the aftermath of the original as anticipated by Walter Benjamin in his pivotal essay "The Task of the Translator": "[A] translation issues from the original—not so much from its life as from its afterlife. For a translation comes later than the original, and since the important works of world literature never find their chosen translators at the time of their origin, their translations mark their stage of continued life." The afterlife of Levi's works comes through in this anthology through the voices of ten different translators (Anne Milano Appel, Alessandra Bastagli and Francesco Bastagli, Jonathan Galassi, Ann Goldstein, Jenny McPhee, MichaelF. Moore, Nathaniel Rich, Anthony Shugaar, and Stuart Woolf). In 2,800 pages, they provide not only the acclaimed and well-known works by Primo Levi already translated into English (If This Is a Man, known in English as Survival in Auschwitz; The Truce, previously translated as The Reawakening; and The Periodic Table), but also Primo Levi's poetry, his fiction works, and his essays that have been only partially translated. Some of the works already published in English have been retranslated, such as The Truce, translated for the anthology by the editor Ann Goldstein. The three volumes, ordered chronologically, also contain an introduction by Toni Morrison, a chronology, notes on the texts, essays on Primo Levi in the American and world context, and a select bibliography...