Primo Levi as a Contemporary Classic: Tradition and Translation
After Dante, Primo Levi has become one of the best-known Italian writers in the world, alongside two of his contemporaries, the poet and Nobel Laureate Eugenio Montale and the novelist Italo Calvino. I investigate how, as a poet, essayist, narrator and translator, his work has become part of the international canon of literary classics. The first chapter examines the concept of the literary canon, its limits, uses and legitimacy. I discuss the debates surrounding it, the attacks by cultural relativists and its reaffirmation by Harold Bloom. Further opposing theoretical positions from domains including Post-colonial Studies, Gender Studies and World Literature are also discussed, and I show how the traditional paradigm of ‘classics’ has now been undermined and the canon opened up to new ideas and perspectives on literature, as well as to new authors and works.
Levi’s initial motivation to write was the urgent need to preserve the memory of his deportation to Auschwitz: he had no literary aim other than clarity. In the early post-war period, it was a response to requests from institutions and committees, urging survivors to send memoirs and reports to testify against Nazi criminals, to count the victims, to register the missing people, and to recognize the merits of those who provided help to the deportees or their families. Levi’s response, his memoir "If This is a Man", was met with little initial acclaim from readers and critics. It was not until the mid-1970s that he gained recognition inside Italy with publication of his collected poems, science-fiction tales, autobiographical stories, essays and articles, and the novel "Se non ora, quando?" (1984). Levi’s reception by readers and critics developed in stages. Rejected by Einaudi, he had difficulty finding a publisher for "If This Is a Man" and he had to his living by working as a chemist.
In my second chapter, I discuss how Levi’s reception went from neglect, to the publication of his first works in English translation, then to the 1984 publication in the US of "The Periodic Table". This book of essays received favourable authoritative reviews and its success prompted the further promotion of all his other books in the American and British markets. This was followed in the mid-1990s by his rediscovery in Italy by a new generation of readers, overcoming the lasting prejudice against him of earlier critics. After discussing the difficulties and obstacles associated with the reception of his texts, I describe how Levi himself became aware of his international recognition and of the different reception of his works amongst readers who had not experienced war or Nazi-fascist persecution. This led him to reflect on the style and form of his writing and how he dealt with his sources. In his first works (except for specific references in "If This is a Man"), models such as Dante and Manzoni are mostly alluded to, but later they are explicitly declared.
Chapter 3 continues my exploration of the English translation of Levi’s works. I focus on his correspondence, in particular, with the American poet and artist Ruth Feldman who undertook the first translation of Levi’s verses. His poems, less well-known than his prose writing, were his first works, and the first of his works to be translated. The letters I discuss reveal his concerns about the interpretation of his words and the style of the translations, and about the preservation of poetic models such as Catullus and others like Leopardi, Petrarch, Manzoni, or Heine, Coleridge and Eliot. To this third chapter I have added an Appendix which transcribes and comments on the correspondence between Levi and Feldman. These include Levi’s last letters which contain significant information on the writer’s feelings in the last months of his life.
In the fourth and fifth chapters I deal with Levi’s translation of works by foreign authors, beginning with his anthology "La ricerca delle radici" – "The Search for Roots" – (Einaudi, 1981). His choices were personal. He deliberately excluded the ‘obvious’ names, those that he believed should be the heritage of every reader, such as Dante, Leopardi, Manzoni, and Flaubert, as well as authors whose work had not been translated fully into Italian (apart from a few that he translated himself for the publication). His choices were made for reasons of personal like or dislike and included works that had meaning for himself, rather than because of their traditional literary value. The common thread of his choices is that they touch essential aspects of his reflection on the questions of evil and the injustice of human suffering, and on the redeeming power of knowledge. The years during which Levi worked on this personal anthology are also the years of his personal maturity, during which he read widely in disciplines such as anthropology, ethnography, and sociology. He was exposed to Einaudi’s “Collection of religious, ethnological and psychological studies” early on, and later proposed to the publisher some important essays on the history of ethnography.
In the final chapter of the thesis, I focus on Levi’s translation of Mary Douglas’s "Natural Symbols" and explore the connections between Douglas’s research, dedicated to the close relationship between ritualism and social organization, and Levi’s reflections on the origin of evil and his elaboration of the concept of the “grey zone”. He believed that a defence against the disorder of life was hidden in the "Shulkhan Arùkh", a set of rules for Ashkenazi ritualism, and that its message was that when rules are divorced from morality, then hatred for the Jews and Auschwitz can result. The nagging anxiety created by the need to understand how the Holocaust happened runs through all of Levi’s work, resulting eventually in the redeeming project of "La ricerca delle radici".
