Gender and Translation: Writing as Resistance in Primo Levi's Se questo è un uomo
2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 16; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/10848770.2011.556899
ISSN1470-1316
Autores Tópico(s)Eastern European Communism and Reforms
ResumoAbstract This essay argues that translation in Se questo è un uomo (If This is a Man) (1947), as well as in related pieces, functions for Primo Levi as a key means for claiming and potentially repairing manhood. In its capacity to reposition meaning, translation functions as a powerful vehicle for affirming agency, particularly gendered agency. What emerges in Levi's writings, particularly in Se questo's “Canto of Ulysses” chapter, is the figure of the translator as resistance fighter: the man who uses his intellect, his love of languages and other men, and his desire to communicate in order to combat the assault on humanity perpetrated by Nazism and sustained by its legacy. In this Levi's writing exists on a continuum with the cultural work of the founding members of Giustizia e Libertà and, accordingly, complicates Italy's postwar understanding of partisan activity. Throughout Se questo è un uomo and related works, translation proves a vital if imperfect means for reclaiming manhood and for asserting the possibility of friendship across cultural, regional, ethnic, and gender boundaries. Notes Notes 1. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 26; hereafter abbreviated as SW and cited in the text. 2. The importance of gendered subjecthood here is not apparent from the title of the American edition, Survival in Auschwitz. While the first English edition appeared under If This is a Man, subsequent ones, undoubtedly shaped by marketing considerations, have been titled Survival in Auschwitz. The shift in meaning is problematic, particularly given the significance with which Levi invested translation as a bearer of meaning. See Nicholas Patruno, Understanding Primo Levi (Columbia, SC: South Carolina University Press, 1995), 10. 3. Zaia Alexander, “Primo Levi and Translation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi, ed. Robert S. C. Gordon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 155, 156. 4. Primo Levi, “On Translating and Being Translated,” trans. Zaia Alexander, Los Angeles Times 30 March 2003, 12–13. The essay appears in L’altrui mestiere (1985); the English version of this collection, Other People's Trades, does not include this essay. 5. As Levi remarks in The Drowned and the Saved, the linguistic humiliation and violence that he endured was not the same as that endured by native speakers Paul Celan and Jean Améry. 6. For a discussion of the violence that translation can encode, see Esther Allen et al., “The Politics of Translation,” PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers 3.6 (2005): 133–41; and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Translation as Culture,” parallax 6.1 (2000): 12–24. 7. Emily Apter, “Afterlife of a Discipline,” Comparative Literature 57.3 (Summer 2005): 205. 8. See Susan Tarrow, “Remembering Primo Levi: A Conversation with ‘Il Pikolo del Kommando 98,’” Forum Italicum 28.1 (1994): 101–10, in which Tarrow interviews Jean Samuel, the Jean of the “Canto of Ulysses” chapter: “He sent me a copy of the original version of that episode in May 1946; he had written it on February 14, 1946, more than a month before he found out that I too had survived” (103). Se questo è un uomo was first published in 1947 by De Silva. Patruno incorrectly writes that “The Canto of Ulysses” chapter was not included in the De Silva edition (8). 9. Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo (1958) (Torino: Einaudi, 2005), 102. 10. “Virtute” is more nearly “moral excellence.” It might also be translated as “virtue” or “manhood.” 11. See Zvi Jagendorf, “Primo Levi Goes for Soup and Remembers Dante,” Raritan 12.4 (Spring 1993): 11. Primo Levi's retelling and rewriting of the episode embeds it yet again in a story if not of salvation then certainly of survival—his own. 12. See Primo Levi, I sommersi e i salvati (Torino: Einaudi, 2007), 103; The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Random House, 1989), 129. Hereafter I refer to the text by its English title, abbreviated as DS, and cited in the text. 13. Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 45. 14. Jonathan Druker, “The Shadowed Violence of Culture: Fascism and the Figure of Ulysses in Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz,” Clio 33.2 (2004): 143–61. See, too, Guiseppe Mazzotta, “Letteratura e verità, la lezione di Primo Levi,” Vita e Pensiero 91.3 (2008): 119. 15. Jonathan Usher, “Primo Levi, the Canon and Italian Literature,” in Gordon, The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi, 174. 16. See Stanislao G. Pugliese, “In a Museum in Rome, Forgotten Partisans’ Stories,” Chronicle of Higher Education 47.39 (8 June 2001): B13, 2p. [downloaded from Ebscohost 23 April 2008]. See also Robert S. C. Gordon, “Primo Levi's If This is a Man and Responses to the Lager in Italy 1945–47,” Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought 48.1 (Winter 1999): 53. 17. See, for example, Franca Tagliacozzo, “Memoria e catarsi. Didattica della storia dopo Auschwitz,” La Rassegna Mensile di Israel 63.1 (July 1997): 111. 18. “On my shelf next to Dante and Boccaccio I kept my Mein Kampf” (DS, 178, emphasis in original). 19. Judith Woolf, “From If This is a Man to The Drowned and the Saved,” in Gordon, The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi, 35. 20. That said, there are very compelling readings that trace the parallels between the two texts. See, for example, Jagendorf, “Primo Levi Goes for Soup and Remembers Dante”; see, too, Alexander, “Primo Levi and Translation,” esp. 161–64. 21. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 38–39, emphasis in original. 22. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 172–73. Levi is writing of the translation of Se questo into German. 23. Apter, “Afterlife of a Discipline,” 205. 24. While this essay only discusses gender in terms of relationships between men, the gendering of women in Se questo is well worth considering. 25. Jean-Marc Dreyfus, co-author with Jean Samuel of Il m’appelait Pikolo (2007), provided me with this information in an email from 6 January 2010. See footnote 30. 26. I am indebted to Mena Mitrano for this connection. 27. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 110. 28. Tarrow, “Remembering Primo Levi: A Conversation with ‘Il Pikolo del Kommando 98,’” 102. 29. Ibid. “Pipel” is the singular form. The term has a double derivation.“Pipel” in Berliner dialect means “little boy”; with German “pipel” is a euphemism for “little penis” (105). 30. In his memoir Jean Samuel corrects Levi. See Jean Samuel, with Jean-Marc Dreyfus, Mi chiamava pikolo, transl. Claudia Lionetti (Milano: Frassinelli, 2008), 6. 31. See both www.wollheim-memorial.de/en/paul_steinberg_19261999, accessed 8 January 2010; and Susanna Egan, “The Drowned and the Saved: PL and Paul Steinberg in Dialogue,” History and Memory 13.2 (Fall/Winter 2001): 96–112. 32. Egan, “The Drowned and the Saved: PL and Paul Steinberg in Dialogue,” 107. 33. For a discussion of Brunetto Latini, see Michael Camille, “The Pose of the Queer: Dante's Gaze, Brunetto Latini's Body,” in Queering the Middle Ages, ed. Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 57–86, and William Burgwinkle, “‘The Form of Our Desire’: Arnaut Daniel and the Homoerotic Subject in Dante's Commedia” GLQ 10. 4 (2004): 565–97. 34. Heinz Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle, trans. David Fernbach (1980; New York: Alyson, 1994), 44–45. 35. See Heinz Heger, Die Männer mit dem rosa Winkel (Hamburg: Merlin-Verlag, 1972), 54, and Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle, 45. 36. Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle, 48. 37. Paul Steinberg, Speak You Also: A Survivor's Reckoning, trans. Linda Coverdale (New York: Picador, 2000). 38. Egan, “The Drowned and the Saved: PL and Paul Steinberg in Dialogue,” 98, 107. 39. Levi, Se questo è un uomo, 94. For a contrast between the earlier and later editions, see, too, Levi, Se questo e un uomo (Torino: Francesco De Silva, 1947), 115. 40. Levi, Se questo è un uomo, 116. The English translation is mine. 41. Levi, Se questo è un uomo, 95. 42. Valerio Ferme, “Translating the Babel of Horror: Primo Levi's Catharsis through Language in the Holocaust Memoir Se questo è un uomo,” Italica 78.1 (Spring 2001): 62. 43. See Gordon, “Primo Levi's If This is a Man and Responses to the Lager in Italy 1945–47,” 51. 44. Stefano Lazzarin discusses how this postwar desire to forget led to the recurring motif of the “racconto inascoltato” in postwar literature. See Stefano Lazzarin, “Il racconto inascoltato: Eduardo De Filippo, Dino Buzzati, Primo Levi,” Narrativa 24 (2003): 227–43. 45. David Ward, “Fifty Years On: Resistance Then, Resistance Now,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 4.1 (1999): 60. 46. Roy Demenico, “The Many Means of Anti-Fascism,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 4.1 (1999): 55. 47. James Edward Miller, “Who Chopped Down That Cherry Tree? The Italian Resistance in History and Politics, 1945–1998,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 4.1 (1999): 38. 48. Gordon, “Primo Levi's If This is a Man and Responses to the Lager in Italy 1945–47,” 50. Nineteen hundred copies of Se questo were originally sold; see Patruno, Understanding Primo Levi, 8. 49. Gordon, “Primo Levi's If This is a Man and Responses to the Lager in Italy 1945–47,” 50. 50. One thinks, for example, of the description of the virile partisan Lanciotto Ballerini. See Stuart Hood, “Partisan Memories,” History Today (August 2001): 14: “Ballerini's reputation as a fine figure of a man—‘molto bell’uomo’—an ex-boxer known for standing up to Fascist bullying even under the regime. The picture that emerged was of a working class hero—an instinctive anti-Fascist.” 51. Patruno notes that writer Natalia Ginzburg, wife of Leone Ginzburg and part of the Giustizia e Libertà circle, recommended against the publication of the original version of the memoir. Ginzburg was concerned that so soon after the war the potential readers would turn away from the subject of the camps (note n.1, p. 26). Gordon's research for “Primo Levi's If This is a Man and Responses to the Lager in Italy 1945–47” offers a similar interpretation of the postwar cultural climate. 52. See Robert S. C. Gordon, “Which Holocaust? Primo Levi and the Field of Holocaust Memory in Post-War Italy,” Italian Studies 61.1 (2006): 85–113. 53. Joel Blatt, “The Battle of Turin, 1933–1936: Carlo Rosselli, Giustizia e Libertà, OVRA and the Origins of Mussolini's Anti-Semistic Campaign,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 1.1 (1995): 36. 54. As Giuseppe Mazzotta has observed, this struggle counterpoints the inscription over the gates of Auschwitz, “Arbeit macht frei.” See Mazzotta, “Letteratura e verità, la lezione di Primo Levi,” 117. 55. Levi had joined the partisan group of the Partito d’Azione (Action Party), which had been formed in 1942 by members of the Giustizia e Libertà when, with the German occupation of France in 1940, the organization had been forced to shut down public operations. 56. For a discussion of Levi's reflections on his capture, see Alberto Cavaglion, “Primo Levi, il 1938, il fascismo e la storia d’Italia,” Belfagor: Rassegna di Varia Umanità 63.6 (November 2008): 719–23. 57. Quoted in Blatt, “The Battle of Turin, 1933–1936: Carlo Rosselli, Giustizia e Libertà, OVRA and the Origins of Mussolini's Anti-Semistic Campaign,” 40–41. 58. Mark Sanders, “Reparation and Translation: Primo Levi's ‘Letters from Germans,’” in Literary Responses to Violence, intro. Daniel Terris (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University, 2004), 75–83. Sanders draws on the work of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and her use of the concept of “Wiedergutmachung” as a means of mental and emotional reparation.
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