Poetry as testimony: Primo Levi's Collected Poems
2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 22; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09502360802271462
ISSN1470-1308
Autores Tópico(s)Violence, Religion, and Philosophy
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 1–56. Gary D. Mole, Beyond the Limit-Experience: French Poetry of the Deportation, 1940–45 (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), pp. 18–19; Sue Vice, ‘Holocaust Poetry and Testimony’ (this is an essay which I commissioned, along with Eaglestone, for a forthcoming special edition of the journal Critical Survey on Holocaust poetry). Quoted in Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002), p. 41. Primo Levi, If This Is A Man/The Truce, trans. S. Woolf (London: Abacus, 1987 1958), pp. 48, 96. Elie Wiesel, ‘The Holocaust as Literary Inspiration’, in Dimensions of the Holocaust (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1990), p. 7. Robert Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 1–2. Eaglestone, p. 38. Donald Bloxham and Tony Kushner, The Holocaust: Critical Historical Approaches (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 45. Agamben, p. 12. Quoted in Mole, pp. 11–12. Primo Levi, Moments of Reprieve, trans. Ruth Feldman (London: Abacus, 1987 [1981]), pp. 99–100. On the back cover of Ad Ora Incerta, Levi comments that ‘There have been times when poetry has seemed to me more suitable than prose for transmitting an idea or an image’ (Translated and quoted in Giovanni Tesio, ‘At an Uncertain Hour: Preliminary Observations on the Poetry of Primo Levi’, in Primo Levi: The Austere Humanist, ed. Joseph Farrell (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 160–70, 163. Sarah Kofman, Smothered Words, trans. Madaleine Dobie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998 [1987]), p. xv. Kofman, p. 36. Susan Gubar, ‘The Long and Short of Holocaust Verse’, New Literary History, 35.3 (2004), pp. 443–69 (also available online at http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk). Primo Levi, Collected Poems, trans. Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann (London: Faber, 1988 [1984]), p. 5. The reference here is to the American edition of If This is a Man, Survival in Auschwitz (New York: Touchstone, 1996): in the interview with Philip Roth, Levi says that the ‘model (or, if you prefer, my style) was that of the “weekly report” commonly used in factories: it must be precise, concise, and written in a language comprehensible to everybody in the industrial hierarchy’ (p. 181). Ian Thomson, Primo Levi (London: Vintage, 2002), p. 223. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1989 [1986]), p. 52. Jay Losey, ‘“The Pain of Remembering”: Primo Levi's Poetry and the Function of Memory’, The Legacy of Primo Levi, ed. Stanislao G. Pugliese (New York: Macmillan, 2005), p. 120. T. S. Eliot, Selected Poems (London: Faber, 1961), p. 53. Primo Levi, Ad Ora Incerta (Garzanti, 1984), p. 11. Agamben, p. 13. Significantly, the phrase is not used in Delbo's Auschwitz and After: the female equivalents of the musulmann are described more compassionately than in Levi's texts. This difference illustrates that the musulmann is located within a dialectic of masculinity between virility (both physically and intellectually) and emaciation. Sofsky quoted in Agamben, p. 44; Joram Warmund, ‘The Grey Zone Expanded’, in The Legacy of Primo Levi, pp. 163–74, 167. Primo Levi, The Black Hole of Auschwitz, ed. Marco Belpoliti and trans. Sharon Wood (Malden/Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), p. 42. Quoted in Mole, p. 103. Quoted in Mole, p. 11. Quoted in Agamben, pp. 166–7. Thomas Gray, ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’, in The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London and Harlow: Longman, 1969), pp. 103–41, 103. Patricia Yaeger, ‘Consuming Trauma; or, The Pleasures of Merely Circulating’, in Extremities: Trauma, Testimony and Community, ed. Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), pp. 25–51, 41. I am paraphrasing Yaeger here (p. 46) in her description of distracted activities after someone reads an article about suffering in the New York Times. Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, trans. Rosette C. Lamont (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 84. The Oxford Companion to the Bible, ed. Bruce M. Metzger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 628. ‘There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.’ The quotation comes from Ferdinando Camon, Conversations with Primo Levi, trans. John Shepley (Marlboro: The Marlboro Press, 1989 [1987]), p. 68. In his preface to Katzenelson's The Song of the Murdered Jewish People, Levi states that ‘There is no longer a God in the “void and empty” skies’ (The Black Hole of Auschwitz, p. 23). Shema: Collected Poems of Primo Levi, eds Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann (London: The Menard Press, 1976), p. 13. Thomson, p. 226; Agamben, p. 58. In The Black Hole of Auschwitz, Levi writes that the poem ‘had been dancing around my head even while I was in Auschwitz, and which I had written down a few days after my return’ (p. 25). Antony Rowland, Tony Harrison and the Holocaust (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001), pp. 25–6. TRAUMA: EXPLORATIONS IN MEMORY, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore/London: John Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 61. J.A. Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms (London: Penguin, 1982 [1977]), p. 236. Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy (London: HarperCollins, 1987 [1986]), p. 809. Terry Eagleton, ‘Material girl no more…’, THES, 16 February 2007, pp. 16, 17, p. 17. To be fair, Eagleton is (rightly) criticizing celebrities' obsession with alternative spiritual sources. Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, trans. Barbara Vedder (New York: Penguin, 1967), p. 22. Thomson, p. 506. Quoted in Thomson, p. 506. Emma Wilson, ‘Material Remains: Night and Fog’, in OCTOBER, 112 (2005), pp. 89–110, 95, 100. Carole Angier, The Double Bond: Primo Levi, a Biography (London/New York: Viking, 2002), p. 445. See footnote 13. Ana Douglas and Thomas A. Vogler, ‘Introduction’, in Witness and Memory: The Discourse of Trauma (London/New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 1–54, 46.
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