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c h a p t e r 1 8 A Note on the Problem of Translation Ann Goldstein Although Primo Levi is known for his writings about the Holocaust and for the autobiographical book The Periodic Table, he also wrote poems, stories, essays, and reviews. He began writing poems and stories when he returned from Auschwitz, even as he was writing about his experiences there, and he continued to write throughout his life. Of his stories, Levi once said in a letter to his publisher, ‘‘I wrote them mostly straight off, trying to give narrative form to a pointlike intuition.’’ The stories convey that ‘‘point’’ or intuition—an emotion, a moment, a thought—in a few concise pages. Many of the stories feature animal or nonhuman protagonists, madeup machines or devices, magical events, otherworldly landscapes. Some are overtly satirical, or allegorical; most are conversational in tone and have a lightly humorous quality. They are usually grounded in reality, with just one element or aspect that may remove them into another realm. For example, the story ‘‘Buffet Dinner’’ has all the elements of a fancy evening party, but the observer-guest is a kangaroo. And in ‘‘Gladiators’’ the details of going to a sporting event are completely realistic and matterof -fact, including the halftime show; it is just that the gladiator-athlete’s antagonist is driving a car. (In fact, this story was first published in the magazine L’Automobile.) These shifts are not wry or whimsical; in the case 217 218 Ann Goldstein of gladiators we are, among other things, being led, gently, to think about our own barbarous instincts. ‘‘The Fugitive,’’ like many of Levi’s stories, starts off in an ordinary office; the details are utterly familiar to the reader—the broken copier, the annoying boss, the piles of papers in the desk drawers—but the poem that the protagonist writes turns out to have a life of its own. Similarly, in ‘‘Bureau of Vital Statistics,’’ the office is familiar (here we have the crowded, slow elevator and the coffee machine as well) but the office worker is assigned to think up ways for people to die. Levi was a working scientist, of course, and the language of his stories reflects that: it is one of the particular difficulties of translating them. The language can be literally scientific, with specialized technical terms, such as osservatori adiabatici (adiabatic observatories) or polimerizzazione precoce (premature polymerization)—the translator has to be sure of the correct English term (and also has to decide whether to use it). The opposite problem is where Levi describes a technical or scientific process, such as how to make a compass or how molecules bond, in nonscientific language; the translator has to make sure that not only the language but also the process are correct. His animals, whether real or invented, are described in terms of both physical and behavioral characteristics. In a mixture of the scientific and the fantastic, the heroines of the story ‘‘TV Fans from Delta Cep’’ tell us, ‘‘We have ten armpits: we are all built according to decadal symmetries, so that our length is the golden section of our radius’’ and, ‘‘Our men are ten or twelve centimeters long and look like your asparagus, and when we want to be inseminated we put them under our armpits for two or three minutes.’’ Even when the subject is not explicitly scientific, there is a precision, an exactness of description, that we associate with science. The invented device called the knall is ‘‘a small, smooth cylinder , as long and thick as a Tuscan cigar, and not much heavier: it is sold loose or in boxes of twenty. . . . It shatters stone and cement and in general all solid materials—the harder the material the more easily. It pierces wood and paper, and sometimes sets them on fire; it melts metals; in water it creates a tiny steaming whirlpool.’’ When the creaturelike poem of ‘‘The Fugitive’’ is examined by the protagonist under a microscope, the language, though not describing a strictly scientific procedure, has a scienti fic precision that can be hard to get right: ‘‘Tiny hairs were sticking out from the page, corresponding to attributes of the letters on the other side. In particular the extremities stuck out, the legs of the ‘d’s and ‘p’s, the little legs of the ‘n’s.’’ [13.58.252.8] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 17...

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