- Arduous Tasks: Primo Levi, Translation, and the Transmission of Holocaust Testimony
In her masterful book, Arduous Tasks, Lina Insana argues persuasively that Primo Levi became discouraged about translation’s potential to transmit Holocaust testimony. By the time he completed his translation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, he had come to doubt whether he could, as a witness to the Holocaust, carry his and others’ experiences over the threshold of understanding. He questioned whether the relationship between testimony and translation, both of which he saw as critically necessary to making manifest the violence of the mid-twentieth century, did not in fact undermine the authenticity of both. Insana’s book provides a brilliant and exceptionally well-researched set of case studies that take up Levi’s preoccupation with translation throughout the arc of his career as a writer and his concern that, as a translator, he was making himself and the world more vulnerable to further violence. [End Page 162]
All acts of translation are also acts of witnessing: the translator’s task is not merely to render an original into a target language, but also to see what the author of the original saw. Insana makes the case, convincingly, that Levi’s translations are more than just transpositions from one language to another; rather, Levi consciously “manhandles” the original texts in order to reassert his—and the authors’—voices over and against the dehumanization inherent in the Holocaust experience. Insana lays out her brief in the book’s first chapter: the pidgin language of the camps, with its brutal and deformed German inflected with Polish and Yiddish, established a new relationship between words and things—a relationship that that was “not intrinsically valid outside its specific time and place” (p. 29). Levi’s anxiety, expressed in the dreams he describes in Si questo è un uomo (translated into English as Survival in Auschwitz) and elsewhere, is an expression of worry over this hermeticism: it is difficult enough to understand what is happening to him at the time but how, Levi wonders, will he ever be able to explain it to an audience that has been hermetically sealed off from the horror?
Insana’s book traces the development of Levi’s deep unease with the task of translation, and examines the different strategies Levi uses to wrestle with his dual role as a victim and as one who has some control over the circumstances of his past and his future. She first takes up Levi’s interest in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s long poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the story, in verse, of the survivor of an unfathomable mishap at sea who finds himself fated, “at an uncertain hour,” to repeat his story to anyone who crosses his path. Coleridge’s mariner shares Levi’s guilt and grief over survivorship and his uncertainty about what he has done to merit his fate. Part of Insana’s thesis here is that Levi resides in the grey zone of the “uncertain hour,” where he gives in to a way of speaking that goes beyond rendering word for word, to an urgency to say what cannot be easily “carried over.”
Next, in a deeply revealing and beautifully layered analysis, Insana argues that the “Canto of Ulysses” chapter of Survival in Auschwitz is a remarkable exploration of Levi’s own misgivings about his skills as one who speaks for the dead. Homer’s Ulysses was a complex character, exhibiting the characteristics of both prudence and folly, whereas Dante, taking his lead from Virgil, makes him hubristic and transgressive. Levi, as he “translates” the “Canto of Ulysses,” resides somewhere between the transgressive and the creative. He is ambivalent about engaging in an act of kindness towards fellow inmate Jean, and yet insistent that such an act might be the only thing that will allow him, if not Jean, to remember himself as human. Ultimately, Dante’s Ulysses is punished because of his abuse of his rhetorical skills; Insana wonders whether Levi was not...