In the 1947 version, Levi writes ‘voglio che’. The change to ‘ho bisogno che’ in the 1958 edition closely recalls, and seems to be in dialogue with, the beginning of SQ (‘Prefazione’), where Levi states that he wrote his book to satisfy an urgent and elementary need - that of telling his story and bearing witness after his liberation from Auschwitz.

VG

The scant daylight that filters in from the small door and breaks the darkness of the underground gas tank does not simply penetrate the cold, damp, and suffocating enclosure in the author’s memory. It also infiltrates the second, revised edition of SQ, published by Einaudi in 1958. In its first version, which appeared eleven years earlier with De Silva, no daylight makes its way into the dark hole where Levi and his commando pretended to be working: ‘Eravamo in sei in una cisterna interrata, al buio. Non era uno dei lavori peggiori, perché nessuno ci controllava’ (OC I, 81; emphasis added). On closer inspection, the shift from complete darkness to twilight between the two versions can enrich our understanding of this chapter and, more broadly, of Levi’s art of testimony.

Glossing another of the several details that Levi revised in his second edition of SQ, Marco Belpoliti explains that such ‘new’ elements simply show how Levi’s memory works ‘per affioramenti progressivi dei ricordi’ (OC I, 1453). The belated mention of the suffused light at the beginning of the 1958 version of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ may indeed constitute yet another example of Levi’s progressive recollection. Certainly, some light must have illuminated the tank for the prisoners to carry out their task. Yet, as Vittorio Montemaggi notes (2011, 53-73), while adding to the realism of the scene, this nuance is also charged with symbolic overtones. It fulfills, in other words, a literary function. Montemaggi argues that this image may intertextually invoke the concluding scene of Dante’s Inferno, when, through a small opening, Dante and Virgil leave Hell’s cave to find themselves on the shore that surrounds Mount Purgatory. From here they begin their upward journey on a beautiful sunny morning. Similarly, by climbing out of the opening of the tank, Levi and Pikolo experience the hopeful transition from darkness into light: they leave the cave to be greeted by a restorative sun and the beauty of the distant mountains. Thus, the soft light suffusing the subterranean prison heralds both the benign presence of the sun and the moment of hopeful reprieve the two protagonists are about to experience. Its appearance in the opening scenes of the chapter’s second edition, therefore, performs a symbolic function. (This is perhaps also the case with the modified qualifier that defines the task assigned to the commando. While in the first version this was deemed merely ‘not the worst job’, in the second it becomes, in a more positive/sarcastic vein, a ‘luxury job’.)

The intertextual allusions to Dante’s Ulysses and Purgatorio that are central to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ are also introduced by another, more explicit, intertextual reference. At the end of the previous chapter, ‘Esame di chimica’, Levi compares Alex the Kapo with the devils of Dante’s Malebolge (OC I, 223), thus signalling his metaphorical reaching of the lowest part of Dante’s Hell, where fraud rules. In the following chapter, as we have seen, he climbs out, both physically and symbolically, from the concentration camp analogue of a Dantean bolgia. Before being once more submerged by the reality of the camp, in his dialogue with Pikolo, Levi catches a momentary glimpse of humanity’s greatness. Similarly, Dante’s encounter with Ulysses in Inferno 26 may be read as a momentary exception within the base world of Malebolge. (This appears to be Levi’s reading of the episode, as suggested by his footnotes to the school edition of SQ (OC I, 1417-18).) Levi even follows the order of Dante’s cantos, as the devils of Malebranche make their appearance in Inferno 21-23, while Ulysses occupies canto 26.)

Likewise, the friendship between Levi and Pikolo constitutes a ‘flaw of form’ in the camp’s universe, where all human relationships are reified. At the heart of this exception is a moment of shared humanity, made possible by a successful act of communication through translation. The precondition of this success is, in Robert Gordon’s words, the two protagonists’ ‘reciprocal openness to the other’ (Gordon 2001, 230). For Gordon, moreover, the true hero of this chapter is Jean Pikolo, ‘an intuitive master of the art of listening’ (249), who obeys ‘the ethical imperative to listen’ (252).

Levi further elaborates on this ethical imperative in two contiguous short stories from Lilít e altri racconti, written and published some years later, between 1975 and 1981. In ‘Lilít’ and ‘Un discepolo’, Levi reworks the same narrative situation and Dantean subtext of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, but inverts the characters’ roles and their symbolic movement outside the ‘infernal’ hole. The second story is especially relevant for appreciating the significance of Levi’s almost imperceptible reworking of the opening scene of the 1958 version of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’.

‘Un discepolo’ reports the episode of the newly arrived Hungarian prisoner, Bandi. Since Bandi’s moral integrity prevents him from breaking the senseless and cruel rules of the Lager, Levi feels compelled to ‘proselytise’ him and teach him to put his life before his moral system. By means of the story’s narrative setting, Levi brings readers back to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’:

In quel tempo pulivamo cisterne. Scesi nella mia cisterna, e con me era Bandi. Alla debole luce della lampadina, lessi la lettera miracolosa, traducendola frettolosamente in tedesco. Bandi mi ascoltava con attenzione: non poteva certo capire molto, perché il tedesco non era la mia lingua né la sua, e poi perché il messaggio era scarno e reticente. Ma capì quello che era essenziale che capisse: che quel pezzo di carta fra le mie mani, giuntomi così precariamente, e che avrei distrutto prima di sera, era tuttavia una falla, una lacuna dell’universo nero che ci stringeva, e che attraverso ad essa poteva passare la speranza (OC II, 258; emphasis added).

Several cues suggest that ‘Un discepolo’ could be read as a companion piece to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Both stories recount the same time in Levi’s life in the camp: we are back in the dark and damp underground tank from which Levi had climbed out after Pikolo. This time, however, Levi descends back into the infernal pit to carry a message of hope from the outside world. (With both Pikolo and Bandi, Levi uses the term ‘messaggio’.) It is once again he who is desperately trying to translate a text to an attentive listener, and, once again, it is the listener’s attentiveness and empathy that makes the act of communication possible despite the limits of translation. Finally, the ‘rupture’ in the time continuum of the Lager is once again completed by the unspoken act of sharing food, as Bandi freely gives Levi a stolen radish, the first fruit of Levi’s lesson (the same gesture is repeated in ‘Lilít’). In ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, Levi shares with his reader that, on that occasion, he would even have renounced his daily soup to be able to remember with greater accuracy Dante’s text.

Speranza is not a word Levi uses lightly. We do not find it in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. I would like to suggest, however, that a hint of the hope Levi experienced on that sunny morning in his conversation with Pikolo is symbolised, in the second edition of SQ, by the fleeting daylight that ruptures the darkness of the tank. In ‘Un discepolo’, we learn that very little or no natural light penetrated their underground prison, as they needed a lamp to read Levi’s letter: ‘alla debole luce della lampadina, lessi la lettera miracolosa’. This realistic disclosure about the work conditions in the tank takes the place of the natural light Levi had introduced in his revised edition of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Thus, in ‘Un discepolo’, we are once more returned to the same dark enclosure of the first version of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. If, however, the added detail of the sunlight disappears once more in the companion scene of ‘Un discepolo’, in its place we find that unspoken word: ‘la speranza’.

FG

The focus of ecosemiotics is ‘on the interactions between environmental conditions and semiotics processes and the diversity of life stories, meaning-making strategies, and narratives that spring from these intertwinings’ (Maran 2020, 4). One of the main difficulties in any ecosemiotic approach is that cultural entities are predominantly symbolic and therefore they are relatively independent from their environmental conditions, as symbols are made autonomous from their objects. In other words, because of the complex and highly symbolic quality of our human communications, we constantly run the risk of creating artifacts that are self-sufficient and closed, with little to no relationship with the actual material circumstances they describe and in which they are involved. This is an apparent danger for any form of literary narrative that aims to the status of testimony, as bearing witness (to the complexity of the nonhuman world as much as to what happened in Auschwitz) requires instead referring to a material reality that lies outside the text. To avoid a radical symbolic self-sufficiency, ecosemiotics scholars suggest paying attention to the inclusion of simpler iconic and (especially) indexical sign relations, as they ‘establish both the connection between the text and the communicative situation as well as make it possible to distinguish between the discursive universe and the real world’ (Maran, 33).

A crucial group of indexical signs is known in linguistics as deictics. Spatial and temporal words, such as here, or this, or now, have fixed semantic meanings, but their information refers to a specific context without which they cannot be properly interpreted. For instance, and broadly speaking, if I say ‘this’ in my speech, my interlocutor and I need to share an extra-linguistic context in which the close object I am pointing to with my deictic does exist. The absence of a shared material context in literary texts makes the use of deixis particularly poignant, as it inevitably incurs in some sort of paradoxical double experience: a similarity because both narrator and readers are surrounded by a material reality in which words like ‘this’ or ‘now’ have a specific meaning, and a disjunction between the context of the former and the context of the latter as they likely diverge (cfr. Uspenskij 2008, 112).

Beginning with the very title of his first book (Se questo è un uomo / If This Is a Man (my emphasis)), Levi’s use of deictics is remarkable in size and meaning, and plays a crucial role in his testimonial work. For instance, if we consider how he utilises the word ‘qui’ (here) in the context of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, we notice four occurrences, all of them in pivotal moments of friction between linguistic and extra-linguistic realities. In fact, Levi twice employs ‘qui’ in relation to the passage of the Commedia he is trying to remember (‘Qui mi fermo’; ‘Qui ancora una lacuna’). They represent a sort of pause in the character Levi’s effort to communicate with Pikolo, a mark of discourse interruption and ultimately of failure, as in both instances they denote a gap – a ‘lacuna’, as Levi calls it – in the intradiegetic attempt to teach his friend some Italian language and, most importantly, to share Dante’s poetry with him. Twice instead the deictic refers to the actual external environment of the concentration camp (‘come si dice qui’; ‘del nostro essere oggi qui’). In this case, too, the deictic determines a break of communication, but the relationship that is interrupted is between the intradiegetic narrator and the reader. The deictic ‘qui’ in the literary text refers in fact to a reality that is surely not shared by the readers of SQ, who likely have a completely different context denoted by ‘qui’ (the library, or their room, but almost certainly not Auschwitz). The deictic thus highlights an ambivalence, as every reader has their own experience of ‘qui’ and yet cannot truly refer to the reality to which the ‘qui’ in Levi’s book points, both epistemologically and ethically (as the reality of Auschwitz is almost unknowable to those who did not experience it). To paraphrase Maran, we may say that the ‘qui’ in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ emphasises both a connection and a distance between the discursive world of the text and the external reality of both the first-hand witness and the readers.

In a famous passage of SQ, Levi uses a different series of deictics but a similar strategy to address precisely the almost inconceivable distance between different instances of ‘qui’, as he writes that ‘questo vero oggi in cui io sto seduto a un tavolo e scrivo, io stesso non sono convinto che queste cose sono realmente accadute’ (emphasis added to the deictics).

Yet, the most radical application of such usage of deixis is in Il sistema periodico. The fictional testimony of the atom of carbon included in this volume ends in fact with the sentence ‘un doppio scatto, in su ed in giù, fra due livelli d’energia guida questa mia mano ad imprimere sulla carta questo punto: questo’ (OC I, 1032). In a story that links the entanglement of the human and the nonhuman world to the act of writing, the deictic metalinguistically redoubles and forces readers to pay attention to the material context of our reading. In pointing to its own materiality made of ink or graphite (carbon again!), Levi thus transforms the full stop from a mere convention into a literary strategy in which indexicality becomes a crucial testimonial tool capable of bringing together different realities without necessarily overlapping them. The deictic therefore functions as a sort of multistable sign through which we experience both writing and the external world; our presence and the presence of others; what happened out there and what is instead happening ‘qui’, here.

(On other instances of 'qui' in this chapter, see here.)

DB

Levi’s ‘chissà’ suggests that the decision to discuss Dante’s ‘Canto di Ulisse’ during the walk with Jean was a matter of mere happenstance, or better still of fortune, to use a word that was dear to Levi and crucial to his conception of the Lager (Gordon 2010). ‘Who knows’ how and why the Inferno, and not another text, came to Levi in this pivotal moment of human connection amidst the inhumanity of Auschwitz?

To answer that question, we may wish to note that Dante’s Inferno similarly occurred to many others among the first witnesses to describe the horrors of the Lager. In an article published in the Socialist daily Avanti! in October 1945, Francisco Largo Caballero, leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, recounted his ‘Ritorno dalla morte’ after being interned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, which he described as ‘uno scenario da “Inferno” dantesco’. Writing in the same daily in July 1949, the French Resistance fighter turned member of Parliament Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier described her own internment in similar terms: ‘Auschwitz! Si è molto scritto sui campi della morte: quando ci eravamo ci pareva che solo un Dante avrebbe potuto descriverne l’orrore per coloro che non ci sono stati’. Umberto Consiglio, bearing witness to the enormity of Dachau for L’Èra Nuova in May 1946, argued that ‘[s]olo Dante, guidato dal suo alto ingegno e aiutato dalle Muse, potrebbe degnamente descrivere quello che è stato il martirio di migliaia e migliaia di esseri umani’, comparing his arrival in the camp to ‘il “lasciate ogni speranza” della porta dell’inferno dantesco’. In that same year, Aldo Pantozzi described Mauthausen as the brutal realisation of Dante’s vision: ‘La fantasia di Dante relegò nelle infernali viscere della terra tali scene: dovevano passare sei secoli di civiltà perché esse, dalle tenebre infernali, venissero trasferite alla luce del sole dalla barbarie nazista’ (Pantozzi 2002, 88). In Liana Millu’s 1947 Il fumo di Birkenau, she describes that infamous Polish camp as having ‘l’aria “senza tempo” descritta nel cerchio dantesco’, relates how during her imprisonment her thoughts became ‘un tormento quasi dantesco’, and recalls her struggle to call to mind, as she sought to make sense of her condition, ‘un canto dell’Inferno dove si parla di dannati che trasportano pietre’ (Millu 1947, 36, 139, 166). As Robert Gordon summarises the situation, in Italian accounts of the Shoah, ‘Dante’s Inferno is a familiar and recurrent reference point’ (Gordon 2010, 52).

Far from a random occurrence or even a fortunate intimation, therefore, Levi’s decision to deliver a Lectura Dantis while in confinement might best be understood as conforming to a recognisable cultural pattern. Consider that while Levi and Jean were discussing ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ in Auschwitz, more than five thousand miles away, the Italian prisoner of war Giuseppe Berto was offering his own interpretation of Dante to his fellow internees in Camp Hereford, Texas, where he was held from May 1943 to February 1946 (Culicelli 2022, 286). Berto, who would go on to achieve literary acclaim with the publication of the novel Il cielo è rosso in 1950, had been captured in Africa, and the experience of military defeat, coinciding with the collapse of Mussolini’s regime, shattered his most deeply held convictions. Unlike many other Fascist true-believers, however, Berto refused to pass directly into the anti-Fascist camp, engaging instead in a continued confrontation with his former faith motivated by an agnosticism that he termed afascismo (CIDAS, 88).

That confrontation propels Berto’s Dante lectures, which he began to deliver in November 1943, but which were published for the first time only in 2015. If Levi focused on Inferno 26, Berto chose instead Inferno 5, the canto of Paolo and Francesca, with whom his current fate, cut off not only from his home but also from his previous ideals, inspired evident sympathy. It is not hard to recognise Berto himself in the description of Francesca’s ‘malinconia di cose belle perdute per sempre’ (461). Yet Berto appears to identify more with Dante the poet than with the sinners whom Dante pilgrim encounters during his voyage. Having witnessed first-hand, and with profound regret, the demise of Fascist Italy’s imperial ambitions in Africa, Berto presents a Dante

ancorato a quella sua medioevale concezione imperialistica, mentre l’impero e il potere teocratico dei papi erano ormai cose morte […]. E chi vi ha detto questo, vi ha anche spiegato come gran parte della grandezza morale di Dante abbia le sue origini appunto nella sua fede in ideali sorpassati. E questa interpretazione, ben che non possa del tutto convincerci, ci affascina per la sua novità, e sopra tutto perché molti di noi sappiamo quanto costi mantenere fede a quegli ideali che sembrano perduti (451).

With these words, Berto unmistakably addressed himself to all those Blackshirts whose honour rested on the refusal to forsake their ideals even when all seemed to be lost.

Primo Levi’s ideals are of course quite far from those promoted by Giuseppe Berto. Levi had been captured as an anti-Fascist partisan, Berto as a Fascist colonial soldier. Yet, just as Levi, interpreting Dante in Auschwitz, finds ‘forse il perché del nostro destino, del nostro essere qui oggi’, so too does Berto find that the Commedia speaks to his conflicted condition before the ‘pulpiti herefordiani’ (448). Ultimately, that condition appears to align Berto more closely with Levi than with Dante, whose unforgiving judgement of the sinners in Inferno clashes with more modern sensibilities. For Berto, ‘la poesia di Dante si rafforza e si esalta proprio dove i sentimenti umani raggiungono una vetta tale da superare i pregiudizi del poeta […]. Farinata, Ulisse, Brunetto Latini hanno un valore umano che sta al di sopra della religione e della morale’ (455-456). Does not this celebration of the sinners’ humanity echo, across a vast physical and ideological divide, the ‘così umano e necessario e pure inaspettato anacronismo’ that Levi discovers in his sympathetic identification with Dante’s Ulysses?

CLL

The scant daylight that filters in from the small door and breaks the darkness of the underground gas tank does not simply penetrate the cold, damp, and suffocating enclosure in the author’s memory. It also infiltrates the second, revised edition of SQ, published by Einaudi in 1958. In its first version, which appeared eleven years earlier with De Silva, no daylight makes its way into the dark hole where Levi and his commando pretended to be working: ‘Eravamo in sei in una cisterna interrata, al buio. Non era uno dei lavori peggiori, perché nessuno ci controllava’ (OC I, 81; emphasis added). On closer inspection, the shift from complete darkness to twilight between the two versions can enrich our understanding of this chapter and, more broadly, of Levi’s art of testimony. Glossing another of the several details that Levi revised in his second edition of SQ, Marco Belpoliti explains that such ‘new’ elements simply show how Levi’s memory works ‘per affioramenti progressivi dei ricordi’ (OC I, 1453). The belated mention of the suffused light at the beginning of the 1958 version of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ may indeed constitute yet another example of Levi’s progressive recollection. Certainly, some light must have illuminated the tank for the prisoners to carry out their task. Yet, as Vittorio Montemaggi notes (2011, 53-73), while adding to the realism of the scene, this nuance is also charged with symbolic overtones. It fulfills, in other words, a literary function. Montemaggi argues that this image may intertextually invoke the concluding scene of Dante’s Inferno, when, through a small opening, Dante and Virgil leave Hell’s cave to find themselves on the shore that surrounds Mount Purgatory. From here they begin their upward journey on a beautiful sunny morning. Similarly, by climbing out of the opening of the tank, Levi and Pikolo experience the hopeful transition from darkness into light: they leave the cave to be greeted by a restorative sun and the beauty of the distant mountains. Thus, the soft light suffusing the subterranean prison heralds both the benign presence of the sun and the moment of hopeful reprieve the two protagonists are about to experience. Its appearance in the opening scenes of the chapter’s second edition, therefore, performs a symbolic function. (This is perhaps also the case with the modified qualifier that defines the task assigned to the commando. While in the first version, this was deemed merely ‘not the worst job’, in the second it becomes, in a more positive/sarcastic vein, a ‘luxury job’.) The intertextual allusions to Dante’s Ulysses and Purgatorio that are central to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ are also introduced by another, more explicit, intertextual reference. At the end of the previous chapter, ‘Esame di chimica’, Levi compares Alex the Kapo with the devils of Dante’s Malebolge (OC I, 223), thus signalling his metaphorical reaching of the lowest part of Dante’s Hell, where fraud rules. In the following chapter, as we have seen, he climbs out, both physically and symbolically, from the concentration camp analogue of a Dantean bolgia. Before being once more submerged by the reality of the camp, in his dialogue with Pikolo, Levi catches a momentary glimpse of humanity’s greatness. Similarly, Dante’s encounter with Ulysses in Inferno 26 may be read as a momentary exception within the base world of Malebolge. (This appears to be Levi’s reading of the episode, as suggested by his footnotes to the school edition of SQ (OC I, 1417-18).) Levi even follows the order of Dante’s cantos, as the devils of Malebranche make their appearance in Inferno 21-23, while Ulysses occupies canto 26.) Likewise, the friendship between Levi and Pikolo constitutes a ‘flaw of form’ in the camp’s universe, where all human relationships are reified. At the heart of this exception is a moment of shared humanity, made possible by a successful act of communication through translation. The precondition of this success is, in Robert Gordon’s words, the two protagonists’ ‘reciprocal openness to the other’ (Gordon 2001, 230). For Gordon, moreover, the true hero of this chapter is Jean Pikolo, ‘an intuitive master of the art of listening’ (249), who obeys ‘the ethical imperative to listen’ (252). Levi further elaborates on this ethical imperative in two contiguous short stories from Lilít e altri racconti, written and published some years later, between 1975 and 1981. In ‘Lilít’ and ‘Un discepolo’, Levi reworks the same narrative situation and Dantean subtext of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, but inverts the characters’ roles and their symbolic movement outside the ‘infernal’ hole. The second story is especially relevant for appreciating the symbolic significance of Levi’s almost imperceptible reworking of the opening scene of the 1958 version of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. ‘Un discepolo’ reports the episode of the newly arrived Hungarian prisoner, Bandi. Since Bandi’s moral integrity prevents him from breaking the senseless and cruel rules of the Lager, Levi feels compelled to ‘proselytise’ him and teach him to put his life before his moral system. By means of the story’s narrative setting, Levi brings readers back to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’:

In quel tempo pulivamo cisterne. Scesi nella mia cisterna, e con me era Bandi. Alla debole luce della lampadina, lessi la lettera miracolosa, traducendola frettolosamente in tedesco. Bandi mi ascoltava con attenzione: non poteva certo capire molto, perché il tedesco non era la mia lingua né la sua, e poi perché il messaggio era scarno e reticente. Ma capì quello che era essenziale che capisse: che quel pezzo di carta fra le mie mani, giuntomi così precariamente, e che avrei distrutto prima di sera, era tuttavia una falla, una lacuna dell’universo nero che ci stringeva, e che attraverso ad essa poteva passare la speranza (OC II, 258; emphasis added).

Several cues suggest that ‘Un discepolo’ could be read as a companion piece to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Both stories recount the same time in Levi’s life in the camp: we are back in the dark and damp underground tank from which Levi had climbed out after Pikolo. This time, however, Levi descends back into the infernal pit to carry a message of hope from the outside world. (With both Pikolo and Bandi, Levi uses the term ‘messaggio’.) It is once again he who is desperately trying to translate a text to an attentive listener, and, once again, it is the listener’s attentiveness and empathy that makes the act of communication possible despite the limits of translation. Finally, the ‘rupture’ in the time continuum of the Lager is once again completed by the unspoken act of sharing food, as Bandi freely gives Levi a stolen radish, the first fruit of Levi’s lesson (the same gesture is repeated in ‘Lilít’). In ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, Levi shares with his reader that, on that occasion, he would even have renounced his daily soup to be able to remember with greater accuracy Dante’s text. Speranza is not a word Levi uses lightly. We do not find it in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. I would like to suggest, however, that a hint of the hope Levi experienced on that sunny morning in his conversation with Pikolo is symbolised, in the second edition of SQ, by the fleeting daylight that ruptures the darkness of the tank. In ‘Un discepolo’, we learn that very little or no natural light penetrated their underground prison, as they needed a lamp to read Levi’s letter: ‘alla debole luce della lampadina, lessi la lettera miracolosa’. This realistic disclosure about the work conditions in the tank takes the place of the natural light Levi had introduced in his revised edition of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Thus, in ‘Un discepolo’, we are once more returned to the same dark enclosure of the first version of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. If, however, the added detail of the sunlight disappears once more in the companion scene of ‘Un discepolo’, in its place we find that unspoken word: ‘la speranza’.

FG

Levi’s ‘chissà’ suggests that the decision to discuss Dante’s ‘Canto di Ulisse’ during the walk with Jean was a matter of mere happenstance, or better still of fortune, to use a word that was dear to Levi and crucial to his conception of the Lager (Gordon 2010). ‘Who knows’ how and why the Inferno, and not another text, came to Levi in this pivotal moment of human connection amidst the inhumanity of Auschwitz?

To answer that question, we may wish to note that Dante’s Inferno similarly occurred to many others among the first witnesses to describe the horrors of the Lager. In an article published in the Socialist daily Avanti! in October 1945, Francisco Largo Caballero, leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, recounted his ‘Ritorno dalla morte’ after being interned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, which he described as ‘uno scenario da “Inferno” dantesco’. Writing in the same daily in July 1949, the French Resistance fighter turned member of Parliament Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier described her own internment in similar terms: ‘Auschwitz! Si è molto scritto sui campi della morte: quando ci eravamo ci pareva che solo un Dante avrebbe potuto descriverne l’orrore per coloro che non ci sono stati’. Umberto Consiglio, bearing witness to the enormity of Dachau for L’Èra Nuova in May 1946, argued that ‘[s]olo Dante, guidato dal suo alto ingegno e aiutato dalle Muse, potrebbe degnamente descrivere quello che è stato il martirio di migliaia e migliaia di esseri umani’, comparing his arrival in the camp to ‘il “lasciate ogni speranza” della porta dell’inferno dantesco’. In that same year, Aldo Pantozzi described Mauthausen as the brutal realisation of Dante’s vision: ‘La fantasia di Dante relegò nelle infernali viscere della terra tali scene: dovevano passare sei secoli di civiltà perché esse, dalle tenebre infernali, venissero trasferite alla luce del sole dalla barbarie nazista’ (Pantozzi 2002, 88). In Liana Millu’s 1947 Il fumo di Birkenau, she describes that infamous Polish camp as having ‘l’aria “senza tempo” descritta nel cerchio dantesco’, relates how during her imprisonment her thoughts became ‘un tormento quasi dantesco’, and recalls her struggle to call to mind, as she sought to make sense of her condition, ‘un canto dell’Inferno dove si parla di dannati che trasportano pietre’ (Millu 1947, 36, 139, 166). As Robert Gordon summarises the situation, in Italian accounts of the Shoah, ‘Dante’s Inferno is a familiar and recurrent reference point’ (Gordon 2010, 52).

Far from a random occurrence or even a fortunate intimation, therefore, Levi’s decision to deliver a Lectura Dantis while in confinement might best be understood as conforming to a recognisable cultural pattern. Consider that while Levi and Jean were discussing ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ in Auschwitz, more than five thousand miles away, the Italian prisoner of war Giuseppe Berto was offering his own interpretation of Dante to his fellow internees in Camp Hereford, Texas, where he was held from May 1943 to February 1946 (Culicelli, 286). Berto, who would go on to achieve literary acclaim with the publication of the novel Il cielo è rosso in 1950, had been captured in Africa, and the experience of military defeat, coinciding with the collapse of Mussolini’s regime, shattered his most deeply held convictions. Unlike many other Fascist true-believers, however, Berto refused to pass directly into the anti-Fascist camp, engaging instead in a continued confrontation with his former faith motivated by an agnosticism that he termed afascismo (CIDAS, 88).

That confrontation propels Berto’s Dante lectures, which he began to deliver in November 1943, but which were published for the first time only in 2015. If Levi focused on Inferno 26, Berto chose instead Inferno 5, the canto of Paolo and Francesca, with whom his current fate, cut off not only from his home but also from his previous ideals, inspired evident sympathy. It is not hard to recognise Berto himself in the description of Francesca’s ‘malinconia di cose belle perdute per sempre’ (461). Yet Berto appears to identify more with Dante the poet than with the sinners whom Dante pilgrim encounters during his voyage. Having witnessed first-hand, and with profound regret, the demise of Fascist Italy’s imperial ambitions in Africa, Berto presents a Dante

ancorato a quella sua medioevale concezione imperialistica, mentre l’impero e il potere teocratico dei papi erano ormai cose morte […]. E chi vi ha detto questo, vi ha anche spiegato come gran parte della grandezza morale di Dante abbia le sue origini appunto nella sua fede in ideali sorpassati. E questa interpretazione, ben che non possa del tutto convincerci, ci affascina per la sua novità, e sopra tutto perché molti di noi sappiamo quanto costi mantenere fede a quegli ideali che sembrano perduti (451).

With these words, Berto unmistakably addressed himself to all those Blackshirts whose honour rested on the refusal to forsake their ideals even when all seemed to be lost.

Primo Levi’s ideals are of course quite far from those promoted by Giuseppe Berto. Levi had been captured as an anti-Fascist partisan, Berto as a Fascist colonial soldier. Yet, just as Levi, interpreting Dante in Auschwitz, finds ‘forse il perché del nostro destino, del nostro essere qui oggi’, so too does Berto find that the Commedia speaks to his conflicted condition before the ‘pulpiti herefordiani’ (448). Ultimately, that condition appears to align Berto more closely with Levi than with Dante, whose unforgiving judgement of the sinners in Inferno clashes with more modern sensibilities. For Berto, ‘la poesia di Dante si rafforza e si esalta proprio dove i sentimenti umani raggiungono una vetta tale da superare i pregiudizi del poeta […]. Farinata, Ulisse, Brunetto Latini hanno un valore umano che sta al di sopra della religione e della morale’ (455-456). Does not this celebration of the sinners’ humanity echo, across a vast physical and ideological divide, the ‘così umano e necessario e pure inaspettato anacronismo’ that Levi discovers in his sympathetic identification with Dante’s Ulysses?

CLL

The focus of ecosemiotics is ‘on the interactions between environmental conditions and semiotics processes and the diversity of life stories, meaning-making strategies, and narratives that spring from these intertwinings’ (Maran 2020, 4). One of the main difficulties in any ecosemiotic approach is that cultural entities are predominantly symbolic and therefore they are relatively independent from their environmental conditions, as symbols are made autonomous from their objects. In other words, because of the complex and highly symbolic quality of our human communications, we constantly run the risk of creating artifacts that are self-sufficient and closed, with little to no relationship with the actual material circumstances they describe and in which they are involved. This is an apparent danger for any form of literary narrative that aims to the status of testimony, as bearing witness (to the complexity of the nonhuman world as much as to what happened in Auschwitz) requires instead referring to a material reality that lies outside the text. To avoid a radical symbolic self-sufficiency, ecosemiotics scholars suggest paying attention to the inclusion of simpler iconic and (especially) indexical sign relations, as they ‘establish both the connection between the text and the communicative situation as well as make it possible to distinguish between the discursive universe and the real world’ (Maran, 33).

A crucial group of indexical signs is known in linguistics as deictics. Spatial and temporal words, such as here, or this, or now, have fixed semantic meanings, but their information refers to a specific context without which they cannot be properly interpreted. For instance, and broadly speaking, if I say ‘this’ in my speech, my interlocutor and I need to share an extra-linguistic context in which the close object I am pointing to with my deictic does exist. The absence of a shared material context in literary texts makes the use of deixis particularly poignant, as it inevitably incurs in some sort of paradoxical double experience: a similarity because both narrator and readers are surrounded by a material reality in which words like ‘this’ or ‘now’ have a specific meaning, and a disjunction between the context of the former and the context of the latter as they likely diverge (cfr. Uspenskij 2008, 112).

Beginning with the very title of his first book (‘Se questo è un uomo’ – If This Is a Man), Levi’s use of deictics is remarkable in size and meaning, and plays a crucial role in his testimonial work. For instance, if we consider how he utilises the word ‘qui’ (here) in the context of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, we notice four occurrences, all of them in pivotal moments of friction between linguistic and extra-linguistic realities. In fact, Levi twice employs ‘qui’ in relation to the passage of the Commedia he is trying to remember (‘Qui mi fermo’; ‘Qui ancora una lacuna’). They represent a sort of pause in the character Levi’s effort to communicate with Pikolo, a mark of discourse interruption and ultimately of failure, as in both instances they denote a gap – a ‘lacuna’, as Levi calls it – in the intradiegetic attempt to teach his friend some Italian language and, most importantly, to share Dante’s poetry with him. Twice instead the deictic refers to the actual external environment of the concentration camp (‘come si dice qui’; ‘del nostro essere oggi qui’). In this case, too, the deictic determines a break of communication, but the relationship that is interrupted is between the intradiegetic narrator and the reader. The deictic ‘qui’ in the literary text refers in fact to a reality that is surely not shared by the readers of SQ, who likely have a completely different context denoted by ‘qui’ (the library, or their room, but almost certainly not Auschwitz). The deictic thus highlights an ambivalence, as every reader has their own experience of ‘qui’ and yet cannot truly refer to the reality to which the ‘qui’ in Levi’s book points, both epistemologically and ethically (as the reality of Auschwitz is almost unknowable to those who did not experience it). To paraphrase Maran, we may say that the ‘qui’ in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ emphasises both a connection and a distance between the discursive world of the text and the external reality of both the first-hand witness and the readers.

In a famous passage of SQ, Levi uses a different series of deictics but a similar strategy to address precisely the almost inconceivable distance between different instances of ‘qui’, as he writes that ‘questo vero oggi in cui io sto seduto a un tavolo e scrivo, io stesso non sono convinto che queste cose sono realmente accadute’ (emphasis added to the deictics).

Yet, the most radical application of such usage of deixis is in Il sistema periodico. The fictional testimony of the atom of carbon included in this volume ends in fact with the sentence ‘un doppio scatto, in su ed in giù, fra due livelli d’energia guida questa mia mano ad imprimere sulla carta questo punto: questo’ (OC I, 1032). In a story that links the entanglement of the human and the nonhuman world to the act of writing, the deictic metalinguistically redoubles and forces readers to pay attention to the material context of our reading. In pointing to its own materiality made of ink or graphite (carbon again!), Levi thus transforms the full stop from a mere convention into a literary strategy in which indexicality becomes a crucial testimonial tool capable of bringing together different realities without necessarily overlapping them. The deictic therefore functions as a sort of multistable sign through which we experience both writing and the external world; our presence and the presence of others; what happened out there and what is instead happening ‘qui’, here.

DB

The scant daylight that filters in from the small door and breaks the darkness of the underground gas tank does not simply penetrate the cold, damp, and suffocating enclosure in the author’s memory. It also infiltrates the second, revised edition of SQ, published by Einaudi in 1958. In its first version, which appeared eleven years earlier with De Silva, no daylight makes its way into the dark hole where Levi and his commando pretended to be working: ‘Eravamo in sei in una cisterna interrata, al buio. Non era uno dei lavori peggiori, perché nessuno ci controllava’ (OC I, 81; emphasis added). On closer inspection, the shift from complete darkness to twilight between the two versions can enrich our understanding of this chapter and, more broadly, of Levi’s art of testimony. Glossing another of the several details that Levi revised in his second edition of SQ, Marco Belpoliti explains that such ‘new’ elements simply show how Levi’s memory works ‘per affioramenti progressivi dei ricordi’ (OC I, 1453). The belated mention of the suffused light at the beginning of the 1958 version of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ may indeed constitute yet another example of Levi’s progressive recollection. Certainly, some light must have illuminated the tank for the prisoners to carry out their task. Yet, as Vittorio Montemaggi notes (2011, 53-73), while adding to the realism of the scene, this nuance is also charged with symbolic overtones. It fulfills, in other words, a literary function. Montemaggi argues that this image may intertextually invoke the concluding scene of Dante’s Inferno, when, through a small opening, Dante and Virgil leave Hell’s cave to find themselves on the shore that surrounds Mount Purgatory. From here they begin their upward journey on a beautiful sunny morning. Similarly, by climbing out of the opening of the tank, Levi and Pikolo experience the hopeful transition from darkness into light: they leave the cave to be greeted by a restorative sun and the beauty of the distant mountains. Thus, the soft light suffusing the subterranean prison heralds both the benign presence of the sun and the moment of hopeful reprieve the two protagonists are about to experience. Its appearance in the opening scenes of the chapter’s second edition, therefore, performs a symbolic function. (This is perhaps also the case with the modified qualifier that defines the task assigned to the commando. While in the first version, this was deemed merely ‘not the worst job’, in the second it becomes, in a more positive/sarcastic vein, a ‘luxury job’.) The intertextual allusions to Dante’s Ulysses and Purgatorio that are central to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ are also introduced by another, more explicit, intertextual reference. At the end of the previous chapter, ‘Esame di chimica’, Levi compares Alex the Kapo with the devils of Dante’s Malebolge (OC I, 223), thus signalling his metaphorical reaching of the lowest part of Dante’s Hell, where fraud rules. In the following chapter, as we have seen, he climbs out, both physically and symbolically, from the concentration camp analogue of a Dantean bolgia. Before being once more submerged by the reality of the camp, in his dialogue with Pikolo, Levi catches a momentary glimpse of humanity’s greatness. Similarly, Dante’s encounter with Ulysses in Inferno 26 may be read as a momentary exception within the base world of Malebolge. (This appears to be Levi’s reading of the episode, as suggested by his footnotes to the school edition of SQ (OC I, 1417-18).) Levi even follows the order of Dante’s cantos, as the devils of Malebranche make their appearance in Inferno 21-23, while Ulysses occupies canto 26.) Likewise, the friendship between Levi and Pikolo constitutes a ‘flaw of form’ in the camp’s universe, where all human relationships are reified. At the heart of this exception is a moment of shared humanity, made possible by a successful act of communication through translation. The precondition of this success is, in Robert Gordon’s words, the two protagonists’ ‘reciprocal openness to the other’ (Gordon 2001, 230). For Gordon, moreover, the true hero of this chapter is Jean Pikolo, ‘an intuitive master of the art of listening’ (249), who obeys ‘the ethical imperative to listen’ (252). Levi further elaborates on this ethical imperative in two contiguous short stories from Lilít e altri racconti, written and published some years later, between 1975 and 1981. In ‘Lilít’ and ‘Un discepolo’, Levi reworks the same narrative situation and Dantean subtext of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, but inverts the characters’ roles and their symbolic movement outside the ‘infernal’ hole. The second story is especially relevant for appreciating the symbolic significance of Levi’s almost imperceptible reworking of the opening scene of the 1958 version of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. ‘Un discepolo’ reports the episode of the newly arrived Hungarian prisoner, Bandi. Since Bandi’s moral integrity prevents him from breaking the senseless and cruel rules of the Lager, Levi feels compelled to ‘proselytise’ him and teach him to put his life before his moral system. By means of the story’s narrative setting, Levi brings readers back to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’:

In quel tempo pulivamo cisterne. Scesi nella mia cisterna, e con me era Bandi. Alla debole luce della lampadina, lessi la lettera miracolosa, traducendola frettolosamente in tedesco. Bandi mi ascoltava con attenzione: non poteva certo capire molto, perché il tedesco non era la mia lingua né la sua, e poi perché il messaggio era scarno e reticente. Ma capì quello che era essenziale che capisse: che quel pezzo di carta fra le mie mani, giuntomi così precariamente, e che avrei distrutto prima di sera, era tuttavia una falla, una lacuna dell’universo nero che ci stringeva, e che attraverso ad essa poteva passare la speranza (OC II, 258; emphasis added).

Several cues suggest that ‘Un discepolo’ could be read as a companion piece to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Both stories recount the same time in Levi’s life in the camp: we are back in the dark and damp underground tank from which Levi had climbed out after Pikolo. This time, however, Levi descends back into the infernal pit to carry a message of hope from the outside world. (With both Pikolo and Bandi, Levi uses the term ‘messaggio’.) It is once again he who is desperately trying to translate a text to an attentive listener, and, once again, it is the listener’s attentiveness and empathy that makes the act of communication possible despite the limits of translation. Finally, the ‘rupture’ in the time continuum of the Lager is once again completed by the unspoken act of sharing food, as Bandi freely gives Levi a stolen radish, the first fruit of Levi’s lesson (the same gesture is repeated in ‘Lilít’). In ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, Levi shares with his reader that, on that occasion, he would even have renounced his daily soup to be able to remember with greater accuracy Dante’s text. Speranza is not a word Levi uses lightly. We do not find it in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. I would like to suggest, however, that a hint of the hope Levi experienced on that sunny morning in his conversation with Pikolo is symbolised, in the second edition of SQ, by the fleeting daylight that ruptures the darkness of the tank. In ‘Un discepolo’, we learn that very little or no natural light penetrated their underground prison, as they needed a lamp to read Levi’s letter: ‘alla debole luce della lampadina, lessi la lettera miracolosa’. This realistic disclosure about the work conditions in the tank takes the place of the natural light Levi had introduced in his revised edition of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Thus, in ‘Un discepolo’, we are once more returned to the same dark enclosure of the first version of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. If, however, the added detail of the sunlight disappears once more in the companion scene of ‘Un discepolo’, in its place we find that unspoken word: ‘la speranza’.

FG

In the 1947 version, Levi writes ‘voglio che’. The change to ‘ho bisogno che’ in the 1958 edition closely recalls, and seems to be in dialogue with, the beginning of SQ (‘Prefazione’), where Levi states that he wrote his book to satisfy an urgent and elementary need - that of telling his story and bearing witness after his liberation from Auschwitz.

VG

The late Stuart Woolf (1936-2021) must have smiled to himself when he first translated these lines, as a young historian working on his PhD in 1950s Turin. Woolf is the only published English translator of SQ; his fluid and immediate rendering of Levi’s words remains the version known to millions of anglophone readers. While the task of a translator is never easy, it may be that the clarity and simplicity of Levi’s style lends itself to translation and grants his writing a certain universality - almost like a chemical formula.

‘The Canto of Ulysses’ can be read as an ode to translation, not just from one language to another, but in a metaphorical sense, in the repositioning of meaning between people and time. This goes back to the idea implied in the etymology of the word ‘translation’, which comes from the Latin translatio, to ‘carry over’, to ‘bring across’. In this chapter, instances of translation form a mise en abyme that ‘carries over’ from Homer to Virgil, Virgil to Dante, Dante to Levi, Levi to Pikolo, Italian to French, Italian to English, and text to reader.

This more conceptual idea of ‘translation’ has become a way of understanding the testimonial act, central to Holocaust studies (Insana 2009; Felman and Laub 1992). Witnesses ‘translate’ into words their experience and their trauma. This process is often thought of as entailing a loss: an ineffable residue that cannot be communicated through language. However, the exchange that takes place between Levi and Jean in ‘The Canto of Ulysses’ invites us to rethink translation in terms of expansion, with each new version becoming part of the original’s harvest. The non-Italian reader’s lack of familiarity with ‘Who Dante is’, ‘What the Comedy is’, may at first seem a disadvantage. And yet, this has the enriching effect of aligning us with Jean: the reader/Pikolo attempts to overcome a linguistic and cultural barrier, to be in communion with the narrator/Levi. Conversely, Italian readers are likely to identify more closely with Levi, as they try, with him, to remember lines learned in their schooldays.

The new interpretative perspectives created by the translated text respond to the original and form a polyphony. This polyphonic effect works on two different levels: first, just as a piece of music sounds different when sung by a different voice, a translation performs a text in another language, with another instrument. Second, by co-existing in the literary universe of the original text, the many translations of this chapter embody the multiple voices that have resonated from Levi’s writing. As Levi and Jean walk, we see the process of translation unfold. As they come to understand each other, communication through words falters, and another kind of translation begins to happen:

O forse è qualcosa di piú: forse, nonostante la traduzione scialba e il commento pedestre e frettoloso, ha ricevuto il messaggio, ha sentito che lo riguarda, che riguarda tutti gli uomini in travaglio

The ‘something more’ is in the polyphony of their exchange, where the ensemble is greater than any individual line. It takes on a special significance in Woolf’s translation - or in any translation of these lines, for it becomes another performance, or layer, of the initial translational act. The message of the original seems to swell, rather than subside. And, just as a melody transcends individual notes, the concern for individual words is eventually superseded by the harmony between Levi and Jean. Describing Dante’s approach to divine grace in Paradiso, George Steiner writes:

But as the poet draws near the Divine presence, the heart of the rose of fire, the labour of translation into speech grows ever more exacting. Words grow less and less adequate to the task of translating immediate revelation (Steiner 1967).

Levi draws us to a similar source, one that sounds ‘like the blast of a trumpet, like the voice of God’. This ‘something more’ that is not bound to language has the universality of music. It reaches towards an inexpressible goodness or enlightenment. This is in direct contrast to the negative ‘ineffability’ that is so often used to describe elements of testimony in Levi and others, in the challenge the Holocaust posed to language, in the impossibility of its translation. Here, language does not drift towards a void of suffering, but towards a chorus of joyful expression, a blast of trumpets. Unlike elsewhere in SQ, the ambiguity present in the meeting of languages is not represented as a chaotic and hellish Tower of Babel, but as a fecund, creative space. Translation is momentarily reclaimed, and acts as an implicit resistance to the obsessive uniformity of Nazi ideology. But their ‘canto’ is interrupted by the cacophony of Auschwitz, and this revelatory chink is closed with a tragic, symphonic surge:

Infin che ’l mar fu sopra noi rinchiuso.

RMur

Note, n.d. (probably made during the 1920's), unsorted, Paxson File.

Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH. (2020, November 20). Today was a very, very odd day I testified before @senatehomeland They held a hearing on hydroxychloroquine. Yup, HCQ In the middle of the worst surge of pandemic HCQ It was clear how our information architecture shapes questions of science and medicine of COVID A thread [Tweet]. @ashishkjha. https://twitter.com/ashishkjha/status/1329646432958156801

Friedmann, M. (2020, September 21). City official: 2 Yale students tested positive for COVID after visiting professor’s lecture. New Haven Register. https://www.nhregister.com/news/article/City-official-2-Yale-students-tested-positive-15584946.php

carried by the conversation

An opportunity for a man to participate, but also ropes him in to offering an implicit endorsement of the group/meeting by blessing it. Willard is recommending another sort of testimonial.

Another example of white male testimony being necessary for Othered bodies to be taken seriously, connecting us to Palmer, Stewart, the Grimkes, and Douglass last week.

Campbell testimony

This is a little misleading, or is, at least, a very limited view of history. I mean, I understand that he's trying to make a broad claim to emphasize the importance of testimony, but although we certainly have a lot of narratives about individuals, history is mostly dictated by what we as a group (that is, not individuals creating their own testimonies) choose to preserve or erase/ignore.

use of testimony

comparing the system of players going to college before pros to indentured servitude or a plantation system / also uses testimony by getting someone else's opinion

Building credibility with the reader that the author did his/her research on these people and backgrounds to provide a balanced view.

This uses testimony as well as pathos. It draws upon the common bond of family that was so often broken by our relation with Cuba. President Obama uses this testimony to make a connection to the audience, especially since he may not have been directly affected by this issue.

Personal experience is used to highlight how he has witnessed some progress firsthand.