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

Dantists - and others - may be interested to note that this chapter (1958 edition) appears to be composed of 34 paragraphs (Dante’s Inferno, whose 26th canto this chapter references in its title, ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, consists of 34 cantos). (Readers may wish to conduct their own counts, including on the 1947 edition.)

Further, the chapter’s 26th paragraph - this one, by my count - is notably participatory in its narrative mode, combining a vocative exclamation, second person direct address, and the present tense to invite the reader into a particular type of intersubjective space: ‘Ecco, attento Pikolo, apri gli occhi e la mente, ho bisogno che tu capisca’. It is also the locus for Ulysses’/Dante’s second person plural participatory imperative, ‘Considerate [la vostra semenza]’, inviting us back to Levi’s own doubled, inclusive invitation in the novel’s prefatory poem: ‘Considerate se questo è un uomo | […] | Considerate se questa è una donna’ (see also this comment).

KP

This spot in the second edition of SQ (1958) is one of the few from which Levi actually removed words appearing in the 1947 edition (see Editions). He removed ‘Sua madre è finita a Birkenau’, a sentence implying that Jean’s mother did not survive her deportation. In fact, she did survive.

JD

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 text of the chapter used here is from the 1958 edition of Se questo è un uomo (Turin: Einaudi), the second published edition of the book, as reproduced in the edition of Levi’s complete works (Opere complete, hereafter OC) from 2016-2018, also published by Einaudi (OC I, 224-29). For this and other key works referenced or recommended, see the Bibliography page.

The text of the chapter from the first edition of Se questo è un uomo (hereafter, SQ) from 1947 (Turin: De Silva) is also included for comparison on the Editions page of this site. This is based on the text republished in OC I, 81-86.

As the editor of the complete works, Marco Belpoliti, explains, several manuscript versions of SQ - or its constituent parts - exist from 1946-47, as do notes for revisions leading up to the 1958 edition. On manuscripts of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ in particular, see OC I, 1467-71.

After 1958, although the book underwent certain further changes, for example with the addition of notes for a Schools edition (1973), or the Appendix of questions most frequently put to Levi (1976), the text of the chapter remained unchanged.

The text of the first published English translation of this chapter, from 1959, by Stuart Woolf (London: Orion), is also available on this site on the English page.

RG

The ‘registro di Kommando e rapportino quotidiano delle prestazioni’ are the very basic forms of labour narrative alluded to in the text, which can be read itself as a sort of counter-narrative to those.

EB

This is a further instance of the tension between manual and intellectual labour throughout the book and chapter.

EB

In I sommersi e i salvati, Levi discusses the obsession for ‘il lavoro ben fatto’:

L’amore per il lavoro ben fatto è una virtù fortemente ambigua. Ha animato Michelangelo fino ai suoi ultimi giorni, ma anche Stangl, il diligentissimo carnefice di Treblinka, replica con stizza alla sua intervistatrice: 'Tutto ciò che facevo di mia libera volontà dovevo farlo il meglio che potevo. Sono fatto così'. Della stessa virtù va fiero Rudolf Höss, il comandante di Auschwitz, quando racconta il travaglio creativo che lo condusse ad inventare le camere a gas. (OC II, 1223).

EB

This is interesting wording on hands: ‘non lavora manualmente, ha mano libera’. Hands, and manual work, have metaphorical value in this case, and are of central importance for Levi (see the documentary, Le mani di Primo Levi).

EB

The character of Pikolo is introduced by listing his roles as part of the workforce and hierarchy in the camp.

EB

Further in relation to labour, and to the infernal character of this chapter, might we note a possible reference to Dante’s Frate Alberigo (Inf. 33, 109-57) in the ‘polvere di ruggine [che] ci bruciava sotto le palpebre’?

EB

The theme of labour permeates the entire fabric of this chapter, in the context of a book which devotes a lot of attention to forced labour and its material conditions as a means for the destruction of humanity (see, for example, in the opening poem, ‘Considerate se questo è un uomo | che lavora nel fango’ (OC I, 139)). In this respect, it is also interesting to consider the implications of the infernal ‘verticality’ of Se questo è un uomo (and this chapter in particular) in relation to labour in the subsurface (see Karen Pinkus, Subsurface (2023)).

EB

Proper names. These are the first three of eleven or twelve (depending on how you count them) proper names of prisoners in the chapter (i.e. not including Dante and Ulisse). Levi uses them to create a vivid, peopled scene, to underline the mix of nationalities in the camp, and to bear witness to his fellow prisoners, many now dead. Later in the chapter, ‘Primo’ appears as a proper name for one of only three times in the whole book.

(For other names in this sequence, see, for example, also here, here, or here, or click on the 'names' tag to see linked comments).*

RG

The causative connector in inverted commas aims at highlighting the perverted logic regulating life in the Lager. Levi repeatedly noticed this disturbing lack of consequentiality, which prevented the prisoners from deducing from observation what the expected behaviour was, which in turn translated into a constant state of insecurity and danger: ‘ogni congettura è arbitraria ed esattamente priva di ogni fondamento reale’. Pikolo’s privileged condition follows another ‘fierce law’ of the Lager: ‘a chi ha, sarà dato; a chi non ha, a quello sarà tolto’.

EL

'Jean' is Jean Samuel, a young Frenchman from Alsace, who survived the camps and the Death Marches and was in contact with Levi after the war. In his 1976 Appendix to SQ, Levi relates:

‘È vivo, e sta bene, Jean, il “Pikolo” del canto di Ulisse: la sua famiglia era stata distrutta, ma si è sposato dopo il ritorno, ed ora ha due figli, e conduce una vita molto tranquilla come farmacista in una cittadina della provincia francese. Ci incontriamo talvolta in Italia, dove viene per le vacanze; altre volte sono andato io a trovarlo. Stranamente, ha dimenticato molto del suo anno di Monowitz: in lui prevalgono i ricordi atroci del viaggio di evacuazione, nel corso del quale ha visto morire di estenuazione tutti i suoi amici (fra questi era Alberto)’ (OC I, 294).

As noted here, Jean later wrote his own memoir, Il m’appelait Pikolo.

Levi would return to Jean and to this chapter, ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, re-reading and commenting on it, in his 1986 book I sommersi e i salvati, in the chapter ‘L'intellettuale ad Auschwitz’:

‘Rileggo dopo quarant’anni in Se questo è un uomo il capitolo Il canto di Ulisse: è uno dei pochi episodi la cui autenticità ho potuto verificare (è un’operazione rassicurante: a distanza di tempo, come ho detto nel primo capitolo, della propria memoria si può dubitare)’ (OC II, 1234).

RG

Levi’s encounter with Ulysses in Auschwitz centres around his painful yet exhilarating struggle to reconstruct Dante’s text from memory. But when Levi talks of his hope that, despite his inadequate rendering, Pikolo ‘got the message’, he is pointing at something other than pure philology. Uttered in the death camp, Dante’s words shine through the dust of school commentary. This estrangement effect triggers a kind of epiphany: ‘ha sentito che lo riguarda, che riguarda tutti gli uomini in travaglio, e noi in specie; e che riguarda noi due, che osiamo ragionare di queste cose con le stanghe della zuppa sulle spalle’. The momentary sense of liberation Levi derives from owning and sharing Dante’s sublime language has been interpreted as a celebration of humanist values that however fails to recognise the way in which these values are entangled with the very structures of domination that created the Lager (Druker 2004). Yet Levi never provides a univocal interpretation of ‘the message’ of Ulysses’ story. In fact, the episode has had a ‘bifurcated’ critical reception and its meaning has been contested since the Middle Ages (Barolini 2018). Moreover, the figure of Dante in general and his figuration of Ulysses in particular became central to Fascism’s nationalist cultural programme, something Levi could hardly have missed.

As with other protagonists of the Inferno, the issue has been how to reconcile Ulysses’ heroic stature as a character with the fact that he is ultimately condemned as an unrepentant sinner. While the prevalent opinion among early commentators of the Commedia was that Ulysses was a transgressor, there were some who presented him as an admirable figure. Cristoforo Landino calls Ulysses’ speech ‘honest and honourable’. Bernardino Daniello notes that the ancient myth of the ne plus ultra was ‘a false and futile belief’. On the other hand, not all modern critics praise Ulysses’ daring. John Ruskin warily observes that humans are yet to learn the ‘danger of this novelty of wisdom’. Still, it is in the modern period that a more positive view of Ulysses’ intellectual hubris starts to gain traction.

The frontispiece to Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) is often cited as the symbolic watershed between medieval deference to traditional beliefs and the modern project of exploration and innovation. This frontispiece depicts a ship which is about to pass through the pillars of Hercules, just like Dante imagined Ulysses and his crew dared to do. Another ship, near the horizon, is also approaching. Below the depiction of the ships, a Latin motto, taken from the Vulgate, recites: ‘Many shall pass through and knowledge shall be increased’. There is no indication of shipwreck; on the contrary, the ships move confidently ahead in full sail. The world has entered a new era and the ancient prohibition has become void: ‘these times may justly bear in their word […] plus ultra, in precedence of the ancient non ultra’ (Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605)).

To Horkheimer and Adorno, Bacon is the ‘herald’ of the modern belief that ‘knowledge, which is power, knows no limits’ – a principle that, taken to its extreme logical conclusion, leads to the gates of Auschwitz. Had Ulysses gone under, as Dante decreed, the world would have been a better place. However, the postmodern critique of rationalism disregards another, parallel line that connects Enlightenment conceptions of the human to emancipatory discourses in both politics and aesthetics. The revolutionary and Romantic era gave us many versions of the self-sacrificing heroes of knowledge, striving for the emancipation of humankind. Shelley’s Prometheus ‘gave men speech, and speech created thought | Which is the measure of the universe. | And Science struck the thrones of earth and heaven | […] for which he hangs | Withering in destined pain’ (Prometheus Unbound). As Dante does with the Homeric story, Shelley rewrites and extends a classical myth in a way that challenges the idea that knowledge is sinful or transgressive. In the preface to Prometheus Unbound, Shelley declares he would ‘rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon than go to Heaven with Paley [eighteenth-century theologian] and Malthus’. Shelley also names Dante as one of the stylistic predecessors to his own use of imagery ‘drawn from the operations of the human mind’. In his readings of the Commedia, Shelley was particularly attracted to similes that illuminate ways of seeing and knowing. But a shadow of Dante’s ambivalence lingers in Shelley’s suggestion that his Prometheus is similar to Milton’s Satan, minus the ‘taints of ambition […] and personal aggrandisement’.

From his long English exile, the Italian revolutionary and nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini contributed to making Dante into a national icon at the service of the Italian Risorgimento. In The Duties of Man, he defines humans as ‘creatures capable of rational, social, and intellectual progress’, warning his readers that ‘you descend to the level of brutes whenever you suppress, or allow to be suppressed any of the faculties that constitute human nature either in yourself or others’ (Mazzini 1892, 45). ‘Brutes’ (‘bruti’) is Dante’s term, and the passage as a whole reads like an extended paraphrase of Ulysses’ ‘orazion picciola’, whose rhetoric Mazzini puts to work here in support of ‘the emancipation of Woman [and] of the working man’ (146).

Mazzini’s duties of man were recast into the Fascist doctrine of the primacy of the state over the individual. The canto of Ulysses was similarly enlisted to the cult of Italian exceptionalism and imperial conquest. Responding to a survey to establish which was the most popular passage of the Commedia, Mussolini apparently nominated the line ‘de’ remi facemmo ali al folle volo’. The quotation struck some as scarily apposite. In the clandestine paper ‘Il Ribelle’ of 31 October 1944, the anti-fascist priest don Giacomo Vender, writing under the pseudonym Sancio Empörer, used the same verse to expose il Duce’s seductive lies: ‘Fascism’s great accomplishment has been to dress its sick [‘folle’] idea of life, humanity, nation and religion in seductive attitudes. [Everything] was made into a wing to hurl ourselves […] beyond the pillars of Hercules…de’ remi facemmo ali al folle volo’.

Levi leaves out the line altogether. His act of subversion is even more radical: as the Resistance fighters, he feels that Dante’s text is ‘about us’, but the role he chooses for himself is not that of the acquiescent victim, one of Ulysses’ anonymous crew. He writes himself and his fellow prisoner as the heroic, tragic protagonists of Ulysses’ ‘shipwreck with spectator’ (Blumberg). Far from being complicit with the master narrative of Fascism, Levi invokes Dante in the death camp to liberate and reclaim his words and restore to them all the force of their moral questioning.

RMuc

The high sea opens up new possibilities of connecting. This passage of the chapter follows a moment of solid and fixed textual memory. After managing the recitation of two terzine from Inferno 26 that initiate the encounter with Ulysses, Levi indicates his frustration at his inability to translate, but also points to Jean’s ability to connect from afar, from a cultural and linguistic remove. Then a gap in memory, a struggle to recall. Half phrases finally crystallise in a well-remembered line, ‘Ma misi me per l’alto mare aperto’ (Inf. 26, 110). This line first prompts Levi to play the role of teacher, explaining to Jean how ‘misi me’ is not the same as the French ‘je me mis,’ but rather something bolder (see also this annotation). In doing so, in envisioning the liberatory potential of breaking a boundary, a chain, putting oneself beyond a barrier, Levi sees a precious and telling connection between himself and Pikolo: ‘noi conosciamo bene questo impulso’. There is a flattening of difference here, a forging of a bond between two men that stretches across the Mediterranean, across a linguistic and poetic divide. Levi is no longer explaining, translating, teaching; instead, they have found a connection in seeking to go beyond, to break out and be free.

Importantly, this oceanic connection privileges Jean’s experience over Primo’s technical knowledge. It is by no means the same as the disdain for intellectuals shown by Alex at the beginning of the chapter. Rather, this emphasis on Pikolo’s experience - ‘Pikolo ha viaggiato per mare e sa cosa vuol dire…’ - is a way to privilege what might be gained through the perspective of the cultural outsider. Jean has been on the sea; he apparently knows what Primo describes as that feeling of freedom when there is nothing left but the aroma of the ocean. Has Primo not had that? (Perhaps only in the pages of books, by Salgari, Conrad?) Is he thus able to have a wholly different, more potent experience of Inferno 26 as a result of this ‘non-native’ reading? Earlier in the chapter, the ‘leggero odore’ of paint and tar have - strangely, almost paradoxically - brought to Levi’s mind ‘qualche spiaggia estiva della mia infanzia’, but this is of another order. Primo’s experience seems to have been shore-bound; Jean has truly sailed.

Because Pikolo knows (and the use of ‘sapere’ is telling here, in contrast to the ‘canoscenza’ of Ulysses’ dictum to follow), Primo can convey with both precision and lyricism that mode of apprehension and feeling of emancipation: ‘è quando l’orizzonte si chiude su se stesso, libero diritto e semplice, e non c’è ormai che odore di mare’. He is envisioning and embodying the possibilities of freedom, of being unbound and certainly not being inundated by odours of a very different kind, such as the paint and tar evoked earlier. The image of the horizon closing in on itself stands in stark contrast to the end of both Dante’s Inferno 26 and the end of this chapter, when it is the sea that closes over Ulysses and his companions, and - by implication and association - over Primo and Jean once more as well. The use of the verb ‘rinchiudere’ in that final moment is also striking, almost as if to imply that there are moments such as this one that open out to the world at large but there is the inevitable return to the horror of the camp that once more closes over them. Here, though, the sea is freedom: it is a simple, straight line of the horizon that connects these individuals together in their desire to escape.

In that exquisite, bittersweet phrase ‘dolci cose ferocemente lontane,’ there is something not just Ulyssean (‘né dolcezza di figlio…’), not just hybrid (‘dulcis’ and ‘ferox’ together, which also resonates with the ‘viver come bruti’ to come), but also a channeling of Purgatorio. One might think in particular of the opening of Purgatorio 8: ‘Era già l’ora che volge il disio | ai navicanti e ’ntenerisce il core | lo dì c’han detto ai dolci amici addio…’. Here, too, the sweet memory of things left behind is made bitter by their absence and separation across the sea. Such a way of thinking Ulysses and the ocean voyage across the Commedia is almost a banality; it nonetheless serves to give us some impetus to thinking about Levi as a reader of not just Inferno, but of other parts of the poem as well.

And it serves to have us perhaps think about this powerful moment of Mediterranean connectivity a little differently, to take that insight of valorising Jean’s non-native perspective out to the world at large. In his 1990 work Poetics of Relation, Martinican philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant espouses Relation as a means to connect globally and valorise the multilingual, multicultural nature of the Caribbean as a model for global culture that is rhizomatic and not tied to a single, Western line of becoming. Glissant sees the Mediterranean as an enclosed sea, ‘a sea that concentrates’, while the Caribbean is ‘a sea that explodes the scattered lands into an arc. A sea that diffracts’. In this moment of SQ, I wonder if we might find the Caribbean model as one that resonates more with the Primo-Jean dynamic, as Jean’s experience of the open sea asks us to see Dante’s text as one that is not enclosed but rather must be opened up to the global reader. Indeed, Glissant himself characterises Dante’s Commedia as a work that is committed to cultural mixing, dwelling on how ‘one of the greatest monuments of Christian universalisation stresses the filiation shared by ancient myths and the new religion linking both to the creation of the world’. Perhaps this moment of connection, of seeing the liberatory possibilities in the open sea that beckons, is not just a way to palpably feel the strength of Primo and Jean’s new bond, but also to urge us as global readers to embrace the diffractive, rhizomatic potential of a decolonised Dante.

AK

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

Air raid sirens were a common occurrence in Monowitz from the summer of 1944. Air raids gave prisoners a chance to escape, to meet and speak to fellow prisoners, to steal food, to gain some respite from their labours and the torment of the Kapos. Some prisoners welcomed the air raids as a sign that the Third Reich was obviously nearing its end. The air raids also frightened their tormentors, the SS guards.

There were large scale air attacks by the US Air Force against the I. G. Farben synthetic oil plant in Monowitz on 20 August, 3 September, 18 December and 26 December 1944, and on 19 January 1945, the day after the beginning of the evacuation of the camp. During the raid of 20 August, seventy-five prisoners were killed and a hundred and fifty injured; on 3 September, three hundred people, including SS and prisoners, were killed or injured. The high number of prisoner casualties was in part due to I. G. Farben employees forbidding prisoners to take cover in makeshift shelters.

CM

Subcamps of Auschwitz project

The system of rationing reached its extreme in the Nazi Lager. Nonetheless, Levi and many of his companions had already experienced the dilemmas of provisioning in the context of war and the violent repression enacted by the Salò Republic. This situation of scarcity and black market profiteering proved acute in the Valle d’Aosta to which Levi and his family had fled, along with many draft evaders and foreign Jews from the Balkans. When Levi joined his partisan comrades in the Col de Joux, they likewise experienced the challenges all partisans faced: how to safely secure supplies without alienating the local population or risking capture.

PB

With the chapter ‘I sommersi e i salvati’, Levi introduces the theme of Prominenz into his reconstruction of life in the Lager. From here on, Levi highlights the web of political relations structuring the concentration camp, wherein power circulates despite and as a function of the persecutors’ will to domination (Forti 2014). A web of relations following the gregarious dynamics of the human--animal as ‘social animal’ (see the conviction ‘every stranger is an enemy’ in the Preface) tends to establish hierarchical forms of cohabitation.

However, Levi also inspects such a ‘hierarchy of Prominenz’ from an ethical perspective: the ‘saved’ enter the circuit of Prominenz by assuming a certain ethical posture, that is, by calibrating their privilege either with solidarity towards their fellow inmates (such as Alberto or Lorenzo) or with a will to power and prestige that becomes blind towards his fellows’ oppression (such as Alfred L, Elias, Alex or Frenkel).

Pikolo is no exception: like any other human figure of salvation in SQ, he is initially presented to readers for his ethical value. The first part of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ describes Pikolo’s story of salvation: he obtained his privilege shrewdly as he understood the voids of power that could be filled with his collaboration. However, he does not use his privilege to increase the oppression of those located in the lower ranks, such as Levi, but works instead to share the advantages his higher position affords him. It is not by chance that Pikolo’s decision to ask Levi to help him to carry out a convenient job that day also, and unconsciously, creates the condition for one of the most intense and memorable dialogues of our literary tradition. If Dante’s verses could resound in Auschwitz and, with them, a moment of hope and mental wellbeing (‘it is doing me good’), it is because of a simple and small act of solidarity that we can never take for granted wherever privilege rules.

SG

This paragraph fascinatingly exemplifies how a text can build on bodily patterns and sensorimotor experience to produce an effect that enriches its semantic meaning. Positioned towards the end of the chapter, it coincides with the emotional peak of Levi’s attempt to explain Dante’s Commedia to Pikolo. The conversation leads Levi’s mind outside of the camp and far from his present condition (‘Per un momento, ho dimenticato chi sono e dove sono’), back to Turin (‘non lasciarmi pensare alle mie montagne, che comparivano nel bruno della sera quando tornavo in treno da Milano a Torino!’) and to a place where it is possible to devote time and mental effort to existential issues other than bare survival. Yet, at the same time, it is Levi’s present condition that makes it all the more important to convey to Pikolo the relevance of Ulysses’ story and Dante’s recounting of it.

The feeling of this sudden expansion – towards other geographical places, past times, and higher meanings – is rendered through various stylistic devices. While the average length of sentences in the chapter is 16.5 words (Voyant Tools), this sentence counts 74 words; the anomalous length of the sentence dovetails with the unusual breadth of Levi’s thoughts, with how far he concedes himself to go with his mind away from the concerns of his life in the camp. Within this continuous flow of words, the urgency of Levi’s present task is formally conveyed through the accumulation of paratactic sentences linked via asyndeton, which reinforce the idea of a linear proceeding, simply propelled forward without strong control (which would be expressed by a period with a more complex and rigid structure), stretching out towards meanings that seem to escape Levi’s reach (and whose scope progressively increases: specific textual passages; the Middle Ages; human destiny). However, this long, loosely ordered period is delimited by words with a high deictic power: ‘Trattengo’ and ‘oggi qui’. Both the opening verb and the closing pair of adverbs (temporal and spatial) identify a deictic centre that coincides with the narrator (and the reader): in between, the paragraph unfolds in a flow that leads both narrator and reader far from the camp, in an encompassing movement that reaches out in time and space to the point of touching and almost enfolding something ‘gigantesco’, which is the sense of destiny of the entire human race, and then swiftly reverts to the starting point of the here and now (‘oggi qui’). (For more on this 'qui', see here.)

The meaning of Levi’s words is reinforced thanks to a conceptual metaphor operating unconsciously which is that of THINKING IS MOVING (writing conceptual metaphors in capital letters is a linguistics convention). THINKING IS MOVING is an elaboration of the very general conceptual metaphor MIND IS BODY, which means that we automatically tend to conceptualise mental activities in terms of bodily activities, because the latter are those of which we have immediate experience. In this paragraph, the encompassing wandering of Levi’s thoughts, its breadth and immense distance from the reality of the camp, is conveyed through strategies that all variably rely on the reader’s bodily experience. Sensorimotor experience operates unconsciously and yet plays a crucial role: it is our non-representational knowledge of what is feels like to move through open spaces, to be held vs. be released, to roam freely with our bodies, that scaffolds and enriches our understanding of what it means to metaphorically roam with one’s mind. Thanks to this metaphor, because the deictic centre at the beginning and at the end of the period is the same and is close to the narrator (reader), this period is endowed with a feeling of circularity, of reaching out and returning to the starting point, which is not explicitly expressed in the text and is rather projected by the reader’s embodied experience.

MB

In an August 2013 article in The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates describes how Levi’s account of Auschwitz evokes for him the Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. Reading SQ, writes Coates, ‘I see my African ancestors here in America, suddenly aware that they will never go back, that they are dead to everyone they have known and loved’. (On the importance of 'here' / 'qui', see also this annotation.)

CLL

Levi returned on a handful of occasions elsewhere in his work to Dante’s Ulysses, for example in another text written at the same time in 1946, the poem ‘Ostjuden’ (‘Padri nostri di questa terra, | Mercanti di molteplice ingegno, | Savi arguti dalla molta prole | Che Dio seminò per il mondo | Come nei solchi Ulisse folle il sale’ (OC II, 690)) (for more on this, see also this annotation).

In fact, he was as much, if not more drawn to the Homeric figure of Odysseus, regularly evoking his intelligence, his powers of narration and speech, and of friendship. He includes a proud speech by Odysseus in his anthology of formative books, La ricercar delle radici (OC II, 27-29).

Another poem, Partigia (1981), mentions Ulisse as a nom de guerre of an anti-Fascist Resistance partisan (‘Dove siete, partigia di tutte le valli, | Tarzan, Riccio, Sparviero, Saetta, Ulisse?’, OC II, 722).

RG

Levi made direct reference to Ulysses also in the poem ‘Ostjuden’, collected in Ad ora incerta (1984; OC II, 530) but composed on February 7, 1946, while he was also working on SQ. As in the chapter, the cunning Homeric hero is a figure of Jewish people, in the poem of Eastern European Jews specifically.

Ostjuden

Padri nostri di questa terra,

Mercanti di molteplice ingegno,

Savi arguti dalla molta prole

Che Dio seminò per il mondo

Come nei solchi Ulisse folle il sale:

Vi ho ritrovati per ogni dove,

Molti come la rena del mare,

Voi popolo di altera cervice,

Tenace povero seme umano.

7 febbraio 1946

EL

Ulysses can be considered as an alter ego of Levi in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ and other passages of the writer’s works. By considering the nature of the link between the author and the classical hero, we can also clarify the reasons behind Levi’s choice of presenting to Pikolo the core episode of canto 26 of Dante’s Inferno. Levi himself connects his experience to that of Ulysses in a 1973 interview, where he states: ‘[M]i ero reso conto che proprio il canto di Ulisse era abbastanza importante, perché è un’evasione anche quella: cioè ero evaso raccontando di un’altra evasione. Questo Ulisse che si strappa dalla vita quotidiana per fare un viaggio che non ha ritorno: mi sembrava che avesse una vaga analogia con la [mia realtà]’ (OC III, 988).

First, Levi underlines the parallel between his condition of deportee and that of Ulysses, driven by his nature and fate (‘fortuna’?) to embark on a journey without return. On a smaller scale, in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ we also find one of the few physical movements in SQ – Primo and Jean’s trip to collect the soup. The chapter also represents a textual journey, where, while reading about Primo translating and interpreting Dante’s canto for Jean, we follow the path towards knowledge of the two characters. Finally, we can read it as a sentimental journey: the chapter is a nostos, a (temporary) memorial homecoming of the two protagonists to their homes and pre-Auschwitz lives. In the chapter, there is a constant superimposition of the experience and memory of Dante’s Ulysses with those of Levi (and Pikolo). Far from his home and family, Dante’s character sees Mount Purgatory in the distance before the shipwreck; this episode triggers in Levi the memory of the Piedmontese Alps he used to see on the horizon while going back home by train: ‘E le montagne, quando si vedono di lontano…le montagne…oh Pikolo, Pikolo, di’ qualcosa, parla, non lasciarmi pensare alle mie montagne, che comparivano nel bruno della sera quando tornavo in treno da Milano a Torino!’

When we consider the presence of Ulysses in Levi’s works, we should not only think of the Commedia. We must consider Homer’s Ulysses too, a character appreciated by Levi since his high-school years and often remembered in his writings and interviews. If we analyse Levi’s quotes from the Odyssey, we can find further points of contact emerging between Levi and his alter ego. We can start with the episode of Ulysses’ deception of Polyphemus, quoted explicitly in the chapter ‘L’ultimo’ in SQ. Here Levi narrates that as he was leaving the shower, ‘un fiduciario del Block si installa sulla porta, e tasta come Polifemo chi esce per sentire se è bagnato’. Primo and Alberto manage to trick the guard and even gain a generous amount of bread from their kombinacja. The common ground between the Greek hero and Levi are versatility and resourcefulness, the most famous traits of Homer’s Ulysses.

Levi considered this episode of the Odyssey crucial and included it also in his auto-anthology La ricerca delle radici with the title ‘Un uomo da nulla’. First of all, the physical description of Ulysses in the passage quoted in La ricerca delle radici – the hero is described as ‘un uomo da nulla, slombato, piccino’ – recalls Levi’s aspect in SQ. More importantly, the whole passage quoted by Levi revolves around the double name and identity of Ulysses. Introducing the excerpt, the writer notices that, while talking to Polyphemus, Ulysses ‘è fiero del suo nome, che finora aveva taciuto’. The name Nobody, chosen by Ulysses to fool the cyclops, recalls the loss of individual identity and the attribution of a new name (the number tattooed on the forearm) to Auschwitz prisoners.

In this sense, Ulysses can be seen not only as an alter ego of Levi, but also as an allegory of the Jews detained in Lagers. This is true also for some aspects of Dante’s Ulysses, as we can read in Levi’s comment to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ in the notes to the school edition of SQ: ‘In quell’istante, all’autore pare di intravvedere una conturbante analogia fra il naufragio di Ulisse e il destino dei prigionieri: l’uno e gli altri sono stati paradossalmente “puniti”’. In his narration of Ulysses’ shipwreck, Dante tells us that everyone on the boat is punished and dies. If we go back to consider the story of Homer’s Ulysses instead, the character could instead be an example of being ‘saved’. Having wandered for ten years, he was finally able to return to Ithaca, just as Levi managed to go back to Turin. Ulysses’ fellows represent instead the ‘drowned’, just like the majority of the prisoners detained in Levi’s barrack.

A final, crucial shared aspect linking Levi to Homer’s Ulysses is the narrative ability and the urge to relate his misadventures to others. The ethical need to share with others the trauma of Auschwitz is strong in Levi already during his detention and impelled him to write SQ. In the 1976 Appendix to the book, he remembers that ‘era talmente forte in noi il bisogno di raccontare, che il libro avevo incominciato a scriverlo là’ (OC I, 281). Levi will reconsider his previous accounts of the Lager from a new perspective in the 1970s. On several occasions, he compares the urge to communicate his experience of the concentration camp to Ulysses’ narration of his decade-long wanderings at the court of Alcinous. In I sommersi e i salvati, Levi adopts this comparison as the opening of the chapter ‘Stereotipi’, writing: ‘[È] bello sedere al caldo, davanti al cibo ed al vino, e ricordare a sé ed agli altri la fatica, il freddo e la fame: così subito cede all’urgenza del raccontare, davanti alla mensa imbandita, Ulisse alla corte del re dei Feaci’. Ulysses is seen here as a prototypical model of the oral narrator and the founder of the genre of the memorial accounts of the survivor (‘reduce’) of traumatic events. Thus, an alter ego not only of Levi as a character but also of Levi as writer.

MM

While referring principally to the hero of the Homeric epic, ‘Ulisse’ also represents the kind of moniker that could serve Italian partisans as a nom de guerre. In his 1981 poem Partigia, Primo Levi enquires into the fate of his companions in the Resistance: ‘Dove siete, partigia di tutte le valli, | Tarzan, Riccio, Sparviero, Saetta, Ulisse?’ Historian Sergio Luzzatto reports that Levi’s 1946 application for recognition as a partisan listed his own code name as 'Ferrero' (Luzzatto 2016, 165-66).

PB

In this same paragraph, the ‘Pikolo’ is said to be a ‘fattorino-scritturale, addetto alla pulizia della baracca, alle consegne degli attrezzi, alla lavatura delle gamelle, alla contabilità delle ore di lavoro del Kommando’, and three paragraphs later Levi adds that ‘la carica di Pikolo costituisce un gradino già assai elevato nella gerarchia delle Prominenze’.

Whereas the other titles mentioned in this chapter - Vorarbeiter; Kapo - identify recognised positions within the hierarchy of the Lager, Pikolo, according to the testimony of Jean Samuel, was the invention of Primo Levi: ‘Pikolo was not a camp job. The term was coined for me by Primo Levi. I was the only Pikolo. Of course, all the Kapos had helpers, often very young people, sometimes as young as twelve, who served as their assistants, doing everything they asked, including prostitution. The Kapos’ lovers, their sexual victims, were called “Pipel”. I escaped all that’ (Samuel, Dreyfus 2015, 37; my translation).

Jean’s testimony also raises questions about the spelling of this term. In a letter he sent to Levi on 13 March 1946, Jean signed his name with his title and identification number from Auschwitz, ‘Picolo ex 176.397’, amending the spelling to ‘Piccolo’ in subsequent correspondence (Franceschini 2017, 268). Moreover, Levi replied to Jean’s letter with a note dated 24 May 1946, attached to which was an early draft of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, which differs in some ways from what would become the published version, including identifying Levi’s conversation partner as ‘Jean detto Piccolo', a spelling that corresponds to that adopted in the draft of the chapter that Levi sent to Anna Foa on 14 February 1946 (269). Beginning with the first edition of SQ, however, the spelling of Jean’s title was changed to ‘Pikolo’. Fabrizio Franceschini argues that Levi adopted this term, with its new spelling, from its common usage in northern Italian (and possibly also in Vienna in German usage) to refer to shop boys and other minor functionaries (272-79).

CLL

The Vorarbeiter, or foreman, was responsible for supervising the prisoners’ labour. This was a privileged position within the Lager, for which extra food rations were provided (Megargee 2009-2012, 200). A study of another camp reports that those ‘employed as foremen (Vorarbeiter) represented the most hateful attitudes towards Jews’ (4), a finding that might inform our understanding of Levi’s account of Auschwitz. In SQ, Levi discusses the Vorarbeiter in the chapter ‘Il lavoro’, where he explains the discriminatory power that the role affords: ‘Il Vorarbeiter ha distribuito le leve di ferro a noi e i martinetti ai suoi amici’ (OC I, 44).

For confirmation of the violence with which this power was enforced, we can consult the archives of the United States Holocaust Museum, which contain the contents of a talk given to members of the French Army in October November 1945 in which the deportee Henry Cogenson testified that: ‘As for Kapos and Vorarbeiter, mostly German, Russian or Polish “common criminals”, they, like the SS, never knew when to stop; after having been hit by others when they were simple inmates, they returned the favor on their peers now that they were given a smidgen of power. It was rather common to bring back to camp in the evening a comrade who had been struck during the day and was unable to withstand the blows’. The Auschwitz Museum online hosts images of the armbands worn by the Vorarbeiter, and of the whips they used to beat prisoners. We might also compare Levi’s account with that contained in the Auschwitz survivor Tadeusz Borowski’s 1946 collection of short stories Pożegnanie z Marią (This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, 1967), wherein the Vorarbeiter Tadeusz is a frequent protagonist.

CLL

The intense sensoriality of this sentence opens up questions of visceral geographies and material ecocriticism by way of stimuli pertaining to touch and taste in particular: the rusty environment gives rise to forbidding language associated not only with the exterminatory context (burning/blood) but also with the human being pervaded by the non-human, as the particles of iron oxide unsettle the functioning of the eyes and gullet.

DAFR

My reflections here build on Lino Pertile’s 2010 essay, ‘L’inferno, il lager, la poesia’. Pertile notes the profound correspondence between the opening poem of the book (OC I, 139) and this chapter. He points out how the main theme of Levi’s book, the dehumanising experience in the Lager, based on the annihilation of people’s identity, is expressed in the poem and resurfaces explicitly again in the chapter dedicated to Dante’s Ulysses. The key term revealing the correspondence of themes and intentions is ‘Considerate [consider]’, used twice in Levi’s poem (‘Consider if this is a man | … | Consider if this is a woman’) and rooted in the memory of Dante’s famous tercet where Ulysses addresses his crew as they sail towards the horizon of their last journey beyond the pillars of Hercules: ‘Considerate la vostra semenza: | fatti non foste a viver come bruti, | ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza’ (Inf. 26, 118-20 and OC I, 228).

There are many other correspondences between the chapter of Ulysses and the opening poem, besides the ‘Considerate’, and that they are profound and filtered through the theme of memory, an eminently Dantean theme: the urgency to fix in the memory itself what is or will be necessary to tell, or the urgency to express and recount what is deposited in memory. Indeed, for Levi, the memory of each individual person contains that person’s humanity.

Memory is immediately activated as Primo and Jean exit the underground gas tank (‘He [Jean] climbed out and I followed him, blinking in the brightness of the day. It was warm [tiepido] outside; the sun drew a faint smell of paint and tar from the greasy earth that made me think of [mi ricordava] a summer beach of my childhood'). Temporarily escaping hell by means of a ladder (a sort of Dantesque ‘natural burella’), it is the tiepido sun and a characteristic smell that evoke the childhood memory and that at the same time the reader cannot avoid connecting to the tiepide case of the initial poem (‘You who live safe | in your heated houses [tiepide case]’ [my emphasis]). It is then around the memory ‘of our homes, of Strasbourg and Turin, of the books we had read, of what we had studied, of our mothers’ that another theme in the chapter coalesces, the theme of friendship (‘He and I had been friends for a week’), a theme that had already emerged in a more general connotation in the opening poem (‘visi amici’). Warmth, friendship (visi amici…Jean), the kitchens as destination for Primo and Jean’s walk (the walk from the tank with the empty pot is ‘the ever welcomed opportunity of getting near the kitchens’, not for that hot food [cibo caldo] evoked in the poem, but for the soup of the camp, an alienating incarnation of Dantesque ‘pane altrui’ whose various names are dissonant). During the respite of the one hour walk from the tank to the kitchens, the intermittent memory of Dante’s canto emerges as if from an underground consciousness, the memory of Inferno as a partial and imperfect mirror of the human condition in the Lager, Ulysses as poetic memory, a sudden epiphany of a semenza, a seed, of humanity that the Lager is made to suppress, and Primo’s wondering in the face of this sudden internal revelation of still possessing an intact humanity. Primo’s memory of his home resurfaces as if springing from the memory of Dante’s text: the ‘montagna bruna’ of Purgatory is reflected in the memory of ‘my mountains, which would appear in the evening dusk [nel bruno della sera] when I returned from Milan to Turin!' But the real, familiar landscape is too heartbreaking a memory of ‘sweet things cruelly distant’, one of those hurtful thoughts, ‘things one thinks but does not say’. There is an epiphanic memory then, the poetic memory that surfaces during the walk and that reveals to Primo that he still is a man, a memory to which he clings despite the sense of his own audacity (‘us two, who dare to talk about these things with the soup poles on our shoulders’); there is also a more intimate memory, equally pulsating with life and humanity - but dangerous, because it makes Primo vulnerable to despair, threatening his own survival in the camp.

The urgent need to remember Dante’s verses in this chapter develops the theme of memory, which has been central from the opening poem. In Levi’s poem, though, memory is perceived from a different angle: the readers (who live safe…) must honour that memory and transmit it as an imperative testimony of what happened in the concentration camp from generation to generation, testifying to the suffering of the man and the woman ‘considered’ in the poem. This is a memory to be carved in one’s heart, which must accompany those who receive it in every action and in every moment of each day like a prayer. Not coincidentally the poem follows the text of the most fundamental prayer of Judaism, the Shemà Israel, which is read twice a day, a memory to be passed on to one’s own children, a responsibility which is a sign of one’s humanity. The commandment to remember of the opening poem (‘I consign these words to you. | Carve them into your hearts') issues a potential curse to the reader, threatening the destruction of what most fundamentally characterises their humanity - home, health, children: ‘Or may your house fall down, | May illness make you helpless, | And your children turn their eyes from you’. Finally, Primo’s act of remembering during the walk to the kitchens is submerged by the Babelic soup (‘Kraut und Rüben…cavoli e rape…Choux et navets…Kàposzta és répak…Until the sea again closed – over us’) and yet the memory of it becomes part of his testimony in such a central chapter of the book written after surviving the Shoah. If the memory of Dante’s verses contributed to Primo’s faith in his own humanity and his psychological and physical survival in the camp, he then accomplishes the commandment of memory and his responsibility as a man through his own writing.

CS

Despite this and other gaps in his recall, Levi actually succeeds in reconstructing just under half of Dante’s narrative of the encounter with Ulysses in Inferno 26, wholly or almost wholly recalling (a notable) 26 out of 58 verses (24 complete verses, two partial) - and with remarkable accuracy.

The verses shown in bold below from Inferno 26 (85-142) are the ones Levi remembers. To explore this comparison for yourself, jump to the Dante tab.

KP

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

In developing the concentration camp system in the 1930s, amongst other methods, the SS used prisoner spies to undermine prisoner solidarity, and to uncover resistance and escape plans and other perceived prisoner infringements. The spies would be given increased food rations and other “luxuries” in return for supplying information on prisoners to Kapos or SS guards.

Being a prisoner spy was not without risk. If the occasion arose, prisoners sometimes took the opportunity to rid themselves of a spy.

CM

Subcamps of Auschwitz project

Levi’s reference to the bowl is significant. The bowl was the most important possession of the concentration camp prisoner. No bowl, no food. If you lost your bowl or had it stolen, you either starved or stole somebody else’s bowl. At night in the barracks, you slept with your bowl safe in your hand or under your body.

The bowl is life.

CM

Subcamps of Auschwitz project

This sentence suggests Sunday afternoon bicycle rides and walks with family in bourgeois pre-war Germany. Levi’s subsequent use of the SS man’s first name in the next sentence (‘È Rudi’) also suggests a relatively relaxed atmosphere, as if Levi sees a friend on that Sunday afternoon ride or walk.

The picture painted of a quant Sunday afternoon bicycle ride is highly ironic. By 1943, Germany was struggling to keep its armed forces and economy operating. There was a serious lack of fuel for the vehicles of the Wehrmacht and the factories of the Third Reich. Resort was made to the use of the horse and bicycle for transport, wood gas for powering automobiles, and, above all, there was rationing. Synthetic oil production was seen as an alternative to overcome the lack of access to natural resources, including oil. I. G. Farben, the giant German chemical conglomerate, took the decision in 1941 to build a synthetic oil plant at the village of Monowitz, near Auschwitz, utilising the slave labour from the Auschwitz camps and the local abundance of coal and water. As the war progressed and the fuel shortage worsened, the importance of the synthetic oil plant at Auschwitz surged. This was visible in the increasing number of Auschwitz prisoners assigned to work at the I. G. Farben plant, and the creation of a Monowitz sub camp of Auschwitz in 1942 and, subsequently, an independent camp, Auschwitz III–Monowitz in 1943. By 1944, ten thousand Auschwitz prisoners were housed at the concentration camp Auschwitz III–Monowitz, working solely for I. G. Farben.

‘Rudi’ is riding his bike as there is little petrol for vehicles, even for the SS and the concentration camps, and even at the plant supposedly producing synthetic oil.

CM

Subcamps of Auschwitz project

For Levi, Alex, the Kapo, was one of the most fearsome individuals in the Monowitz camp, even more so than the SS men. The SS had developed and honed the concentration camp system, starting in 1933 in Dachau. They developed the system to control and eventually break the prisoners. One of the methods used was to introduce camp prisoner functionaries who would have total powers over other prisoners. This had the benefits of reducing SS manpower needed to administer the camps but also of breeding division in the prisoner community.

The Kapo was the most feared of all prisoner camp functionaries. He was responsible for prisoner roll calls, overseeing the prisoner barracks, and supervising the prisoners at work. He literally had power of life and death over the prisoners. The Kapos were originally chosen from the German criminals (‘green triangles’) incarcerated in the concentration camps from the 1930s. They were chosen for their brutality and because they were German, and therefore separate from Jews, gypsies, and foreign political prisoners increasingly incarcerated in the concentration camps from 1941. Later in the war, Kapos were also chosen from the other prisoner communities including Jews, who could be equally as brutal as the German criminal Kapos.

Levi was correct to be afraid of ‘Alex, il Kapo’.

CM

Subcamps of Auschwitz project

As Levi writes in the preface to the theatrical adaptation of SQ - produced in collaboration with Pietro Alberto Marché - all those imprisoned in the Lager hoped to find an attentive audience: ‘speravamo non di vivere e raccontare, ma di vivere per raccontare. È il sogno dei reduci di tutti i tempi, e del forte e del vile, del poeta e del semplice, di Ulisse e del Ruzante’ (OC I, 1195). In this chapter, therefore, Ulysses’s canto does not simply identify the monologue of Dante’s Ulysses, which Levi painfully pieces together from memory and translates for Pikolo; it also signifies the song of the hero who has survived his ordeal and is eager to tell his story to anyone who is willing to listen. Levi drew inspiration for his radio and theatre adaptations of SQ from an earlier, independent radio program on Canadian national radio. Levi praises this experiment for its ability to capture the lack of communication, aggravated by the confusion of languages, that had been a central device in the Lager’s machine of dehumanisation and annihilation. As Levi reports, the Canadian authors explained their decision not to translate the bits of dialogues in different languages to convey the author’s experience, ‘perché questo isolamento è la parte fondamentale della sua sofferenza, e la sofferenza, sua e di tutti i prigionieri, scaturiva dal proposito deliberato di espellerli dalla comunità umana, di cancellare la loro identità, di ridurli da uomini a cose’ (OC I, 1196). Tellingly, the moment of catharsis between Levi and Pikolo is made possible by the act of translation, the only instrument capable of redeeming the Babelic confusion of languages.

A willingness to listen, however, is the key precondition for successful communication and a veritable ‘flaw of form’ in the universe of the Lager, especially when this attitude is displayed by someone (like Pikolo) who enjoys a superior position in the camp’s hierarchy. Levi’s gratuitous election to be Pikolo’s travelling companion in the journey to the kitchen, and Pikolo’s openness to listen, may be fittingly celebrated through a subversive reinterpretation of Ulysses’s last words, ‘come altrui piacque’. Could this be part of the unspoken realisation that is capable of reshaping, albeit only contingently, Levi’s own understanding of their condition in the Lager?

In two contiguous short stories from Lilít e altri racconti, Levi further elaborates on the ethical imperative to listen that is at the heart of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. He also reworks the same narrative situation and Dantean subtext from ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, but inverts the characters’ roles and their symbolic movement outside the ‘infernal’ hole (see also the story ‘Capaneo’).

In ‘Lilít’, a heavy downpour of rain makes it impossible for prisoners to work and compels them to find shelter and temporary rest. Levi slides into a large pipe. From the other side of the pipe, another inmate known as Tischler enters. Tischler spends this recreational time sharing with Levi the story of Lilít. According to some Kabbalistic interpretations of the Bible, Lilít was Adam’s first wife. For rebelling against both Adam and God, she was turned into a devil and eventually became God’s mistress. Their union continues today and is the cause of evil and suffering in the world. Tischler teases Levi for not knowing this story and jokes about Levi being an Epicurean like all other Westerner Jews. The use of the label ‘Epicurean’ to define the ‘miscredenti’, I suggest, gestures to the subtext of Dante’s Inferno 10, where the sin of heresy is named precisely as Epicurus’s sin. Those punished for this sin are condemned to burn in a sarcophagus. Each sarcophagus houses several souls who, like Levi and Tischler, must share the same narrow space, but, crucially, are uninterested in communicating with each other. (Indeed some of Tischler’s phrasing echoes Dante: e.g. verrà un potente… farà morire Lilít’, and cf. Inf. 1.101-02.) This Dantean reminiscence is not the only element that links ‘Lilít’ to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Both stories recount a successful act of communication and storytelling in the Lager. But there are two significant inversions: this time, the protagonists move inside a hollow space and Levi is the one who plays the part of the attentive listener. This shift, I believe, is signalled in the text by Tischler’s injunction: ‘perché oggi la mia parte è di raccontare e di credere: l’incredulo oggi sei tu’ (OC II, 252; emphasis added). Tischler’s words seem to echo Levi’s thoughts in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ that ‘Se Jean è intelligente capirà. Capirà: oggi mi sento da tanto’. That Tischler plays the part that had been Levi’s in his dialogue with Pikolo is further confirmed by the former’s gesture of sharing an apple with Levi, before telling his story, as a way to celebrate their common birthday. This act amounted to blasphemy in the Lager, where everyone used every means to survive, even stealing food from other inmates. In ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, Levi tells us that, like Tischler, he would be willing to give up his daily ration of food in exchange for being able to remember Dante’s text correctly and share it with Pikolo: ‘Darei la zuppa di oggi per saper saldare “non ne avevo alcuna” col finale’. Like Pikolo, and unlike Dante’s Epicureans, Levi pays attention to Tischler’s story and, by retelling it, saves it from annihilation.

In ‘Un discepolo’, Levi is back in the underground tank and, as with Pikolo, he is trying to translate to another Häftling, Bandi, the text of a letter from his family that had been smuggled into the camp by an Italian worker. The episode is almost identical to the one narrated in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Once again, moreover, Levi emphasises his listener’s attention: ‘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’ (OC II, 258; emphasis added). Bandi also shares food with Levi. Hence, the act of sharing/giving up food becomes a physical marker of their desire to share their lives through human communication and let themselves be nurtured by it.

For Levi, the real protagonists of these exceptional acts of communication in the Lager are not the messengers but the listeners. Those, in other words, who were able to resist the continuous and exhausting process of reification enforced by the camp and could muster enough human empathy and curiosity to listen con attenzione.

FG

Dante is one of Primo Levi’s most important cultural touchstones. Levi's use of the Commedia, across multiple works, reflects a sophisticated and intimate reading of the poem. It may come as some surprise that Dante does not appear in Levi’s 1981 literary anthology, La ricerca delle radici, which provides a highly eclectic collection of some of his preferred authors and texts, from Homer to Darwin and Rabelais to Celan. However, Levi justifies this omission on account of the medieval writer’s universal importance: Dante, Levi states in an interview from the same year, is ‘part of any reader’s heritage’.

Allusions to Dante have been identified in Levi’s fiction, essays and poetry. However, it is here in SQ that we witness his most sustained engagement with the Commedia. The most explicit and celebrated use of the poem comes in the present chapter, ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, where Levi uses the famous Ulysses episode from Inferno 26 to teach some Italian to his friend and fellow inmate Jean, and skilfully incorporates into his text suggestive fragments of Dante’s own poem. The Ulysses canto, read in the secularised, Romantic tradition of Croce and De Sanctis, resonates powerfully in the context of Auschwitz and becomes a parable of human courage and self-emancipation. In particular, the Greek hero’s rousing words to his crew and invocation of their very humanity (‘Considerate la vostra semenza…’) resonate viscerally in the dehumanising world of the camp. The recollection of Ulysses sailing beyond the pillars of Hercules into the forbidden sea allows Levi momentarily to imagine breaking beyond the confines of the infernal Lager. The chapter ends, however, with the climactic words of Dante’s canto, describing the sea closing over Ulysses’ boat and the curtailment of his doomed journey, as Levi and Jean’s momentary taste of freedom ceases, and they must again confront the horror and banal misery of the camp. The omnipotent God of Dante’s tale of Ulysses, who punishes the voyager’s doomed attempt to reach Mount Purgatory without divine sanction, implicitly becomes here the Nazi regime that confines him.

In ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, Dante offers Levi a fleeting antidote to the horrors of Auschwitz. Elsewhere in the testimony, however, Levi draws on Dante as a kindred author of the infernal, adapting imagery from the medieval poet’s first cantica in describing his experience of an all-too-real Hell. In the book’s second chapter, Levi explicitly designates his new surroundings as a modern Inferno (‘Questo è l’inferno. Oggi ai nostri giorni, l’inferno deve essere così’). Thereafter, Levi often uses deictic expressions (‘sul fondo’, ‘lassù’, ‘laggiù’), some with Dantean resonance, that construct his experience of the camp as a kind of infernal descent. More specific narrative, topographical and structural echoes appear, too. Nazi guards are compared, both directly and more implicitly, to devils and guardian figures in Dante’s Hell. Different regions of Dante’s Hell (Antinferno, Limbo, Malebolge) are invoked in describing the different parts of the camp. Levi also seems to draw on the example of Dante’s Inferno as a model of confronting the negative limits of language and verbal communication. The topos of inexpressibility that features in the closing cantos of the Inferno also appears in SQ. Both writers imagine the existence of a uniquely ‘harsh’ language (‘rime aspre e chiocce’ | ‘un nuovo aspro linguaggio’) that might do justice to the horrors of their infernal experiences, but which they do not possess. However, while Levi may take inspiration from Dante in numerous ways, there is a powerful and bleak irony at stake when Levi establishes parallels between the medieval poet’s imagined account of a medieval Christian hell, founded upon an infallible notion of divine justice, and his own experience of the historical hell of Auschwitz, a place of the most extreme and barbarous injustice and racialised hate.

Levi’s use of Dante is all the more striking in light of the ways in which the Italian Fascist regime had appropriated and frequently distorted Dante and his poetry in the years prior to his deportation. In the Risorgimento and in liberal Italy, Dante had been endlessly appropriated as a kind of symbol and embodiment of the new nation. Under Fascism, however, there had emerged an even more heavily and crudely instrumentalised cult of Dante. The poet was invoked not only as a source of fervent cultural pride, but as a prophet of the fascist state and of Mussolini. He was given a central place in fascist schooling and was used in irredentist and expansionist campaigns, in setting out highly restrictive language policy, as a model of fascist virility, and on account of his imperial associations. In the late 1930s, passages from the Commedia even appeared on the cover of the magazine La difesa della razza, with Dante appropriated to support the regime’s later politics of racial purity and antisemitism. It is thus all the more striking that Levi makes such imaginative and deft use of Dante across his works. He found in Dante, a poet so freighted with nationalistic interpretations during the period in question, a powerful, personal and highly adaptable resource of language, meaning, and understanding.

TK

Levi explores the economy of cigarettes and smoking in the chapter of SQ entitled ‘Al di qua del bene e del male', where he explains that ‘Mahorca’, a low-quality tobacco, is officially distributed in the canteen in exchange for the coupons provided to the best worker, but because those coupons are distributed infrequently and inequitably, the tobacco is also sold unofficially in the Market, ‘in stretta obbedienza alle leggi dell’economia classica’, with the resulting booms and busts in price (OC I, 200-01). Because it can be exchanged for more food rations, newer clothing, and other vital necessities, ‘[f]ra i comuni Häftlinge, non sono molti quelli che ricercano di Mahorca per fumarlo personalmente; per lo più, esce dal campo, e finisce ai lavoratori civili della Buna’. That Deutsch is smoking during this work detail is thus a sign of his status and position within the camp.

CLL

Levi introduces the term ‘Häftling’ (pl. Häftlinge), German for ‘detainee’ or ‘prisoner,’ in the chapter of SQ entitled ‘Sul fondo,’ wherein he recounts his arrival in Auschwitz, a camp designed to produce ‘un uomo vuoto, ridotto a sofferenza e bisogno, dimentico di dignità e discernimento’, so that ‘Si comprenderà allora il duplice significato del termine «Campo di annientamento»’ (OC I, 152). It is immediately after offering this reflection that Levi provides the term used to denote this ‘uomo vuoto’: ‘Häftling: ho imparato che io sono uno Häftling. Il mio nome è 174 517; siamo stati battezzati, porteremo finché vivremo il marchio tatuato sul braccio sinistro’ (ibid.). Later in the same chapter, Levi explains the distinction between ‘Häftlinge privilegiati’ and ‘comuni Häftlinge’ and describes how the various groups of prisoners are distinguished: ‘Tutti sono vestiti a righe, sono tutti Häftlinge, ma i criminali portano accanto al numero, cucito sulla giacca, un triangolo verde; i politici un triangolo rosso; gli ebrei, che costituiscono la grande maggioranza, portano la stella ebraica, rossa e gialla’ (OC I, 158).

CLL

‘Intuizione’ is the key word of the aesthetic philosophy of Benedetto Croce, the most influential Italian thinker of the first half of the twentieth century, the ‘Crocean half-century’, as this era in Italian culture has been described (Antoni, Mattioli 1950, 352). Croce insisted upon what he described as ‘la teoria dell’arte come pura intuizione’, and with it ‘la verità […] che l’intuizione pura è essenzialmente liricità’ (Croce 1923, 15, 22). Underlying his idealistic aesthetics, therefore, was ‘la semplicissima formola: che «l’arte è intuizione»’ (Croce 1923, 23). Widely - almost universally - adopted for decades in Italy, this formula influenced nearly all artistic creation and reception in Levi’s time. So far as I am aware, Levi’s only explicit reference to Crocean aesthetics is to be found in ‘La misura della bellezza,’ a sci-fi short story about a machine that provides an ‘objective’ judgement of beauty, wherein the narrator recounts how his wife fails to share his faith in the machine’s verdicts because she was ‘un caso disperato di educazione crociana’ (OC I, 592). Yet Croce’s influence on Levi’s thought is clear, and is attested clearly elsewhere in his work.

Appointed minister of education in 1920, Croce set in motion many of the school reforms that would subsequently be codified by the Fascist government (Rizi 2019, 6). As a result, Primo Levi’s schooling was profoundly - and to his mind negatively - influenced by Croce. This point emerges most clearly in Levi’s reflections on the education he received from Azelia Arici, who taught him Italian literature for three years, inspiring in him ‘una certa avversione’ for the subject, because Arici ‘era una gentiliana, una crociana, riteneva che le scienze naturali e la fisica e la matematica fossero materie accessorie, ausiliarie, di serie B’ (OC III, 1027). Levi elsewhere referred to those who upheld this Crocean anti-science bias in the Italian school system as ‘la congiura’, summarising the message they transmitted to him in particularly resonant terms: ‘Tu giovane fascista, tu giovane crociano, tu giovane cresciuto in questa Italia non avvicinarti alle fonti del sapere scientifico, perché sono pericolose’ (OC III, 484). Levi thus blamed Croce for what he called the ‘hegemony’ of humanistic culture in Italy (OC III, 255) and the resulting diminishment of science - and the dearth of science fiction writing - in the Italian cultural scene (OC III, 51). Moreover, he framed his own penchant for the sciences in explicitly anti-Crocean terms. In the ‘Idrogeno’ chapter of Il sistema periodico, he contrasts his youthful passion for chemistry with his humanistic schooling, absorbed by ‘metamorfosi inconcludenti, da Platone ad Agostino, da Agostino a Tommaso, da Tommaso a Hegel, da Hegel a Croce’ (OC I, 876).

As for the potentially positive influence of Croce’s persistent anti-Fascism on Levi’s fledgling resistance to Mussolini’s regime, the evidence is mixed. In the ‘Potassio’ chapter of Il sistema periodico, Levi recounts how his generation had to ‘«inventare» un nostro antifascismo, crearlo dal germe, dalle radici. Cercavamo intorno a noi, e imboccavamo strade che portavano poco lontano. La Bibbia, Croce, la geometria, la fisica, ci apparivano fonti di certezza’ (OC I, 898). However, in a 1976 interview he recalled instead the ‘confusion’ of the interwar period, when countervailing voices were scarce: ‘Di antifascismo si aveva paura a parlare; Marx non esisteva e Croce veniva censurato’ (OC III, 916). To what degree Levi found political inspiration in Croce in addition to the frustration he faced as a result of Croce’s humanistic prejudices thus remains in doubt.

What we can say with greater confidence is that the so-called ‘congiura’ that determined much of Levi’s schooling ensured that his reading of Dante was thoroughly Crocean. Indeed, scholars have demonstrated that the textbooks with which Primo Levi was taught his Dante emphasised Benedetto Croce’s analysis of the Commedia, based firmly on Francesco De Sanctis’s hegemonic nineteenth-century Storia della letteratura italiana (Pertile 2010, 30; Garullo, Rigo, Toppan 2020, 82). As he elaborated in the 1921 study La poesia di Dante, Benedetto Croce was largely uninterested in what he dismissed as the ‘bizzarre interpretazioni’ of the scholarly dantisti who dominated the academic interpretation of the Commedia, and who seized upon what he believed to be pointless questions of Medieval theology (Croce 1921, 25, 63, 197). Instead, and as a result of his aesthetic theory, Croce was interested exclusively in Dante’s poetic ‘intuizione lirica’ (31). This emphasis manifests itself in Croce’s famous distinction between the Commedia’s struttura, its historical and theological content, and its poesia, its inspired lyrical beauty (61-71). While questions of theology may have mattered to Dante, argued Croce, they need not trouble modern readers, who should treat them ‘con qualche indifferenza bensì, ma senza avversione e, soprattutto, senza irrisioni’ (204). The indifference to Dante’s religious beliefs allowed Croce to redeem in poetic terms many of those Dante had damned in theological terms.

This emphasis is evident in Croce’s analysis of the figure of Ulysses. Quoting the same lines that Levi would recite to Jean - ‘Fatti non foste a viver come bruti | Ma per seguir virtude e conoscenza’ - Croce argues that Ulysses emerges as a positive figure despite Dante’s intentions. Ulysses, Croce insists,

è una parte di Dante stesso, cioè delle profonde aspirazioni che la riverenza religiosa e l’umiltà cristiana potevano in lui contenere, ma non già distruggere. Donde la figura di questo Ulisse dantesco, peccaminoso ma di sublime peccato, eroe tragico, maggiore forse di quel che fu mai nell’epos e nella tragedia greca (97-98).

Whether directly or, what is more likely, indirectly, this analysis may well have influenced Primo Levi’s reading of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’.

Yet Levi goes further than Croce. With his ‘intuizione di un attimo’, Levi fixates not upon Dante’s fourteenth-century poetic intuition but instead upon his own admittedly ‘anachronistic’ discovery of the poem’s relevance to him and to Jean, ‘che osiamo ragionare di queste cose con le stanghe della zuppa sulle spalle’. With this intuition, Levi transcends the scholastic Dante drilled into him by the ‘congiura’ and discovers verses far more vital than those he had studied in school.

CLL

The subject of mothers arises often in the conversations between prisoners in SQ. When Schlome questions Levi in the chapter ‘Sul fondo,’ he asks 'Dove tua madre?' (OC I, 156) Standing in the long-awaited sunshine in ‘Una buona giornata,’ the teenager Sigi ‘[a]veva cominciato col parlare della sua casa di Vienna e di sua madre’ (OC I, 195), and Levi tells us that, in this moment of relative peace, he and the other prisoners likewise ‘siamo capaci di pensare alle nostre madri e alle nostre mogli, il che di solito non accade’ (OC I, 197).

These references to mothers are likely to remind us of the mothers who were deported to the Lager, whom Levi describes in the chapter ‘Il viaggio’:

Ognuno si congedò dalla vita nel modo che più gli si addiceva. Alcuni pregarono, altri bevvero oltre misura, altri si inebriarono di nefanda ultima passione. Ma le madri vegliarono a preparare con dolce cura il cibo per il viaggio, e lavarono i bambini, e fecero i bagagli, ed all’alba i fili spinati erano pieni di biancheria infantile stesa al vento ad asciugare; e non dimenticarono le fasce, e i giocattoli, e i cuscini, e le cento piccole cose che esse ben sanno, e di cui i bambini hanno in ogni caso bisogno. Non fareste anche voi altrettanto? Se dovessero uccidervi domani col vostro bambino, voi non gli dareste oggi da mangiare? (OC I, 143).

This affecting passage - the first instance, after the introductory poem in which Levi confronts the reader directly, demanding that we place ourselves in the position of the prisoners - enacts a human connection intimately related to the bond that Levi and Jean share in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’.

CLL

In the Schools edition of SQ, Levi glosses his own chapter ending as follows: ‘Il verso, che chiude il Canto di Ulisse col tragico naufragio in vista del Monte del Purgatorio, chiude anche un altro “folle volo”, e cioè la breve parentesi umana, lo sforzo dell’autore e di Pikolo di sollevarsi per un momento al di sopra dell’orizzonte desolato della prigionia’ (OC I, 1418).

RG

This is not the only porcupine to appear in Levi’s writing. In The Truce, we learn that Levi’s companion Cesare, disappointed after a misadventure on the black market, spent two days ‘huddled on his bed, bristling like a porcupine’ (CW I, 338). In The Wrench, Faussone identifies a clearing in which ‘a porcupine was advancing cautiously, with brief stops and starts’ (CW II, 1025). These English translations suggest a possible connection to SQ that is less obvious in the original Italian, where the text refers not to an ‘istrice’ but rather to a ‘porcospino’. In La tregua, Cesare is described as ‘ispido come un porcospino’ (OC I, 417), and in La chiave a stella, Faussone points out that ‘un porcospino avanzava cauto, con brevi arresti e riprese’ (OC I, 1099).

The terms ‘istrice’ and ‘porcospino’ refer to animals of the same family, Hystricidae, and identify the same species, Hystrix cristata, the crested porcupine, which is native to Italy. In the Grande dizionario italiano dell’uso, ‘porcospino’ is listed as a synonym of ‘istrice’, which is defined scientifically as a ‘piccolo mammifero con il corpo coperto di aculei appuntiti ed erettili’, with a second figurative meaning as a ‘persona intrattabile, scontrosa’ (805).

Despite their similarity, there is a notable difference between the two synonyms with regard to their literary resonances. As the Tesoro della lingua Italiana delle Origini demonstrates, ‘istrice’ was the preferred term for medieval philosophers, historians, and poets, including Boccaccio, who used it in his Caccia di Diana and Ameto, where the husband’s beard is described as being ‘né più né meno pugnente che le penne d’uno istrice’ (Tutte le opera di Giovanni Boccaccio, 774). The Grande dizionario della lingua italiana attests subsequent citations from Parini, D’Annunzio, De Amicis, and Foscolo, with the latter two adopting the term metaphorically to refer to a person who is taciturn and cagey (615).

I suspect that Levi had another literary reference in mind when he opted for ‘istrice’ rather than ‘porcospino’ in SQ. Here are the words with which the Ghost in Shakespeare’s Hamlet reveals both his identity and the infernal torments he suffers in the afterlife:

I am thy father’s spirit,

Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,

And for the day confined to fast in fires,

Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature

Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid

To tell the secrets of my prison-house,

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word

Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,

Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,

Thy knotted and combined locks to part

And each particular hair to stand on end,

Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:

But this eternal blazon must not be

To ears of flesh and blood. List, list, O, list! (Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5, vv. 14-28)

In standard Italian translations dating back at least to the early nineteenth century, Shakepeare’s ‘fretful porpentine’ is rendered as a ‘pauroso istrice’ (Amleto, 59). This word, and these lines, would seem to resonate remarkably well with Levi’s description of the hell of Auschwitz, which is the context for his invocation of ‘la difesa dell’istrice’.

After all, Hamlet’s Ghost is compelled to speak quickly, in the brief interval he has been granted in his eternal suffering:

My hour is almost come,

When I to sulphurous and tormenting flames

Must render up myself (Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5, vv. 5-7)

Cannot Levi and Jean say the same thing? The ‘lungo giro’ that Jean has arranged buys them a brief respite, but this precious time has begun to disappear as soon as it arrives: ‘quest’ora già non è più un’ora’. Cannot Hamlet’s Ghost say the same thing?

The moment of connection and communication at the heart of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ can be said to have begun with Jean’s clever strategy to curry favour with cruel Alex, the Kapo Levi describes as ‘un bestione violento e infido’, who is won over by Jean’s ‘opera lenta cauta e sottile’, finally ceding to him the coveted role of Pikolo. It is this victory that Levi describes as penetrating ‘the porcupine’s defence’. And it is this victory that frees Jean to choose Levi for the task of fetching the daily soup ration, enabling the disquisition on Dante that gives the chapter its title.

If I am correct that the reference to ‘la difesa dell’istrice’ is thus evidence that Levi and Jean’s Dantean voyage begins under the sign of Hamlet, this would be a particularly elegant literary manoeuvre, since the voyage concludes under the very same sign. As their hour runs out once they have reached the kitchen, Levi finds himself unable to say all that needs to be said and is forced to concede that ‘il resto è silenzio’, an unmistakable echo of Hamlet’s final words: ‘the rest is silence’ (Hamlet, Act V, Scene 2, v. 395).

If further evidence for a Shakespearean source text is warranted, I would note that Levi included in Ad ora incerta a poem that explicitly references Hamlet’s Ghost, who is referred to as an ‘old mole’ because he continues to speak from beneath the floorboards (Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5, v. 183). Italian translations render this line as ‘vecchia talpa’, words that Levi borrowed for the title of a 1982 poem, which literalises the reference - the poem is in fact written from the perspective of an old mole - while nevertheless conveying the sense of the original, with its profound intimations of the latent power of buried knowledge.

In altri tempi seguivo le femmine,

E quando ne sentivo una grattare

Mi scavavo la via verso di lei:

Ora non più; se capita, cambio strada.

Ma a luna nuova mi prende il morbino,

E allora qualche volta mi diverto

A sbucare improvviso per spaventare i cani. (OC II, 727)

The reference to an ‘istrice’ in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ similarly suggests hidden depths.

CLL

Interlinguistic necessity. Although containing the record of a ‘lesson’ on Dante’s Inferno 26, the central experience recounted in this chapter is set in motion by linguistic rather than literary elements. Jean desires to learn a new language, Italian, and Primo’s teaching accordingly combines his intermittent recitation of Dante’s text in the original language with a hesitant French commentary on, often a paraphrase of, salient elements in it. At its core, thus, the chapter relates an attempt at interlinguistic mediation. The text’s emphasis on interlinguistic communication is projected against the backdrop of the Lager’s Babel-like dehumanising confusion of languages that Levi explored in other texts (SQ, I sommersi e i salvati). As such, the circumstances of the episode are exceptional.

Jean is an exceptional, and exceptionally positive, character in the universe of the book. He speaks and thinks in two languages: most importantly, he is native in both (‘Jean parlava correntemente francese e tedesco’). As established on the chance encounter with an SS, Rudi the Blockführer, bilingual utterances are for him the norm: ‘È indifferente, può pensare in entrambe le lingue’. The role he plays in the structure of the concentration camp, facilitated by the distinction of his bilingualism, however, is not what is at stake in the episode per se. While Jean certainly has acquired a linguistic capital of sorts, Levi’s narrative insists on what he decides to share of that privilege. His multilingualism is not associated with exclusionary practices, but with the work of intermediation it brings about and the community of intents it creates. The language learning situation is presented as a space in which the power dynamics of the Lager’s languages are suspended and ultimately refused.

(For more on this, go back here or forward here).

SM

In his Il m’appelait Pikolo, published 20 years after Levi’s death, Samuel’s recollection of his encounter and conversation with Levi differs conspicuously. Samuel reports, for instance, how he saw the sea for the first time only after the war. Samuel’s book also features correspondence between the two fellow inmates in which they hint at their different memories.

FB

Similarly in the story ‘Lilít’, Levi describes as ‘sweet’ and ‘ferocious’ his chance encounter in the Lager with a woman: ‘A quel tempo capitava di rado di vedere una donna da vicino, ed era un’esperienza dolce e feroce, da cui si usciva affranti’ (OC II, 251). Tellingly, the story also recounts a rare moment of human warmth and respite from work during which Levi bonded with a fellow prisoner, Tischler, thanks to the power of narrative – Tischler told him the story of Lilìt.

EL

This recalls Giuseppe Ungaretti’s famous poem ‘Il porto sepolto’ (‘The Buried Port’). In the same way that Levi momentarily escaped from the Lager thanks to Dante’s verses, in ‘Il porto sepolto’, poetry allowed Ungaretti to evade the trenches of the Great War where he was fighting. However, Levi here seems to use this reference to object to Ungaretti’s poetics of the fragment, as well as to the role of ‘vates-poet’, able to unveil meanings otherwise hidden to common people. The fragments from Dante that Levi manages to share with Pikolo do not communicate an ‘inexhaustible secret’, but rather reveal the impossible struggle to find poetry in the Lager.

Il porto sepolto

Mariano il 29 giugno 1916

Vi arriva il poeta

e poi torna alla luce con i suoi canti

e li disperde

Di questa poesia

mi resta

quel nulla

d’inesauribile segreto

EL

The human--animal - the Darwinian, rather than Hobbesian, social animal endowed with ‘social instincts’ and ‘moral sense’ - is surely the anthropological substratum of the ‘study of certain aspects of the human mind’ that Levi carries out in SQ. However, these verses from canto 26 of Dante’s Inferno seem to contravene such evolutionary--anthropological assumptions, instead claiming the humanist identification of humanity with reason.

This apparent ‘conceptual anomaly’ has led interpreters to diverge, between those who see in this chapter a patent affirmation of Levi’s humanist creed (Farrell, Patruno) and those who remind us that these pages should always be read along with Levi’s naturalistic essays from the 1960s and the 1970s (Benvegnù, Ross), or indeed through the ‘Fascist’ Ulysses of the liceo (Druker). Of course, Levi’s reflection on the human mind is not immune from contradictions or unsolved questions.

However, we might propose that ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ can be read as an expression of Levi’s mindset as a man of science who does not conceive any rift between the so-called ‘two cultures’. Levi can pair Darwin and Dante without perceiving any contradiction; a mutual reinforcement that does not entail the lack of spirit in the former and the lack of matter in the latter. Put simply, for Levi, in certain moments, the Scholastic Dante (or the Catholic Manzoni) could say more about human experience than the materialists Darwin and Lorenz, but this is no escape from our finitude.

SG

In geographic terms, of course, the sea that Ulysses traverses is the broader Mediterranean and, at moments, its inner seas (e.g. the Ionian, Aegean, or Adriatic). As in Homer’s epic, however, ‘mare’ possesses a polyvocality in Levi’s text that far exceeds its cartographic meanings. The Fascist regime famously instrumentalised and misused Italy’s classical heritage. As early as 1918, Mussolini had linked ‘romanità’ with the sea, declaring in a speech at Pavia, ‘Now the mission of Italians is in the Mediterranean’ ('Ora la missione degli Italiani è nel Mediterraneo'). Yet even as the Duce confidently proclaimed that Italy would rule over a revived Mare Nostrum, the sea itself retained a historically ambivalent – at points, even marginal – status within the modern Italian state (Fogu 2020).

In a 1985 Paris Review interview (only published in 1994), Levi spoke of the revelation of reading Melville during the time of Fascism. According to Levi, the fascist censors allowed Cesare Pavese to translate the book as ‘it had no political implications’, a judgement that ignored the work’s entanglements with American narratives of imperialism and race politics. In Levi’s estimation, Pavese’s translation ‘distorted it [Moby Dick], fitted it into the Italian language’ – and thus into an ambivalent Italian imaginary of the sea. Like many Italians, ‘[h]e wasn’t a seaman – Pavese – he hated the sea’, commented Levi.

Such ambivalence towards the sea resonates in Levi’s biography, as well. Like many 20th-century Italians and Europeans more generally, Levi was familiar with the seaside as a place for recreation and tourism. Indeed, in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, Levi claimed that Rudi, the Blockführer in Auschwitz, liked Italy and wanted to learn Italian; this desire dated back to a month-long holiday in Liguria before the war, a vacation presumably spent along the shore. In the chapter, Levi likewise refers to ‘una qualche spiaggia estiva della mia infanzia’. Yet in his youth Levi embraced mountain climbing, with one biographer, Ian Thomson, claiming that on the eve of World War II Levi did not even know how to swim. For Levi, the sublimity of the peaks, rather than the sea’s vastness, symbolised freedom. In this, Levi was not alone. The classic terrain of both the Resistance and the civil war was resolutely a landscape (karst, forest, field, mountain) rather than a seascape.

In an indirect way, the project of Mare Nostrum threatened to shipwreck Levi’s own university hopes. In 1937, as Levi prepared for his ‘maturità’ exams, he received a demand to report to the Turin seaplane base. There he was accused of ignoring a draft summons for the Royal Navy. Levi’s sister, Anna Maria Levi, insisted, ‘Maybe my brother’s name was on a Fascist National Service list, but he never received an Italian Royal Navy summons’ (Thomson 2003, 66). A compromise was struck, with Levi expected to enrol in the university branch of the Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale (MVSN). Thus, unlike Ulysses, Levi was not destined to set forth on the open sea (in the latter’s case with the Navy). In the end, Levi never served in any branch of the Italian military or fascist militia. Rather, his brief three month career as a partisan played out in the mountain passes of the Valle d’Aosta, after Levi moved out of the Hotel Ristoro where he had initially sought refuge.

During those few months when Levi took up arms against the Fascists, there occurred an incident that profoundly demoralised Levi and his comrades: the execution at Frumy of two partisan brothers-in-arms, Fulvio Oppezzo and Luciano Zabaldano on December 9, 1943. In the estimation of historian Sergio Luzzatto, this episode would continue to haunt not only Levi’s conscience but also his writings (non-fiction, his novel, and poetry) (Luzzatto 2016). The ‘ugly secret’ Levi harboured was that these partisans - long celebrated as the first partisans killed in the Valle d’Aosta - did not fall at the hands of the Fascists but of their comrades, who appear to have punished Oppezzo and Zabaldano for indiscretion and greed. Perhaps it was only fitting that Zabaldono’s nom de guerre was ‘Mare’, given that this partisan’s life – and death – embodied the ambiguity and fluidity of what Levi would later conceptualise as the ‘grey zone’.

PB

Dante’s text ‘riguarda’, ‘has to do with’, Levi and Pikolo. ‘Considerate la vostra semenza: | Fatti non foste a viver come bruti, | Ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza.’ What I would emphasise is that by remembering and translating and discussing Dante, Levi and Pikolo live out that terzina from Inferno 26, or rather, they live out a new version of the terzina. That action - ‘ragionare di queste cose con le stanghe della zuppa sulle spalle’ - is a particular living out of Ulysses’ words. For Levi and Pikolo here, discussing Dante becomes a way of seeking after ‘virtute e conoscenza’, and of going beyond the camp’s Pillars of Hercules; ‘è scagliare se stessi al di là di una barriera’, as Levi writes earlier in the chapter. Yet while Dante’s Ulysses casts aside bonds of friendship and affection - seeing the ‘piéta | del vecchio padre’, the ‘debito amore | lo qual dovea Penelope far lieta’ as obstacles to his pursuit of ‘virtute e conoscenza’ - Levi and Pikolo seek after knowledge through conversation, through attention to each other. In the chapter Pikolo listens, he pays attention, he suggests possible translations, he reassures Levi. Interpreting Inferno 26 - ‘ragionare di queste cose’ - is a joint endeavour (Gordon 2001, 68-70; Insana 2009, 107-10; Montemaggi 2020, 127-42), an endeavour in which Levi and Pikolo pursue virtue and knowledge, but do so in a mode quite different to Ulysses (Montemaggi 2020, 133-35; Montemaggi 2011, 66-67, 71-72).

What seems to matter particularly in this passage is that Pikolo and Levi realise that Dante’s is a text about them. ‘[F]orse […] ha ricevuto il messaggio, ha sentito che lo riguarda, che riguarda tutti gli uomini in travaglio, e noi in specie; e che riguarda noi due’ (emphasis added). The ‘messaggio’ arising from Levi and Pikolo’s joint interpretation of Dante is not only a fuller understanding of the ideas Dante is expressing, important as that is, nor is the message limited to assessing the truthfulness of Dante’s words, important as that is too. But - and perhaps underpinning both of these - the ‘messaggio’ also involves recognising that Dante’s words speak about and to Levi and Pikolo. The repeated ‘riguarda’ casts the terzina as not just concerning humanity as a general, abstract category, but as concerning specific, particular lives: Pikolo’s and Levi’s. In the movement from Pikolo (‘lo riguarda’) outward to all those in travail and then narrowing inward to those in the camps (‘noi’) and then inward again to Pikolo and Levi (‘noi due’), the ‘riguarda’ also cast the terzina as open to be encountered in an equally personal light by others.

At least here, the value of the Commedia seems ultimately to lie not in the particular elaboration that Dante offers of various worldviews, but in how the text becomes part of a reader’s lived experience. The two are, however, connected, and one of the questions arising from this chapter is: How? Levi tells us that Dante’s words - in and through the context of Levi’s encounter with them in Auschwitz - revealed to him, ‘perhaps’, ‘forse’, ‘il perché del nostro destino, del nostro essere oggi qui’. A question perhaps worth investigating further would be: How might moving towards fuller understanding of the Commedia and particular lived experiences of Dante’s text inform each other?

HPR

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

Memories of childhood always send a pang through the heart. Not because they are sad. Perhaps they are, but the pang can be deeper when they are good, for they tell us of what is utterly lost and are thus redolent of our relentless passage through time, projected as we are towards death with, so it seems, an increasing rapidity as we get older. Levi passes quickly over this moment of thought of his infancy. But it sets the tone for ‘Il canto di Ulisse’: the tone of something utterly lost and yet completely present. The childhood beach with its peculiar smell of paint and tar is wholly past and yet it is Levi, here, now. In this moment it is everything he is. Just so, the canto is utterly gone, belonging to a different life, the life Levi had before Auschwitz, and yet is here, now, making him this particular individual man with this burden of identity. He is freighted with the memory of the beach as he is with the memory of those lines from Dante.

When I was a child, I was sometimes taken in the summer in my parents’ car to one of the few sandy beaches near to where I grew up. The car park was behind the dunes and was itself a vast expanse of coarse grass worn flat and of impacted sand. The smell of that beach was the smell of the grass and sand mingled with that of the hot interior of the car, leather and metal warmed through, the bench seat offering to my child’s body a kind of place of perfect rest, long enough for me to stretch out on it to warm myself after the coldness of the sea. For me, leather and metal are what paint and tar were to Levi: the odours of these at the beach, suffused with the smell of hot sand.

I cannot think of those odours and all they bring back to me of my childhood without pain, intense but somehow delicious in its melancholy. This is all lost but it is mine and no-one else’s, giving me an acute sense of my individuality. I grasp that Levi had the same sense in remembering that smell of paint and tar from his childhood, even in this dark place. This is why he needs to mention it; this is why he passes over it so rapidly. It is everything and nothing; it is painful and sweetly delicious. This experience of the memory of the beach, surging up out of the nowhere of the camp, is at one with the eruption in Levi’s mind of the canto from Dante. Not everyone can read Dante. But everyone knows of these odours of childhood. Levi is saying: somewhere in this nightmare, in this hell created by some human beings to torture other human beings, there is someone else who, perhaps deprived of culture and learning, ill-educated and uninterested in books, nonetheless has a feeling for his or her childhood as I do for mine. I move from that to Dante; this other person will not. No matter. What binds me to that other, even this side of good and evil where theft is honoured and cheating praised, in this world of remorseless self-concern for the sake of survival, is that he or she too will smell the tar and paint, or some other material, and then be joined again to a moment of childhood. There is a common fellowship after all, a fellowship forged by the fact that that other unknown person and I are both returned to our childhood in some fleeting moment that is saturated in an odour.

Levi then tries to express this in turning to Pikolo and grasping after those fragments from Dante in order to get him to understand these words of a – for Pikolo – foreign language and feel the depth of Levi’s response to Dante. But it is the beach that is at the back of that: the Dante stands proxy for a more universal feeling – that feeling that we can have, says Levi, even here, perhaps especially here, for our lost childhood.

CH

Very often, when we think about ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, we tend to recall only the most famous pages in which Levi tries to remember Dante’s canto. The depth and sense of urgency of the Ulyssean passages are so overwhelming and passionate that they may distract us from other elements in the chapter. However, if we go back to the text and read it closely, we cannot avoid noticing that, after a brief opening in which Levi introduces Pikolo and narrates how he came to be Pikolo’s ‘fortunate’ chaperone to collect the soup for the day, ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ also dwells quite significantly on a moment of domestic memories. While going to the kitchens, Levi writes: ‘Si vedevano i Carpazi coperti di neve. Respirai l’aria fresca, mi sentivo insolitamente leggero’. This is the first moment in the chapter in which Levi refers to the mountains as something that revitalises him and makes him feel fresh and light, both physically and mentally.

This moment foreshadows another, also in this chapter, when Levi goes back to his mountains, those close to Turin, and compares them to the mountain that the protagonist of Dante’s canto, Ulysses, encounters just before his shipwreck with his companions:

... Quando mi apparve una montagna, bruna

Per la distanza, e parvemi alta tanto

Che mai veduta non ne avevo alcuna.

Sì, sì, ‘alta tanto’, non ‘molto alta’, proposizione consecutiva. E le montagne, quando si vedono di lontano... le montagne... oh Pikolo, Pikolo, di’ qualcosa, parla, non lasciarmi pensare alle mie montagne, che comparivano nel bruno della sera quando tornavo in treno da Milano a Torino! Basta, bisogna proseguire, queste sono cose che si pensano ma non si dicono. Pikolo attende e mi guarda. Darei la zuppa di oggi per saper saldare ‘non ne avevo alcuna’ col finale.

The significance of the mountains in Levi’s narration is confirmed in this passage. For him, the mountains represent his experience of belonging, his youthful years, and his work as a chemist – the job he was doing when he commuted by train from Turin to Milan. At the same time, Levi’s own memories of the mountains intertwine and overlap with another mountain, Dante’s Mount Purgatory. Here, a deep and perhaps not fully conscious intertextual game starts to emerge and to characterise Levi’s writing. The lines that Levi does not remember are these (compare, on the Dante page):

Noi ci allegrammo, e tosto tornò in pianto,

ché de la nova terra un turbo nacque,

e percosse del legno il primo canto.

For Dante’s Ulysses, Mount Purgatory signifies the final moment of his adventure and his desire for knowledge. The marvel and enthusiasm that Ulysses and his company feel when they see the mountain is suddenly transformed into its contrary. From the mountain, a storm originates that will destroy the ship and swallow its crew: ‘Tre volte il fe’ girar con tutte l’acque, | Alla quarta levar la poppa in suso | E la prora ire in giù, come altrui piacque’. Dante’s Mount Purgatory, so majestic and spectacular, represents the end of any desire for knowledge that aims to find new answers to and interpretations of human existence in the world without God’s word.

Going back to Levi’s text, we find that, instead, in a kind of reverse overlapping between his image and that of Ulysses, the image of the mountain of Purgatory suggests to Levi a very different set of thoughts that, although seemingly and similarly overwhelming, opens up new interpretations: ‘altro ancora, qualcosa di gigantesco che io stesso ho visto ora soltanto, nell’intuizione di un attimo, forse il perché del nostro destino, del nostro essere oggi qui’. For a moment, it is almost as if Levi, a new Dantean Ulysses in a new Inferno, stands in front of Mount Purgatory and forgets the terzine and the shipwreck. Maybe Levi cannot or does not want to remember those terzine because the mountain in Purgatory represents something very different for him than for Dante’s Ulysses. Levi’s view of the mountain does not lead to a moment of recognition of sin, as it does in Dante’s Ulysses. For him, the mountain, like his mountain range, is the gateway to knowledge, enrichment, and illumination and to a world that lies beyond the imposed limits of traditional, constricting, and distorted views and that awaits discovery (‘qualcosa di gigantesco che io stesso ho visto ora soltanto’). Something about and beyond the Lager.

To better understand how the mountains are central in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, we have to remember that Levi’s view of the mountains strongly depends on his anti-Fascism, which he expressed particularly vigorously in two moments of his life: during his months in the Resistance, just before he was captured and sent to Fossoli, and, even more intensely, during the adventures of his youth, when he was a free young man who enjoyed climbing the mountains surrounding Turin. As Alberto Papuzzi has suggested, ‘le radici del suo rapporto con la montagna sono ben piantate in quella stagione più lontana: radici intellettuali di cittadino che cercava sulla montagna, nella montagna, suggestioni e risposte che non trovava nella vita, o meglio nell’atmosfera ispessita di quella vita torinese, senza passato e senza futuro’ (OC III, 426-27). Indeed, reports Papuzzi, Levi confirms that:

Avevo anche provato a quel tempo a scrivere un racconto di montagna […]. C’era tutta l’epica della montagna, e la metafisica dell’alpinismo. La montagna come chiave di tutto. Volevo rappresentare la sensazione che si prova quando si sale avendo di fronte la linea della montagna che chiude l’orizzonte: tu sali, non vedi che questa linea, non vedi altro, poi improvvisamente la valichi, ti trovi dall’altra parte, e in pochi secondi vedi un mondo nuovo, sei in un mondo nuovo. Ecco, avevo cercato di esprimere questo: il valico.

The heart of that epic story made its way into the chapter ‘Ferro’ in Il sistema periodico. The discovery of this (brave) new world, ‘mondo nuovo’, is an integral part and a direct achievement of Levi’s experience in the mountains. The mountains open a new understanding and a new perspective on the world.

Something that escapes common understanding is revealed through the experience of the mountains, both in Levi’s memories of his youth and in his literary recounting of Auschwitz. Reciting Dante in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ is therefore not only an intertextual exercise for Levi. Only by inserting Levi’s literary references in the complexity of his own experience – before, during, and after Auschwitz – can we fully capture the depth of his reflections. Levi mentally and metaphorically brought to Auschwitz not only Dante but also his ‘metafisica dell’alpinismo’. Together, they contributed to his attempt to come to terms with that reality.

Food is a fundamental aspect of war and captivity narratives. Cabbage and turnips become emblems of misery in Günter Grass’s Der Butt (The Flounder), Ernst Jünger’s In Stahlgewittern (In Storms of Steel), and Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front). In Levi, these vegetables symbolise the bleak reality of the Lager that makes any daydreaming futile.

GC

The chapter ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ in SQ ends with a shipwreck. Levi closes the chapter with the same line that Dante uses to conclude Inferno 26, ‘Infin che ’l mar fu sopra noi rinchiuso’. (As Alberto Cavaglion has pointed out, the citation contains a significative lapsus: ‘rinchiuso’ instead of ‘richiuso’.) How should we interpret this ending? I would like to offer a creative reading that plays on the metaphorical meaning of navigation and shipwreck in Western culture.

In Shipwreck with Spectator, Hans Blumenberg argues that humans have sought to grasp the movement of their existence above all through the metaphor of the perilous sea voyage. As the reverberations of the Greek idea of the κυβερνήτης (governor) show, navigation is a widespread metaphor for politics, philosophy, and life itself. Among these reverberations we find an ancient motto that is particularly interesting for its ambivalence and paradoxical structure: naufragium feci, bene navigavi. This motto was first mentioned by Diogenes Laertius, but we find multiple versions of it throughout European culture. To cite a couple of examples from the Italian context, I would recall Leopardi’s ‘naufragar [...] dolce’ (‘L’infinito’) and Ungaretti’s Allegria di naufragi.

How can we interpret the seeming contradictoriness of this motto? The motto calls into question the idea that shipwreck is the sign of bad navigation. On the contrary, there is a mutual implication between good navigation and shipwrecking. This is made explicit by Erasmus in the Adagium 1878:

Nunc bene navigavi, cum naufragium feci (Now that I am shipwrecked, my navigation has gone well/I’ve learnt how to navigate)

Here shipwreck is not in contrast with navigation, but is rather a necessary passage, something without which we cannot have a full and proper ‘navigation’. To put it a different way, only when we have experienced shipwreck can we claim to have navigated well. On the one hand, ‘shipwreck’ is an enriching experience, a possibility that gives meaning to every metaphorical ‘navigation’. On the other hand, in our human existence, it is impossible to navigate without ever experiencing shipwreck. In our finite, imperfect world, shipwreck is ultimately unavoidable.

With this in mind, I would like to suggest that we could read ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ in SQ through the prism of the motto naufragium feci, bene navigavi. I am not arguing that this is what Levi intended to say, but simply that this is one of the ways of reading the text. If we see ‘texts and readers as co-creators of meaning […], [whereby] interpretation becomes a co-production between actors that brings new things to light rather than an endless rumination on a text’s hidden meaning or representational failures’ (Felski 2015, 173-74), ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ could be read as a (metaphorical) navigation on three levels. First, Levi and Pikolo’s journey to get the soup is a navigation through the camp that provides a ‘moment of reprieve’. Second, Levi’s translation of Dante is a metaphorical navigation in the labyrinth of memory, an attempt to trace a route through a sea of oblivion. Finally, Levi’s translation is also a ‘metanavigation’, for it concerns another navigation and shipwreck, that of Ulysses. By overlapping his navigation with that of Ulysses, Levi raises crucial questions regarding the human condition and the fate of the Häftlinge in the Lager.

As in the case of Ulysses, each of the three levels of navigation ends with a shipwreck. But is Levi’s translation of Dante really a failure, or could it be read as the sign of a good navigation? In the Preface to SQ, Levi argues that when the idea that ‘every stranger is an enemy’ becomes the ‘major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager’. The whole Lager could indeed be read through the curse of the Tower of Babel (see ‘Una buona giornata’). Translation is therefore a way of countering this course, a way of reining in the effects of Babel by restoring the humanity of the stranger and building a bridge through language, as Levi argues in ‘Tradurre ed essere tradotti’. By translating Dante to Pikolo, then, Levi is not just recovering fragments of memory. He is countering the logic that lies at the root of the Lager and restoring – if temporarily – his and Pikolo’s humanity. The translation ends with a shipwreck, yes, but that experience – the attempt of ‘enacting’ the human through a navigation – is a good shipwreck: naufragium feci, bene navigavi.

SB

Food is a fundamental aspect of war and captivity narratives. Cabbage and turnips become emblems of misery in Günter Grass’s Der Butt (The Flounder), Ernst Jünger’s In Stahlgewittern (In Storms of Steel), and Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front). In Levi, these vegetables symbolise the bleak reality of the Lager that makes any daydreaming futile.

GC

Levi and Jean’s fleeting Dantean reprieve is abruptly halted by the return to the ‘sordid, ragged crowd of the soup queue’. Standing in contrast with Dante’s majestic verses and Ulysses’ voyage of discovery is the cramped enclosure of the queue and the banality of the description of the day’s cabbage-and-turnip soup. But the contrast is also between Levi’s own Italian language and sense of cultural identity and the Babelic experience of the Lager. Linguistic chaos is a key component of Levi’s experience and subsequent description of the camp, and one to which he was unusually attentive. Early on in his testimony (and once again, Dante is an important model here), Levi designates the camp a ‘perpetua Babele’. He evokes the linguistic confusion of the camp by including in his account unfamiliar tongues. We see this here in the soup queue but also, for example, in his recollection of the distribution of bread (‘la distribuzione del pane, del pane-Brot-Broit-chleb-pain-lechem-kenyer’) and in his description of the industrial tower in the camp (‘i suoi mattoni sono stati chiamati Ziegel, briques, tegula, cegli, kamenny, bricks, teglak’). Linguistic chaos contributes acutely to the condition of extreme isolation associated with the Lager.

Levi’s most sustained meditation on language in Auschwitz comes in the essay ‘Comunicare’, found in the 1986 collection I sommersi e i salvati. Here he reflects not only upon the extreme linguistic isolation of the camp and the psychological damage this often wrought, but also upon the degradation of language he witnessed. Violence and brute force would often replace linguistic exchange as the ‘communicative’ medium between individuals. Levi describes how, for those who did not speak German, words were used not on account of their referential function but as blunt aural instruments that could elicit the desired response from the receiver. The linguistic interaction between guards and prisoners became more reminiscent of that between humans and working animals than that between human beings existing on the same level.

TK

Examples are everywhere in SQ, but this is arguably the most striking instance of how an elevated style and references taken from literary tradition clash continuously with plurilingualism in Levi’s writing; abstract concepts with harsh materiality; ‘destiny’ with ‘Kraut’. In this case, ‘cavoli e rape’ is repeated in four different languages. The harsh sound of these words in German, Italian, French, and Hungarian clashes with the philosophical reasoning of the vertiginous previous lines. Language underscores the tragic irony of the entire sequence (a tragic irony that was present even in Dante’s original treatment of Ulysses’ story, in his Inferno 26).

FB

Levi wrote some brief explanatory notes of his own for a Schools edition of SQ, published by Einaudi in 1973. Most of these are linguistic, translating foreign words and phrases, or simply explanatory. The note here to ‘il perché’ has more substance, but has also been treated tentatively by critics, as it seems somewhat partial or incomplete as an explanation of this remarkable, climactic moment. Levi writes: ‘In quell’istante, all’autore pare di intravvedere una conturbante analogia fra naufragio di Ulisse e il destino dei prigionieri: l’uno e gli altri sono stati paradossalmente “puniti”, Ulisse per aver infranto le barriere della tradizione, i prigionieri perché hanno osato opporsi a una forza soverchiante, qual era allora l’ordine fascista in Europa. Ancora: fra le varie radici dell’antisemitismo tedesco, e quindi del Lager, c’era l’odio e il timore per l’“acutezza” intellettuale dell’ebraismo europeo, che i due giovani sentono simile a quella dei compagni di Ulisse, e di cui in quel momento si riconoscono rappresentanti ed eredi’ (OC I, 1417-18).

RG

In Inferno 26, Ulysses recounts how, as he was approaching the safety of a mountain-island in the middle of the ocean, a sudden whirlwind plunged his ship into the abyss, drowning him and all his mariners – ‘com’ altrui piacque [as pleased Another]’ (141), he comments. Reflecting on this ending, Levi lists, among the thoughts he desperately wants to share with Pikolo, the ‘cosí umano e necessario e pure inaspettato anacronismo [so human, so necessary and yet unexpected anachronism]’ that is implied in it. This is most likely the fact that, in Dante’s account, the Greek hero is struck down by the will of a god who belongs to a different time order. Perhaps, however, Levi’s ‘anachronism’ is more significant.

Odysseus, the Homeric hero, displays two contrasting impulses that drive him forward. One is his desire to return home, his nostalgia for Ithaca, his family and peace after ten years fighting the Trojan war and ten more trying, though not always convincingly, to return home. The other is his yearning to explore new lands and gain knowledge of unknown, undiscovered peoples. These impulses push him in opposite directions, keeping him wandering all over the Mediterranean for ten years. In the end, however, the centripetal force wins, and Odysseus returns home to resume his role as king, husband, father and son.

Dante is unlikely to have known the Odyssey but, being aware of the two impulses, he comes up with a concept that is absolutely brilliant. He collapses one impulse into the other – Ulysses’ desire for home, the known, and the past into a yearning for distant lands, the unknown and the future. He gives Ulysses a new, obscure but powerful purpose that urges him not back in, towards Ithaca, but out, in search of a loftier centre and home, an uninhabited world (mondo sanza gente) that he has never seen but that he, with his extraordinary intelligence, intuits must exist.

Though it may sound somewhat fanciful, Dante’s innovation is consistent with the medieval notion that a destiny is inscribed in the very name of the Greek hero. Uguccione da Pisa’s dictionary, among others, states that the name ‘Ulysses’ derives from olon xenos, an expression denoting ‘the wise man who inhabits this world as a pilgrim, a stranger’. To this information, Uguccione (d. 1210), whose work Dante knew, adds, quoting St Paul’s authority (Hebrews 13. 14), a crucial comment: 'non enim hic habemus manentem civitatem sed futuram inquirimus [For we have not here a lasting city, but we seek one that is to come]'. Accordingly, Ulysses may be viewed as an exile and a pilgrim in this world, who uses his genius to seek, in Pauline terms, his true home. Coming in sight of the ultimate centre, paradise on earth, he almost breaks into the world of the Christian myth. To his eyes, it is the only land where, after five months on the open sea, he might escape death, but it belongs to another time, another space and another moral order. No wonder that he is struck down, ‘as pleased Another’. He dies tragically, while exercising the genius that defines him. He dies in a manner that is unexpected and mysterious for him, though not for Dante and his readers, who watch his final exploit knowing full well that no one may reach earthly paradise before Christ re-opens its gates. Indeed, when Ulysses’ ship crashes against the storm, something truly awesome happens: two different eras, two different ethical orders and two poetic worlds intersect and clash – the ancient and the modern, the pagan and the Christian, the Homeric and the Dantean. By attempting to land on the shore of the earthly paradise before it is re-opened, Dante’s Ulysses is trying to break through the laws of time to reach an impossible destination that is in the future. The anachronism consists not just in his being stopped by the Christian God, as Levi suggests, but in his yearning to reach that God.

But then, how can Ulysses be guilty and why should he be stopped if he is searching for the supreme good? What kind of transgression has Ulysses committed? The answer comes from Thomas Aquinas who, writing about the fall of Lucifer, makes a very chilling point:

The devil sinned not by desiring something evil, but rather by desiring something good, viz., ultimate beatitude, but not in a fitting manner, that is, not in such a way as to attain it by God’s grace. (Quaestiones disputatae de malo, qu. 16, art. 3).

So, one can find damnation while looking for something good, be it knowledge, as Adam and Eve did, or power, as Lucifer did. This is Ulysses’ case as well. The difference is that Lucifer, Adam and Eve knew, Ulysses doesn’t: they are acquainted with God, Ulysses isn’t. However, Ulysses’ subjective innocence does not make him objectively less guilty. His mistake is wanting to reach God without God. A pagan and a sinner, Ulysses attempts to reach the sacred mountain by means of intelligence and strength alone. However heroic and noble, his attempt is destined to fail. Eternal bliss cannot be conquered by intelligence, nor even by virtue, for it is not enough to seek, one must be sought. As the choir of the Proud, on the first terrace of Purgatory, prays: ‘Vegna ver’ noi la pace del tuo regno, | ché noi ad essa non potem da noi, | s’ella non vien, con tutto nostro ingegno’ [May the peace of your kingdom come to us, | for we cannot attain it of ourselves | if it come not, for all our striving] (Purg. 11, 7-9).

By underlining the anachronism of Ulysses’ death, Primo Levi points the finger at his extraordinary relevance for us. Dante’s Ulysses is endowed with the mind of one whom Horkheimer and Adorno would call a follower of the Enlightenment, a free thinker, a modernist; and, while being intellectually fascinated by him, the poet shows that he runs to his undoing. His tragedy is a warning to all humans, Dante included, not to trust their intelligence alone, ‘perché non corra che virtù nol guidi [lest it run where virtue does not guide it]’ (Inf. 26, 22) – something that is becoming more and more evident in our time, when the vulnerability of modern society to its own inventions is becoming more apparent every day.

LP

This verse is not from Inferno 26 but from Inferno 3, the canto of ‘lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’intrate’ and of ‘diverse lingue, orribili favelle, parole di dolore, accenti d’ira’. Both Inferno 3 as a whole, and this line in particular, could have served Levi well to describe his internment in Auschwitz (a land of despair, a Babel of languages, sorrowful words, angry imprecations). Here, however, Levi does not want to refer to the Dante of Inferno 3, the poet whose words could possibly be read as a direct reminder of the world of the camp, but to the Dante of Inferno 26, whose lines offer a revelatory insight into Levi’s (and the other inmates’) existence and destiny.

VG

‘The Canto of Ulysses’ records a truly remarkable feat of cultural memory, as Levi recalls and recites Dante amidst the ruin of Auschwitz. He does so to teach Italian to his campmate Jean. But as he recites the words of Dante, Levi also feels his past come back to him. He begins to recover something of his identity and his humanity in the degraded world of the Lager, to feel again that he is ‘a man’.

Dante is not, however, the only canonical writer to appear in ‘The Canto of Ulysses’. So too does Shakespeare. <br /> Levi admits to ‘gaps’, ‘holes’, and ‘lacuna[e]’ in his memory as he recites Dante, some of which would seem to be ‘irreparable’. Unable to recall his Dante, Levi is forced to confront ‘silence’:

I would give today’s soup to know how to connect ‘the like on any day’ to the last lines. I try to reconstruct it through rhymes, I close my eyes, I bite my fingers – but it is no use, the rest is silence [il resto è silenzio]. Other verses dance in my head: ‘…The sodden ground belched wind …’, no, it is something else. [Woolf’s translation.]

‘[T]he rest is silence’: Levi is quoting the last words that are spoken by Hamlet, before he dies:

O, I die, Horatio!

The potent poison quite o’ercrows my spirit.

I cannot live to hear the news from England.

But I do prophesy th’election lights

On Fortinbras; he has my dying voice.

So tell him, with th’occurrents more and less

Which have solicited – the rest is silence.

With his ‘spirit’ succumbing to the ‘potent poison’ Claudius and Laertes have used to kill him, Hamlet undertakes the impossible: to testify to his own death, to ‘tell’ in words his fall into deathly silence. This is his ‘dying voice’.

What is Hamlet doing in ‘The Canto of Ulysses’? Why does Levi place it where he does, in ‘the caesura’, the abyssal gap between Auschwitz and his cultural identity and memory, embodied by Dante? It is certainly ironic that Levi draws once again on the Western canonical literary tradition to record the moment of its ostensible breakdown. What emerges from the lapse, the silence that Levi testifies to, is another tie to his compromised past, and the literary culture that would seem to have been obliterated by the Holocaust – even if Levi does not choose to bring obvious notice to his allusion by using quotation marks or by writing, ‘as Hamlet says’. The poetry of Hamlet appears to be among the ‘other verses’ Levi has confusedly ‘dancing in his head’ while he tries to fill the gaps in his memory.

By quoting Hamlet, Levi would appear to again testify to the power of literature as a mainstay of culture and humanity, evincing his commitment to humanist ideals. This is certainly the positive interpretation of Hamlet in ‘The Canto of Ulysses’. I would make the case, however, that Levi is using Shakespeare for an altogether more challenging purpose. By appropriating the ‘dying voice’ of Hamlet, Levi records the place where his memory and his identity collapse, testifying to the reduction of the camp inmate to silence and oblivion. Bryan Cheyette writes that ‘even when his memory self-consciously fails him’, Levi is always ‘at pains to bear witness to those moments of failure’ (Cheyette 1999, 64). Levi seeks to testify to the silence, to show that ‘something has occurred even if it cannot be understood’ (Druker 2009, 64). This is the role played by Hamlet in ‘The Canto of Ulysses’. Levi does not use the play to testify to the endurance of the human spirit in the camps, but to silence, to a ‘world of negation’ (OC I, 235). Hamlet, perhaps ironically given its near-unrivalled canonical and cultural status, marks the space beyond language and culture, into which Levi is at risk of falling. This, as Levi called it, is the ‘black hole’ of Auschwitz (OC II, 1663).

Through his allusion to Hamlet, Levi rewrites Shakespeare from the perspective of Auschwitz, endowing the play with new meanings as he confronts the lacunae and voids produced by the world of the concentration camp. Levi uses the play to record the disintegration of humane values in Auschwitz, as memory and language are brought to the point of collapse. Jacques Derrida does much the same in his own work on the play. He draws Hamlet into conversation with Holocaust testimony when he compares the play to the poetry of survivor Paul Celan in his 1995 piece ‘The Time is Out of Joint’. Derrida contends that the paradox of testimony is that the witness must uncannily ‘outlive his life’ (3.2.117) – or ‘survive’ that which is not ‘survivable’: the collapse of all meaning and death (Derrida 1995). This is the sense in which Hamlet is a play about the ‘impossible possibility of testimony’, as Derrida calls it. Hamlet has ‘seen the worst’ and is ‘the witness of the worst disorder, of absolute injustice’, writes Derrida. Hamlet has witnessed too much for words – but testimony, ‘though it hath no tongue, will speak’ (2.2.546).

Levi must also confront and testify to the painful death of memory, the destruction of human identity and culture, before the event of physical death itself – or as Jacques Lacan would call it, ‘symbolic’ before ‘actual’ death, the death of the self before physical death. Lawrence Langer uses the phrase ‘deathlife’ to name the same phenomenon, of ‘dying while one is living’ (Langer 2021, 13). Not unlike the melancholic prince, Levi attempts the impossible of testifying to his own demise. He deploys Hamlet to record his fall into a place beyond humanity and beyond culture – even beyond language. It is, to adopt the words of Jean Améry, an act of both resignation and revolt: resignation to silence, and a determined revolt against oblivion, by testifying to it. It is an astonishing moment.

RA

In this sentence we are encountering a barter of survival, biological survival versus the survival of memory. What matters most in this exceptional moment, a state of exception within the state of exception of the Lager, is not keeping one’s body alive but restoring life to a handful of verses. Can literature be against survival?

MAM

Levi’s encounter with Ulysses in Auschwitz centres around his painful yet exhilarating struggle to reconstruct Dante’s text from memory. But when Levi talks of his hope that, despite his inadequate rendering, Pikolo ‘got the message’, he is pointing at something other than pure philology. Uttered in the death camp, Dante’s words shine through the dust of school commentary. This estrangement effect triggers a kind of epiphany: ‘ha sentito che lo riguarda, che riguarda tutti gli uomini in travaglio, e noi in specie; e che riguarda noi due, che osiamo ragionare di queste cose con le stanghe della zuppa sulle spalle’. The momentary sense of liberation Levi derives from owning and sharing Dante’s sublime language has been interpreted as a celebration of humanist values that however fails to recognise the way in which these values are entangled with the very structures of domination that created the Lager (Druker 2004). Yet Levi never provides a univocal interpretation of ‘the message’ of Ulysses’ story. In fact, the episode has had a ‘bifurcated’ critical reception and its meaning has been contested since the Middle Ages (Barolini 2018). Moreover, the figure of Dante in general and his figuration of Ulysses in particular became central to Fascism’s nationalist cultural programme, something Levi could hardly have missed.

As with other protagonists of the Inferno, the issue has been how to reconcile Ulysses’ heroic stature as a character with the fact that he is ultimately condemned as an unrepentant sinner. While the prevalent opinion among early commentators of the Commedia was that Ulysses was a transgressor, there were some who presented him as an admirable figure. Cristoforo Landino calls Ulysses’ speech ‘honest and honourable’. Bernardino Daniello notes that the ancient myth of the ne plus ultra was ‘a false and futile belief’. On the other hand, not all modern critics praise Ulysses’ daring. John Ruskin warily observes that humans are yet to learn the ‘danger of this novelty of wisdom’. Still, it is in the modern period that a more positive view of Ulysses’ intellectual hubris starts to gain traction.

The frontispiece to Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) is often cited as the symbolic watershed between medieval deference to traditional beliefs and the modern project of exploration and innovation. This frontispiece depicts a ship which is about to pass through the pillars of Hercules, just like Dante imagined Ulysses and his crew dared to do. Another ship, near the horizon, is also approaching. Below the depiction of the ships, a Latin motto, taken from the Vulgate, recites: ‘Many shall pass through and knowledge shall be increased’. There is no indication of shipwreck; on the contrary, the ships move confidently ahead in full sail. The world has entered a new era and the ancient prohibition has become void: ‘these times may justly bear in their word […] plus ultra, in precedence of the ancient non ultra’ (Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605)).

To Horkheimer and Adorno, Bacon is the ‘herald’ of the modern belief that ‘knowledge, which is power, knows no limits’ – a principle that, taken to its extreme logical conclusion, leads to the gates of Auschwitz. Had Ulysses gone under, as Dante decreed, the world would have been a better place. However, the postmodern critique of rationalism disregards another, parallel line that connects Enlightenment conceptions of the human to emancipatory discourses in both politics and aesthetics. The revolutionary and Romantic era gave us many versions of the self-sacrificing heroes of knowledge, striving for the emancipation of humankind. Shelley’s Prometheus ‘gave men speech, and speech created thought | Which is the measure of the universe. | And Science struck the thrones of earth and heaven | […] for which he hangs | Withering in destined pain’ (Prometheus Unbound). As Dante does with the Homeric story, Shelley rewrites and extends a classical myth in a way that challenges the idea that knowledge is sinful or transgressive. In the preface to Prometheus Unbound, Shelley declares he would ‘rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon than go to Heaven with Paley [eighteenth-century theologian] and Malthus’. Shelley also names Dante as one of the stylistic predecessors to his own use of imagery ‘drawn from the operations of the human mind’. In his readings of the Commedia, Shelley was particularly attracted to similes that illuminate ways of seeing and knowing. But a shadow of Dante’s ambivalence lingers in Shelley’s suggestion that his Prometheus is similar to Milton’s Satan, minus the ‘taints of ambition […] and personal aggrandisement’.

From his long English exile, the Italian revolutionary and nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini contributed to making Dante into a national icon at the service of the Italian Risorgimento. In The Duties of Man, he defines humans as ‘creatures capable of rational, social, and intellectual progress’, warning his readers that ‘you descend to the level of brutes whenever you suppress, or allow to be suppressed any of the faculties that constitute human nature either in yourself or others’ (Mazzini 1892, 45). ‘Brutes’ (‘bruti’) is Dante’s term, and the passage as a whole reads like an extended paraphrase of Ulysses’ ‘orazion picciola’, whose rhetoric Mazzini puts to work here in support of ‘the emancipation of Woman [and] of the working man’ (146).

Mazzini’s duties of man were recast into the Fascist doctrine of the primacy of the state over the individual. The canto of Ulysses was similarly enlisted to the cult of Italian exceptionalism and imperial conquest. Responding to a survey to establish which was the most popular passage of the Commedia, Mussolini apparently nominated the line ‘de’ remi facemmo ali al folle volo’. The quotation struck some as scarily apposite. In the clandestine paper ‘Il Ribelle’ of 31 October 1944, the anti-fascist priest don Giacomo Vender, writing under the pseudonym Sancio Empörer, used the same verse to expose il Duce’s seductive lies: ‘Fascism’s great accomplishment has been to dress its sick [‘folle’] idea of life, humanity, nation and religion in seductive attitudes. [Everything] was made into a wing to hurl ourselves […] beyond the pillars of Hercules…de’ remi facemmo ali al folle volo’.

Levi leaves out the line altogether. His act of subversion is even more radical: as the Resistance fighters, he feels that Dante’s text is ‘about us’, but the role he chooses for himself is not that of the acquiescent victim, one of Ulysses’ anonymous crew. He writes himself and his fellow prisoner as the heroic, tragic protagonists of Ulysses’ ‘shipwreck with spectator’ (Blumberg). Far from being complicit with the master narrative of Fascism, Levi invokes Dante in the death camp to liberate and reclaim his words and restore to them all the force of their moral questioning.

RMuc

‘Il canto di Ulisse’ describes a translation process like no other. Absent are the quiet room, the pen, paper, keyboard, screen, dictionary that nowadays usually accompany the translator’s work. Instead, there are two friends walking in the fresh air, momentarily released from labour. Absent, moreover, are the words on the page to be translated, that comforting object that is at once static and mutable, authoritative and open-ended. Instead, there is flawed memory, conversation, communion. The translation that happens in the canto (named for an act of song, a bodily, expressive, fleeting thing) has other priorities, other aims, other strengths at hand. It is first and foremost a translation between and of persons; a carrying across (trans-latio) of one self to another. Like the Dantean text it translates, it enacts a going-beyond the limits, a desperate striving for liberty and fully lived humanity, but it is a liberty of mind, of language, and not of body.

The impetus for the translation that takes place in the canto has desire at its core. A desire to learn, a desire to seize a moment of liberty, to communicate, to be understood, to go beyond the awful limits of the present time and place. The shared desiring of Primo and Jean (Jean who, unlike Ulysses, ‘non trascurava di mantenere rapporti umani’, as Levi comments earlier in the chapter) pushes the translation forwards despite its shortcomings in terms of accuracy or creativity (it is ‘scialba’, ‘pedestre’). Though words might be forgotten, something fundamental of the absent Dantean text is expressed in this urgent desiring – Ulysses’ narrative of unquenchable desire, striving, desperate: ‘il messaggio’ comes through.

Perhaps the translation is so full of feeling because the text to be translated is not on the page, an object, but is an integrated part of Primo’s memory. He is not translating Dante, he is translating his memory of Dante, Dante learned and remembered in who-knows-what circumstances - at home, at school - with who-knows-what feelings and associations. A text learned a world away from where he is. And yet his current situation makes the (memory) text take on meaning it did not have before. The gradually increasing pace of the narrative and the shift from past to present tense amplifies the sense of urgency; he is changing, the text is changing, everything is happening now, all made possible by the openhearted interlocutor Jean, who experiences with him. The intimacy of this translation act is breathtaking. Unlike other acts of translation that have an object which is (to varying degrees) fixed, external, safe, a book we can close at the end of the day, here the object is within, maddeningly intangible, bearing with itself not a third party’s words to be ‘interpreted’, but those words passed through the translator’s own living memory. The person of Primo through Dante is the source text.

As Alexander has pointed out in relation to this chapter, ‘all translations […] bear the imprint of the moment’ (Alexander 2007, 160). The physical circumstances of this act of translation are tangible (‘gradevole marcia’, ‘aria fresca’), manifesting the momentary liberty of the participants (‘mi sentivo insolitamente leggero’). I would add to this: not only is the moment imprinted on the translation but the persons involved in it. The canto manifests in an extreme way the fact that ‘translators are never […] neutral, impersonal transferring devices. Translators’ personal experiences – emotions, motivations, attitudes, association […] are indispensable’ (Robinson 1991, 260). In the canto, the personal experiences of the translator are not only indispensable, they are inescapable, they are the text itself.

The meaning of the text is generated in the willing coming together of the two friends, Primo and Jean. The text’s ‘message’ is not something external but emerges from their lives; meaning is found in the interpersonal act of translation itself, ‘at the heart of [which] is recovery’ (Woods 2014, 3). Primo and Jean are seeking to recover something of themselves in this stolen, fleeting translational exchange. Where words fail, Primo relies on Jean’s experience to fill in the gaps (‘Pikolo ha viaggiato per mare e sa cosa vuol dire’). But it is the present moment and the people they are now that makes possible a new reading, a new translation of the Dantean lines filled with revelation, empathy, resonance: ‘Dovevo venire in Lager per accorgermi’. It is their present state as ‘uomini in travaglio’ that enables Jean to ‘receive the message’ of the text, which is as much Primo’s life as it is Dante’s words.

We do not hear the ‘dull’ (‘scialba’) translation that is produced in this encounter between the friends. It does not exist, only their living of the process of translating is recorded. The production of an object was never the aim of the encounter or the subsequent narrative Levi weaves around it. We are left with a message which, though composed of words, expresses the ineffable.

RC

Among many other layers to this chapter and its revelations, the ‘qualcosa di piú’ is also a reference to poetry as a means to escape Auschwitz. Poetry itself becomes the means to resist the process of bestialisation and reification.

MJ

Proper names. This Levi was also named in the chapters ‘Il viaggio’ and ‘Sul fondo’.

RG

Giovanni Falaschi (Falaschi 2002) points out that for Levi to remember ‘compagna | Picciola’ but not the equally famous ‘orazion picciola’ is not credible. The same goes for ‘folle volo’, another almost proverbial expression. Falaschi explains this case of ‘selective memory’ as Levi fearing that these expressions might be perceived - either by Pikolo or by his readers - as diminishing or critical of Ulysses, and thus he ‘forgets’ them. However, ‘orazion picciola’ simply means ‘brief speech’, and Falaschi maintains that, while Levi certainly was aware of this, he might have wanted to avoid any confusion.

EL

In the linguistic framework of the chapter, and in light of the Dantean subtext on which it relies, the figure of this non-speaking character is particularly meaningful since it evokes, as a foil, the character of Nimrod in Inferno 31. Dante introduces Nembrotte as the speaker of an unintelligible language, embodied in a single five-word enigmatic utterance: Raphèl maì amecche zabi almi (v. 67). Three elements seem pertinent to establish the contrastive connection. First, the position: both Nimrod and the ingegner Levi stand in a hole, visible only from the waist up. Secondly, the speaking: Virgil mocks Nimrod’s inability to move out of his own private, untranslatable language, while ingegner Levi ‘makes a gesture’ (‘mi fa un cenno’), entrusting to a non-verbal cue its expression of charitable and friendly connection with Primo. Finally, the restriction of what may be conveyed verbally: Nimrod does not speak intelligibly, while ingegner Levi ‘never speaks of eating’. The verb for “eating” (It. mangiare) is a particularly sensible one in the linguistic domain of the Lager, having been violently shifted in the semantics of the Lager from the human and communal ‘essen’ to the animal and isolating ‘fressen’. Ingegner Levi’s character in the episode reinforces the notion that a desire for communication is at the root of a human community, the exact opposite of ‘life as brutes’.

(Note: L’ingegner Levi appears twice earlier in SQ: first in ‘Il viaggio’ as the father of three-year old Emilia - ‘una bambina curiosa, ambiziosa, allegra e intelligente’ (OC I, 146) - murdered on arrival at Auschwitz; and then in ‘Sul fondo’, nervously asking Primo where his daughter and wife might be.)

SM

Similarly in the story ‘Lilít’, Levi describes as ‘sweet’ and ‘ferocious’ his chance encounter in the Lager with a woman: ‘A quel tempo capitava di rado di vedere una donna da vicino, ed era un’esperienza dolce e feroce, da cui si usciva affranti’ (OC II, 251). Tellingly, the story also recounts a rare moment of human warmth and respite from work during which Levi bonded with a fellow prisoner, Tischler, thanks to the power of narrative - Tischler told him the story of Lilìt.

EL

This is a powerful moment of connection between Ulysses and Primo Levi, both in Hell for having followed their belief: Ulysses for his desire for knowledge, Levi for his rebellion against the RSI and the German occupiers. For more on this, see Giovanni Pietro Vitali’s essay, ‘Le ultime lettere di Primo Levi e i suoi compagni ad ogni passo verso Auschwitz’ (in Garullo, Rigo, Toppan 2020, 209-69).

MJ

As in ‘Argon’ in Il sistema periodico, Levi here demonstrates a philologist’s interest in historical grammar. The grammatical difference that separates the marked ‘Ma misi me’ and its unmarked equivalent in Italian is not expressly stated (the French je me mis is the ordinary, unremarkable grammar, and hence can’t serve to illustrate it). Levi’s free indirect discourse here indicates how much store he put in this difference: he explains its effect in three different ways to Jean (as ‘audacious’, as a broken chain, as the other side of a barrier).

The expected fourteenth-century Italian syntax is Ma misimi. (It is unlikely to be Ma mi misi, as it would be today, because in old Italian ma frequently triggers the postposition of the pronoun). But Levi does not limit himself to describing impressionistically the effect of the marked grammar. Scientifically, he analyses the form of mettersi via comparison with other instances of the same lemma in the passage. Of si metta: ‘I had to come to the Lager to realise that it is the same expression as before’.

The difference between Ma misimi and Ma misi me is that the unaccented, enclitic pronoun mi has become the accented, separate word me. This completely changes the rhythm of the line: *Ma mísimi per l’álto máre apérto (accents on 2, 6 and 10) becomes Ma misi mé per l’álto máre etc. (with accents on 4, 6 and 10). A number of Commedia manuscripts, in fact, have misimi – another clue to precisely the ‘audacity’ that Levi detects in Dante’s rhythmical and grammatical usage here.

Dante’s me makes his reflexive pronoun mi into (almost) a transitive object – a distinct, real-existing entity, separate from the grammatical subject: ‘I’ act on a ‘me’, not just ‘myself’.

What Levi hears, via a kind of solecism, is a prominent, sticking-out me – ‘oggi mi sento da tanto’. This is a sense of self that grows – ‘Per un momento, ho dimenticato chi sono e dove sono’ – into almost an answer to his title’s question.

RP

The ‘hole in the memory’ that swallows up Dante’s verses and prevents Levi from sharing them with Pikolo is reminiscent of both the underground tank described at the beginning of the chapter, and the vast crater that is Dante’s hell. Visually these ‘holes’, be they real or metaphorical, are the negative cast of the mountains mentioned later in the chapter: Levi’s beloved Alps, and Ulysses’ Mount Purgatory - these, instead, bearers of positive meanings, as they respectively represent home and human ambition. (Levi’s very last newspaper article was given the title ‘Il buco nero di Auschwitz’, OC II, 1662-65.)

EL

Interlinguistic felicity. Passages addressing questions of communication, language acquisition, interlanguage connection and intercultural translation scattered throughout the text are constantly marked by a specific affective tonality: they are remembered and represented as successful. The situation at hand is exceptional. In both SQ and I sommersi e i salvati, linguistic plurality is often used to characterise the absurd chaos and linguistic cacophony that marked Häftling existence in the Lager, which is a temporary universe of linguistic dissension and violence. To the contrary, the exchange between Jean and Primo is not simply based on, and concerned with, translation. It also is utterly charitable, in a technical sense. It is based on a systematic practicing of interpretive benevolence. It is dominated, that is, by the desire to move beyond linguistic differences and find a common ground. Such desire is not simply posited: it is acted upon. When Primo stumbles or forgets, Jean encourages him to go on (“Ça ne fait rien, vas-y tout de même”). Similarly, when memory of Dante’s original fails Primo and something of the original text is admittedly lost, the text does not dwell on the loss, but it vindicates the eventual success of the mediation work: ‘nonostante la traduzione scialba e il commento pedestre e frettoloso, ha ricevuto il messaggio’.

Felicity in interlingual communication is crucial for Levi to regain momentary existence as a human being in the violent linguistic landscape of the Lager. Accordingly, interlinguistic success is made the vehicle of interhuman connection. The exchange between Primo and Jean, in its translative quality, sheds light on an oppositional element in the language of the Lager, which Levi defines as ‘orts- und zeitgebunden', tied to that place and that time (I sommersi e i salvati, 1066; OC II, 1025). Levi draws his terminology from Victor Klemperer’s 1947 book Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook. Klemperer’s merciless diagnosis of the language of Nazi Germany as the product and the producer of a dehumanising regime is the foil for Levi’s momentarily but crucially successful act of communicating across different languages. In the chapter, the willingness and ability to free the most meaningful human exchange from the ties of a time- and place-bound language is the antidote to the isolating and dehumanising linguistics of the concentration camp.

(For more on this theme, see here.)

Linguistically categorised terms: * Vorarbeiter [German]

• Pikolo [KZGerman]

• Häftling [KZGerman]

• Kommando [KZGerman]

• Also, etc. [German]

• Qu’est-ce qu’il-y-a [French]

• Kapo [KZGerman]

• Ihr Doktoren! [German]

• Meister [KZGerman]

• Lager [KZGerman]

• Aujourd’hui [French]

• Essenholen [KZGerman]

• Corvée [French]

• Tu es fou de marcher [French]

• Blockführer [KZGerman]

• Sale brute [French]

• Ein ganz gemeiner Hund [German]

• Je me mis [French]

• Kraftwerk [German]

• Keine Ahnung [German]

• Ça ne fait rien [French]

• Kraut und Rüben [German]

• Choux et navets [French]

• Káposzta és répak [Other]

SM

The prisoners’ gait is in focus throughout. The minimal characterisation of Limentani here (his name, his origin, his hidden bowl) is striking for its emphasis on his ambulatio, the result of his wooden clogs – ‘strascicando i piedi’. Shoes are a recurrent obsession of Levi and all the prisoners in SQ, as established in ‘Sul fondo’: ‘Né si creda che le scarpe, nella vita del Lager, costituiscano un fattore d’importanza secondaria. La morte incomincia dalle scarpe.’ The stakes of this gait are summarised early in the work: ‘Dobbiamo camminare diritti, senza strascicare gli zoccoli [...] per restare vivi, per non cominciare a morire’ (‘Iniziazione’). The brief exchange between Levi and Limentani here, which Jean listens in on attentively, is then also one between living and dead.

Jean, at the beginning of this chapter, was recognised by his clogs (‘appena si riconobbero le sue scarpe [...], tutti smisero di raschiare’) – as Pikolo, he has a right to discarded clothes and shoes, ‘vestiti e scarpe “nuovi”’ (‘Le nostre notti’). These clogs, ‘zoccoli’, frequently impede the kind of conversation which Levi and Jean accomplish today, drowning out even furtive exchanges: ‘si può tentare di scambiare qualche parola attraverso l’acciottolio delle diecimila paia di zoccoli di legno’ (‘Esame di chimica’), or clamorously announcing a presence too abject for human exchange: ‘I nostri zoccoli di legno sono insupportabilmente rumorosi [...]. Con noi non parlano, e arriciano il naso quando ci vedono trascinarsi [...] disadatti e malfermi sugli zoccoli’ (‘Die drei Leute vom Labor’).

Here their clop must accompany the ‘pleasant walk’ in which the Italian lesson takes place. Perhaps the clogs scan the rhythm of the lines, or are audible in Jean’s recitation of new words, “Zup-pa, cam-po, ac-qua”, or indeed in Levi’s ‘pedestrian commentary’.

RP

The urgency of this phrase is very different from the other references to the passing of time in SQ, where ozio (idleness) and attesa (waiting) are usually precious for the momentary relief they provide for the prisoners from the harshness of the camp’s daily life (see, for instance, the chapters ‘Iniziazione’ and ‘Esame di chimica’).

VG

Interlinguistic mutuality. Shuttling between recitation of Dante’s text in the Italian original and its hurried and utilitarian French prose version, the lesson Primo imparts to Jean is deeply interlinguistic. The exchange between Jean and Primo is also mutual, at the very basic level of collaboration that any linguistic exchange requires. In addition, Jean is not a passive learner. He takes part in the process of communication, which unfolds in a living dialogue and requires that dialogue to exist. The first words of Italian that Jean picks up and adopts emerge from the living context of a spoken exchange, by the ‘natural’ and immediate imitation of two native speakers. The syllabification of the initial vocabulary Jean apprehends (“zup-pa, cam-po, ac-qua”) from those exchanged between Primo and another prisoner from Rome, Limentani, is not a marker of alienness but of co-participation. More importantly, the learning process is from the start accompanied by a smile, a pre-linguistic sign of mutual understanding.

Levi’s insistence on the collaborative work that undergirds the acts of interlinguistic communication taking place in the episode resonates with Walter Benjamin’s notion that translation is the cultural practice which best captures the intrinsic drive of all languages to communicate through their apparent mutual exclusiveness: ‘All suprahistorical kinship between languages consists in this: in every one of them as a whole, one and the same thing is meant […]. Whereas all individual elements of foreign languages - words, sentences, associations - are mutually exclusive, these languages supplement one another in their intentions’ (‘The Translator’s Task’, 156). The experience of shared humanity, which Primo and Jean achieve within the Babel of the Lager, and notwithstanding its violence, relies on the same underlying philosophy of language as Benjamin’s.

(For more on this, go here next.)

SM

Part of the concentration camp uniform, the cap is the first, grotesque piece of clothing that Levi spots upon arrival in Auschwitz, on the ‘strani individui’ (the prisoners already assimilated to the camp system) whose condition prefigures the fate of the newly arrived inmates: ‘In capo avevano un buffo berrettino, ed erano vestiti di una lunga palandrana a righe, che anche di notte e di lontano si indovinava sudicia e stracciata […]. Questa era la metamorfosi che ci attendeva’. Within the camp, prisoners have to quickly remove their caps in front of the Nazis as part of a quasi-military routine: ‘Il regolamento del Lager prescriveva di mettersi sull’attenti e di scoprirsi il capo’. (The Kapo of the Chemical Kommando shows the same deference in front of the official testing Levi’s ability as a chemist: ‘Alex bussa rispettosamente, si cava il berretto’; ‘C’è solo il Doktor Pannwitz, Alex, col berretto in mano, gli parla a mezza voce’.)

This action, featuring for the first time in the present chapter and then as a recurring automatism throughout SQ (see ‘giù i berretti di scatto davanti alle SS’), assumes new meaning in the final chapter of the book, ‘Storia di dieci giorni’, where Charles’ conscious decision to take off his cap as a sign of mourning of the death of fellow prisoner Sómogyi attests to a resurgence of human habits. In the same chapter, Levi refers to him as ‘l’uomo Charles’, and he himself regrets not having a cap to tip: ‘Charles si tolse il berretto. A me dispiacque di non avere il berretto’. The same words mark the narrative continuity between SQ and Levi’s second book. At the beginning of La tregua, a specification reinforces the gravity of Charles’ gesture, marking the transition from the death hovering above the camp to the future life of the prisoners after liberation: ‘Charles si tolse il berretto, a salutare i vivi e i morti’.

GM

Levi wrote this chapter in early 1946, apparently during a brief 45-minute lunch break at the Montecatini chemical plant at Avigliana, outside Turin, where he was then working (e.g. OC I, 1469). It is interesting to note that the chapter tells the story of another 'lunch break', in another chemical--industrial plant, an unimaginably darker, distant workplace.

RG

Scholars tend consistently if not quite unanimously to emphasise the ambiguity of Levi’s term ‘gigantesco’. The discussion of Dante’s Ulysses is ‘broken off’, as Hayden White puts it, before Levi can tell us ‘what we are supposed to conclude’ (2015, 12). As a result, ‘there is no final manifestation of the message, of the meaning that Levi is so desperately trying to grasp and communicate’, argues Giuseppe Stellardi (2019, 715). ‘Nessuno potrà mai affermare nulla con sicurezza’, assert Alberto Cavaglion and Paolo Valabrega (515). The lack of certainty regarding the term’s meaning is perhaps responsible for the substantial divergence between the critical interpretations that this passage has inspired.

There are those who argue that Levi’s ‘gigantic’ discovery when reciting Dante in Auschwitz is an unconquerable ‘faith in his culture’ (Hartman 1996, 52), and those who claim, conversely, that Levi instead recognises how ‘behind the gas chambers, the ovens, the starvation rations, and the astonishing otherworldly everyday viciousness and cruelty can be found at the heart of Western culture’ (Feinstein 2003, 365). In other words, while some hold that Levi finds in Dante the antidote to Auschwitz, others argue that he finds the cause.

Levi’s subsequent glosses on this passage have done little to alleviate the uncertainty. In the version of SQ that he prepared for a 1964 radio broadcast, he clarified the meaning of the quoted phrase ‘come altrui piacque’ (OC I, 1237); for the 1973 Schools edition of SQ, intended for an audience of Italian students, he provided footnotes explaining the term ‘anacronismo’ and the phrase ‘il perché del nostro destino’ (OC I, 1417-18). In both instances, Levi left ‘gigantesco’ undefined. This apparent authorial reticence should inspire some restraint in our critical exegesis. There is no need to pursue false certainty where the text offers legitimate ambiguity.

What we may note, however, is that elsewhere in SQ, and with significant frequency in Levi’s subsequent writing, the term ‘gigantesco’ serves to identify the monstrosity of the Lager. In the chapter ‘I sommersi e i salvati’, he describes Auschwitz as ‘una gigantesca esperienza biologica e sociale’ (OC I, 217). In the aforementioned school edition of SQ, he explains the historical shift in Nazi policies that transformed concentration camps into ‘gigantesche macchine di morte’ (OC I, 292). In a 1955 article celebrating the tenth anniversary of Italy’s liberation from Fascism, he describes how the Nazis ‘[h]anno lavorato con tenacia a creare la loro gigantesca macchina generatrice di morte e di corruzione’ (OC II, 1293). In a 1968 preface to a book on Auschwitz, he argues that the vital question remains ‘per quali ragioni e cause, prossime o lontane, abbia potuto nascere in questo civile continente una gigantesca fabbrica di morte’ (OC II, 1357). In the 1975 article ‘Così fu Auschwitz’, he describes what he calls the Nazis’ ‘costituzione di un gigantesco esercito di schiavi, non retribuiti e costretti a lavorare fino alla morte’ (OC II, 1374). In a 1979 response to the broadcast of the TV mini series Holocaust, he notes how the public seemed to focus on the question of why the genocide of the European Jews had occurred, ‘e questo è un perché gigantesco, ed antico quanto il genere umano: è il perché del male nel mondo’ (OC II, 1456). The accretion of these examples is by no means definitive; the ‘qualcosa di gigantesco’ that Levi discovered in discussing Dante with Jean may well differ from the ‘perché gigantesco’, the ‘perché del male nel mondo’, on which he deliberated decades later. Nevertheless, there would appear to be a pattern.

It is a pattern, moreover, that obtains well beyond Levi’s own work. To cite just one relevant example, the Italian anti-Fascist expatriate Giuseppe Antonio Borgese entitled his 1937 study of the totalitarian movement in Italy Goliath: The March of Fascism. And in that text Borgese lay the ultimate blame for the enormity of Fascism not on the Duce—‘it is futile […] to explain Fascism as if it were the creation of a single man, Mussolini’—but rather on another ‘gigantic individuality’ in the Italian national pantheon: Dante, who ‘distorted the soul of his people’, giving rise to ‘Nationalism and Racialism’ (46). Many Fascists, too, claimed Dante as the founder of their movement (Albertini 2013). Not for nothing did ‘Giovinezza’, the Fascist anthem, boast that ‘la vision dell’Alighieri, | oggi brilla in tutti i cuor’ (Pugliese 2001, 55). A 1927 study of Dante Alighieri e Benito Mussolini argued that the Duce’s Italy was closer than ever to Dante’s ideal (7-8). The Fascist Party’s own 1940 Dizionario di Politica made the same claim (735). ‘Che Dante sia Fascista lo dimostrano tutte le sue opere’, insisted one of the regime’s intellectuals; ‘solo oggi possiamo riconoscere in Dante il profeta del nostro destino’, maintained another (Scorrano 2001, 92-93, 198).

It is perhaps tempting to hear the echo of such sentiments in Levi’s epiphany that in Dante’s ‘Canto di Ulisse’ is to be found ‘il perché del nostro destino’. After all, Levi had learned his Dante in an Italian school system that had been turned to Fascism’s totalitarian aims. If he is indeed suggesting to Jean that abuses of Dante - the appropriation of tradition to support the arrogation of power in the present; the fraudulent claims to a divine warrant for violence - bear responsibility for the Häftlinge’s tragic fate, he has good reason.

Yet those who interpret Levi’s Dante lesson in a more liberatory manner have good reason as well. If the inhuman contrapasso of eternal damnation ‘come altrui piacque’ is to be found in Dante, so, too, is Ulysses’ call for an innate and inviolable human dignity: ‘considerate la vostra semenza’. Borgese in Goliath recognised this duality (12). So, too, I suspect, does Primo Levi in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Perhaps this is the ‘gigantic’ discovery that Levi has made in his meditation on Dante’s Inferno: that in our cultural inheritance are to be found both the roots of Fascism and the seeds of resistance.

CLL

This “qui” is a fulcrum around which the temporal and spatial dimensions of Levi’s narrative turn. After Levi’s initial passato remoto (‘Passò una SS’) shifts to present-tense narration (‘È Rudi’) in paragraph 15, Primo and Pikolo’s itinerant conversation unfolds in the now. Levi then develops an analogous spatial proximity with his insistence on the demonstrative “questo”, culminating in paragraph 28 (beginning ‘Pikolo mi prega…’), where he twice uses the word “qui”: in the first instance indicating the “hereness” of yet another gap in his memory; in the second, in ‘... come si dice qui’, effectively erasing any distance between the episode and its narration.

LI

Possibly the first time that Levi refers to the fundamental difference between prose and poetry and a certain natural superiority of poetic expression (see ‘Introduction’ to his poetry collection Ad ora incerta).

VG

Proper names. Both the other mentions of Levi’s first name in the book come in the final chapter, ‘Storia di dieci giorni’. All three, strangely, are spoken by French companions.

RG

As noted earlier, Jean Samuel’s memories of this episode are described in Il m’appelait Pikolo, pp. 39-40. Consider, for example, this sentence: ‘Encore maintenant je m’interroge sur ce mystère de la mémoire: nous avons eu tous deux le sentiment d’une rencontre cruciale, inoubliable, mais elle ne se fondait pas sur les mêmes gestes, les mêmes paroles, les mêmes sensations’ (Samuel, Dreyfus 2007, 40).

MJ

Jean Samuel, the actual person behind the character Jean, il Pikolo, in SQ, survived the camp and would write his own memoir – but only after Levi’s death. The book, written with Jean-Marc Dreyfus, is entitled Il m’appelait Pikolo (2007).

FB

Proper names. Alex was a key protagonist/antagonist in the previous chapter, ‘L’esame di chimica’.

RG

In Il m’appelait Pikolo, Jean Samuel and Jean-Marc Dreyfus write: ‘Pikolo […] Primo Levi m’a donné ce nom, mon nouveau nom’; ‘[l]e terme de Pikolo ne fait pas partie du vocabulaire ordinaire du camp; c’est une invention de Primo Levi’ (Samuel, Dreyfus 2007, 15, 16) (see also here). Recent research, though (Franceschini 2022) has qualified this claim, pointing to a possible earlier origin.

Tellingly, Samuel’s book was published on the twentieth anniversary of Primo Levi’s death.

MJ

The chapter opens with Levi and his fellow prisoners working below ground in an underground cistern or tank and ends with the quotation from Dante about the sea closing over Ulysses’ and his companions’ heads. These two moments are further connected as the description of the tank – ‘scaletta di corda’ and ‘portello’, literally ‘hatch’ rather than ‘manhole’ – conjures up the image of a ship.

EL

In the previous chapter, ‘Esame di chimica’, Primo has been admitted, through a kind of perverse and humiliating ‘chemistry examination’ carried out by Nazi official Herr Doktor Pannwitz, to a so-called ‘Chemical Kommando’. This Kommando will work, notionally, in a laboratory of the Buna-Werke industrial rubber plant, under construction by IG Farben next to the Monowitz-Auschwitz III concentration camp (and other POW and labour camps). The ‘cistern’ here is not a laboratory setting, but is probably a work site within the Buna complex.

Monowitz was the largest of the extensive network of so-called satellite- or sub-camps beyond Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau. For more information on Monowitz, see the Subcamps of Auschwitz project.

RG

Jean Samuel, the actual person behind the character Jean, il Pikolo, in SQ, survived the camp and would write his own memoir – but only after Levi’s death. The book, written with Jean-Marc Dreyfus, is entitled Il m’appelait Pikolo (2007).

FB

Sensorial descriptions help readers to get better involved in the story. The body is a universal signifier shared and recognised by all. Bodily signs, perceptions, and markers of suffering prove themselves to be universally intelligible. They can bridge the distance between readers and characters. On the body as signifier see, for example, Madelaine Hron’s ‘The Trauma of Displacement’ (in Kurtz 2018, 284-98).

MJ

Interlinguistic felicity. Passages addressing questions of communication, language acquisition, interlanguage connection and intercultural translation scattered throughout the text are constantly marked by a specific affective tonality: they are remembered and represented as successful. The situation at hand is exceptional. In both SQ and I sommersi e i salvati, linguistic plurality is often used to characterise the absurd chaos and linguistic cacophony that marked Häftling existence in the Lager, which is a temporary universe of linguistic dissension and violence. To the contrary, the exchange between Jean and Primo is not simply based on, and concerned with, translation. It also is utterly charitable, in a technical sense. It is based on a systematic practicing of interpretive benevolence. It is dominated, that is, by the desire to move beyond linguistic differences and find a common ground. Such desire is not simply posited: it is acted upon. When Primo stumbles or forgets, Jean encourages him to go on (“Ça ne fait rien, vas-y tout de même”). Similarly, when memory of Dante’s original fails Primo and something of the original text is admittedly lost, the text does not dwell on the loss, but it vindicates the eventual success of the mediation work: ‘nonostante la traduzione scialba e il commento pedestre e frettoloso, ha ricevuto il messaggio’.

Felicity in interlingual communication is crucial for Levi to regain momentary existence as a human being in the violent linguistic landscape of the Lager. Accordingly, interlinguistic success is made the vehicle of interhuman connection. The exchange between Primo and Jean, in its translative quality, sheds light on an oppositional element in the language of the Lager, which Levi defines as ‘orts- und zeitgebunden', tied to that place and that time (I sommersi e i salvati, 1066; OC II, 1025). Levi draws his terminology from Victor Klemperer’s 1947 book Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook. Klemperer’s merciless diagnosis of the language of Nazi Germany as the product and the producer of a dehumanising regime is the foil for Levi’s momentarily but crucially successful act of communicating across different languages. In the chapter, the willingness and ability to free the most meaningful human exchange from the ties of a time- and place-bound language is the antidote to the isolating and dehumanising linguistics of the concentration camp.

Linguistically categorised terms: * Vorarbeiter [German]

• Pikolo [KZGerman]

• Häftling [KZGerman]

• Kommando [KZGerman]

• Also, etc. [German]

• Qu’est-ce qu’il-y-a [French]

• Kapo [KZGerman]

• Ihr Doktoren! [German]

• Meister [KZGerman]

• Lager [KZGerman]

• Aujourd’hui [French]

• Essenholen [KZGerman]

• Corvée [French]

• Tu es fou de marcher [French]

• Blockführer [KZGerman]

• Sale brute [French]

• Ein ganz gemeiner Hund [German]

• Je me mis [French]

• Kraftwerk [German]

• Keine Ahnung [German]

• Ça ne fait rien [French]

• Kraut und Rüben [German]

• Choux et navets [French]

• Káposzta és répak [Other]

SM

Dantists - and others - may be interested to note that this chapter (1958 edition) appears to be composed of 34 paragraphs (Dante’s Inferno, whose 26th canto this chapter references in its title, ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, consists of 34 cantos). (Readers may wish to conduct their own checks, including on the 1947 edition.)

Further, the chapter’s 26th paragraph - this one - is notably participatory in its narrative mode, combining a vocative exclamation, second person direct address, and the present tense to invite the reader into a particular type of intersubjective space: ‘Ecco, attento Pikolo, apri gli occhi e la mente, ho bisogno che tu capisca’. This 26th paragraph is also the locus for Ulysses’/Dante’s second person plural participatory imperative, ‘Considerate [la vostra semenza]’, inviting us back to Levi’s own doubled, inclusive invitation in the novel’s prefatory poem: ‘Considerate se questo è un uomo | […] | Considerate se questa è una donna’.

[IMAGE TO FOLLOW]

KP

Levi explores the economy of cigarettes and smoking in the chapter of SQ entitled ‘Al di qua del bene e del male', where he explains that ‘Mahorca’, a low-quality tobacco, is officially distributed in the canteen in exchange for the coupons provided to the best worker, but because those coupons are distributed infrequently and inequitably, the tobacco is also sold unofficially in the Market, ‘in stretta obbedienza alle leggi dell’economia classica’, with the resulting booms and busts in price. Because it can be exchanged for more food rations, newer clothing, and other vital necessities, ‘Fra i comuni Häftlinge, non sono molti quelli che ricercano di Mahorca per fumarlo personalmente; per lo più, esce dal campo, e finisce ai lavoratori civili della Buna’. That Deutsch is smoking during this work detail is thus a sign of his status and position within the camp.

CLL

Sensorial descriptions help readers to get better involved in the story. The body is a universal signifier shared and recognised by all. Bodily signs, perceptions, and markers of suffering prove themselves to be universally intelligible. They can bridge the distance between readers and characters. On the body as signifier see, for example, Madelaine Hron’s ‘The Trauma of Displacement’ (in Kurtz 2018, 284-98).

MJ

The system of rationing reached its extreme in the Nazi Lager. Nonetheless, Levi and many of his companions had already experienced the dilemmas of provisioning in the context of war and the violent repression enacted by the Salò Republic. This situation of scarcity and black market profiteering proved acute in the Valle d’Aosta to which Levi and his family had fled, along with many draft evaders and foreign Jews from the Balkans. When Levi joined his partisan comrades in the Col de Joux, they likewise experienced the challenges all partisans faced: how to safely secure supplies without alienating the local population or risking capture.

PB

With the chapter ‘I sommersi e i salvati’, Levi introduces the theme of Prominenz into his reconstruction of life in the Lager. From here on, Levi highlights the web of political relations structuring the concentration camp, wherein power circulates despite and as a function of the persecutors’ will to domination (Forti 2014). A web of relations following the gregarious dynamics of the human--animal as ‘social animal’ (see the conviction ‘every stranger is an enemy’ in the Preface) tends to establish hierarchical forms of cohabitation.

However, Levi also inspects such a ‘hierarchy of Prominenz’ from an ethical perspective: the ‘saved’ enter the circuit of Prominenz by assuming a certain ethical posture, that is, by calibrating their privilege either with solidarity towards their fellow inmates (such as Alberto or Lorenzo) or with a will to power and prestige that becomes blind towards his fellows’ oppression (such as Alfred L, Elias, Alex or Frenkel).

Pikolo is no exception: like any other human figure of salvation in SQ, he is initially presented to readers for his ethical value. The first part of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ describes Pikolo’s story of salvation: he obtained his privilege shrewdly as he understood the voids of power that could be filled with his collaboration. However, he does not use his privilege to increase the oppression of those located in the lower ranks, such as Levi, but works instead to share the advantages his higher position affords him. It is not by chance that Pikolo’s decision to ask Levi to help him to carry out a convenient job that day also, and unconsciously, creates the condition for one of the most intense and memorable dialogues of our literary tradition. If Dante’s verses could resound in Auschwitz and, with them, a moment of hope and mental wellbeing (‘it is doing me good’), it is because of a simple and small act of solidarity that we can never take for granted wherever privilege rules.

SG

With the chapter ‘I sommersi e i salvati’, Levi introduces the theme of Prominenz into his reconstruction of life in the Lager. From here on, Levi highlights the web of political relations structuring the concentration camp, wherein power circulates despite and as a function of the persecutors’ will to domination (Forti 2014). A web of relations following the gregarious dynamics of the human--animal as ‘social animal’ (see the conviction ‘every stranger is an enemy’ in the Preface) tends to establish hierarchical forms of cohabitation.

However, Levi also inspects such a ‘hierarchy of Prominenz’ from an ethical perspective: the ‘saved’ enter the circuit of Prominenz by assuming a certain ethical posture, that is, by calibrating their privilege either with solidarity towards their fellow inmates (such as Alberto or Lorenzo) or with a will to power and prestige that becomes blind towards his fellows’ oppression (such as Alfred L, Elias, Alex or Frenkel).

Pikolo is no exception: like any other human figure of salvation in SQ, he is initially presented to readers for his ethical value. The first part of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ describes Pikolo’s story of salvation: he obtained his privilege shrewdly as he understood the voids of power that could be filled with his collaboration. However, he does not use his privilege to increase the oppression of those located in the lower ranks, such as Levi, but works instead to share the advantages his higher position affords him. It is not by chance that Pikolo’s decision to ask Levi to help him to carry out a convenient job that day also, and unconsciously, creates the condition for one of the most intense and memorable dialogues of our literary tradition. If Dante’s verses could resound in Auschwitz and, with them, a moment of hope and mental wellbeing (‘it is doing me good’), it is because of a simple and small act of solidarity that we can never take for granted wherever privilege rules.

SG

In Il m’appelait Pikolo, Jean Samuel and Jean-Marc Dreyfus write: ‘Pikolo […] Primo Levi m’a donné ce nom, mon nouveau nom’; ‘[l]e terme de Pikolo ne fait pas partie du vocabulaire ordinaire du camp; c’est une invention de Primo Levi’ (Samuel, Dreyfus 2007, 15, 16). (Although recent research by Franceschini 2022 has qualified this claim, pointing to a possible earlier origin.) Tellingly, Samuel’s book was published on the twentieth anniversary of Primo Levi’s death.

MJ

In Il m’appelait Pikolo, Jean Samuel and Jean-Marc Dreyfus write: ‘Pikolo […] Primo Levi m’a donné ce nom, mon nouveau nom’; ‘[l]e terme de Pikolo ne fait pas partie du vocabulaire ordinaire du camp; c’est une invention de Primo Levi’ (Samuel, Dreyfus 2007, 15, 16). (Recent research, though, by Franceschini 2022 has qualified this claim, pointing to a possible earlier origin.) Tellingly, Samuel’s book was published on the twentieth anniversary of Primo Levi’s death.

MJ

Levi introduces the term ‘Häftling’ (pl. Häftlinge), German for ‘detainee’ or ‘prisoner,’ in the chapter of SQ entitled ‘Sul fondo,’ wherein he recounts his arrival in Auschwitz, a camp designed to produce ‘un uomo vuoto, ridotto a sofferenza e bisogno, dimentico di dignità e discernimento’, so that ‘Si comprenderà allora il duplice significato del termine «Campo di annientamento»’. It is immediately after offering this reflection that Levi provides the term used to denote this ‘uomo vuoto’: ‘Häftling: ho imparato che io sono uno Häftling. Il mio nome è 174 517; siamo stati battezzati, porteremo finché vivremo il marchio tatuato sul braccio sinistro’. Later in the same chapter, Levi explains the distinction between ‘Häftlinge privilegiati’ and ‘comuni Häftlinge’ and describes how the various groups of prisoners are distinguished: ‘Tutti sono vestiti a righe, sono tutti Häftlinge, ma i criminali portano accanto al numero, cucito sulla giacca, un triangolo verde; i politici un triangolo rosso; gli ebrei, che costituiscono la grande maggioranza, portano la stella ebraica, rossa e gialla’.

CLL

Levi introduces the term ‘Häftling’ (pl. Häftlinge), German for ‘detainee’ or ‘prisoner,’ in the chapter of SQ entitled ‘Sul fondo,’ wherein he recounts his arrival in Auschwitz, a camp designed to produce ‘un uomo vuoto, ridotto a sofferenza e bisogno, dimentico di dignità e discernimento’, so that ‘Si comprenderà allora il duplice significato del termine «Campo di annientamento»’. It is immediately after offering this reflection that Levi provides the term used to denote this ‘uomo vuoto’: ‘Häftling: ho imparato che io sono uno Häftling. Il mio nome è 174 517; siamo stati battezzati, porteremo finché vivremo il marchio tatuato sul braccio sinistro’. Later in the same chapter, Levi explains the distinction between ‘Häftlinge privilegiati’ and ‘comuni Häftlinge’ and describes how the various groups of prisoners are distinguished: ‘Tutti sono vestiti a righe, sono tutti Häftlinge, ma i criminali portano accanto al numero, cucito sulla giacca, un triangolo verde; i politici un triangolo rosso; gli ebrei, che costituiscono la grande maggioranza, portano la stella ebraica, rossa e gialla’.

CLL

In this same paragraph, the ‘Pikolo’ is said to be a ‘fattorino-scritturale, addetto alla pulizia della baracca, alle consegne degli attrezzi, alla lavatura delle gamelle, alla contabilità delle ore di lavoro del Kommando’, and three paragraphs later Levi adds that ‘la carica di Pikolo costituisce un gradino già assai elevato nella gerarchia delle Prominenze’.

Whereas the other titles mentioned in this chapter - Vorarbeiter; Kapo - identify recognised positions within the hierarchy of the Lager, Pikolo, according to the testimony of Jean Samuel, was the invention of Primo Levi: ‘Pikolo was not a camp job. The term was coined for me by Primo Levi. I was the only Pikolo. Of course, all the Kapos had helpers, often very young people, sometimes as young as twelve, who served as their assistants, doing everything they asked, including prostitution. The Kapos’ lovers, their sexual victims, were called “Pipel”. I escaped all that’ (Samuel, Dreyfus 2015, 37; my translation).

Jean’s testimony also raises questions about the spelling of this term. In a letter he sent to Levi on 13 March 1946, Jean signed his name with his title and identification number from Auschwitz, ‘Picolo ex 176.397’, amending the spelling to ‘Piccolo’ in subsequent correspondence (Franceschini 2017, 268). Moreover, Levi replied to Jean’s letter with a note dated 24 May 1946, attached to which was an early draft of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, which differs in some ways from what would become the published version, including identifying Levi’s conversation partner as ‘Jean detto Piccolo', a spelling that corresponds to that adopted in the draft of the chapter that Levi sent to Anna Foa on 14 February 1946 (269). Beginning with the first edition of SQ, however, the spelling of Jean’s title was changed to ‘Pikolo’. Fabrizio Franceschini argues that Levi adopted this term, with its new spelling, from its common usage in northern Italian (and possibly also in Vienna in German usage) to refer to shop boys and other minor functionaries (272-79).

CLL

In this same paragraph, the ‘Pikolo’ is said to be a ‘fattorino-scritturale, addetto alla pulizia della baracca, alle consegne degli attrezzi, alla lavatura delle gamelle, alla contabilità delle ore di lavoro del Kommando’, and three paragraphs later Levi adds that ‘la carica di Pikolo costituisce un gradino già assai elevato nella gerarchia delle Prominenze’.

Whereas the other titles mentioned in this chapter - Vorarbeiter; Kapo - identify recognised positions within the hierarchy of the Lager, Pikolo, according to the testimony of Jean Samuel, was the invention of Primo Levi: ‘Pikolo was not a camp job. The term was coined for me by Primo Levi. I was the only Pikolo. Of course, all the Kapos had helpers, often very young people, sometimes as young as twelve, who served as their assistants, doing everything they asked, including prostitution. The Kapos’ lovers, their sexual victims, were called “Pipel”. I escaped all that’ (Samuel, Dreyfus 2015, 37; my translation).

Jean’s testimony also raises questions about the spelling of this term. In a letter he sent to Levi on 13 March 1946, Jean signed his name with his title and identification number from Auschwitz, ‘Picolo ex 176.397’, amending the spelling to ‘Piccolo’ in subsequent correspondence (Franceschini 2017, 268). Moreover, Levi replied to Jean’s letter with a note dated 24 May 1946, attached to which was an early draft of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, which differs in some ways from what would become the published version, including identifying Levi’s conversation partner as ‘Jean detto Piccolo', a spelling that corresponds to that adopted in the draft of the chapter that Levi sent to Anna Foa on 14 February 1946 (269). Beginning with the first edition of SQ, however, the spelling of Jean’s title was changed to ‘Pikolo’. Fabrizio Franceschini argues that Levi adopted this term, with its new spelling, from its common usage in northern Italian (and possibly also in Vienna in German usage) to refer to shop boys and other minor functionaries (272-79).

CLL

Jean Samuel, the actual person behind the character Jean, il Pikolo, in SQ, survived the camp and would write his own memoir – but only after Levi’s death. The book, written with Jean-Marc Dreyfus, is entitled Il m’appelait Pikolo (2007).

FB

Jean Samuel, the actual person behind the character Jean, il Pikolo, in SQ, survived the camp and would write his own memoir – but only after Levi’s death. The book, written with Jean-Marc Dreyfus, is entitled Il m’appelait Pikolo (2007).

FB

Jean is Jean Samuel, a young Frenchman from Alsace, who survived the camps and the Death Marches and was in contact with Levi after the war. In his 1976 Appendix to SQ, Levi relates:

‘È vivo, e sta bene, Jean, il “Pikolo” del canto di Ulisse: la sua famiglia era stata distrutta, ma si è sposato dopo il ritorno, ed ora ha due figli, e conduce una vita molto tranquilla come farmacista in una cittadina della provincia francese. Ci incontriamo talvolta in Italia, dove viene per le vacanze; altre volte sono andato io a trovarlo. Stranamente, ha dimenticato molto del suo anno di Monowitz: in lui prevalgono i ricordi atroci del viaggio di evacuazione, nel corso del quale ha visto morire di estenuazione tutti i suoi amici (fra questi era Alberto)’ (OC I, 294).

As other annotations note, Jean later wrote his own memoir, Il m’appelait Pikolo.

Levi would return to Jean and to this chapter, ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, re-reading and commenting on it, in his 1986 book I sommersi e i salvati, in the chapter ‘L'intellettuale ad Auschwitz’:

‘Rileggo dopo quarant’anni in Se questo è un uomo il capitolo Il canto di Ulisse: è uno dei pochi episodi la cui autenticità ho potuto verificare (è un’operazione rassicurante: a distanza di tempo, come ho detto nel primo capitolo, della propria memoria si può dubitare)’ (OC II, 1234).

RG

Jean is Jean Samuel, a young Frenchman from Alsace, who survived the camps and the Death Marches and was in contact with Levi after the war. In his 1976 Appendix to SQ, Levi relates:

‘È vivo, e sta bene, Jean, il “Pikolo” del canto di Ulisse: la sua famiglia era stata distrutta, ma si è sposato dopo il ritorno, ed ora ha due figli, e conduce una vita molto tranquilla come farmacista in una cittadina della provincia francese. Ci incontriamo talvolta in Italia, dove viene per le vacanze; altre volte sono andato io a trovarlo. Stranamente, ha dimenticato molto del suo anno di Monowitz: in lui prevalgono i ricordi atroci del viaggio di evacuazione, nel corso del quale ha visto morire di estenuazione tutti i suoi amici (fra questi era Alberto)’ (OC I, 294).

As other annotations recall, Jean later wrote his own memoir, Il m’appelait Pikolo.

Levi would return to Jean and to this chapter, ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, re-reading and commenting on it, in his 1986 book I sommersi e i salvati, in the chapter ‘L'intellettuale ad Auschwitz’:

‘Rileggo dopo quarant’anni in Se questo è un uomo il capitolo Il canto di Ulisse: è uno dei pochi episodi la cui autenticità ho potuto verificare (è un’operazione rassicurante: a distanza di tempo, come ho detto nel primo capitolo, della propria memoria si può dubitare)’ (OC II, 1234).

RG

Proper names (also here and here. These are the first three of eleven or twelve (depending on how you count them) proper names of prisoners in the chapter (i.e. not including Dante and Ulisse). Levi uses them to create a vivid, peopled scene, to underline the mix of nationalities in the camp, and to bear witness to his fellow prisoners, many now dead. Later in the chapter, ‘Primo’ appears as a proper name for one of only three times in the whole book.

RG

The Vorarbeiter, or foreman, was responsible for supervising the prisoners’ labour. This was a privileged position within the Lager, for which extra food rations were provided (Megargee 2009-2012, 200). A study of another camp reports that those ‘employed as foremen (Vorarbeiter) represented the most hateful attitudes towards Jews’ (4), a finding that might inform our understanding of Levi’s account of Auschwitz. In SQ, Levi discusses the Vorarbeiter in the chapter ‘Il lavoro’, where he explains the discriminatory power that the role affords: ‘Il Vorarbeiter ha distribuito le leve di ferro a noi e i martinetti ai suoi amici’ (OC I, 44).

For confirmation of the violence with which this power was enforced, we can consult the archives of the United States Holocaust Museum, which contain the contents of a talk given to members of the French Army in October November 1945 in which the deportee Henry Cogenson testified that: ‘As for Kapos and Vorarbeiter, mostly German, Russian or Polish “common criminals”, they, like the SS, never knew when to stop; after having been hit by others when they were simple inmates, they returned the favor on their peers now that they were given a smidgen of power. It was rather common to bring back to camp in the evening a comrade who had been struck during the day and was unable to withstand the blows’. The Auschwitz Museum online hosts images of the armbands worn by the Vorarbeiter, and of the whips they used to beat prisoners. We might also compare Levi’s account with that contained in the Auschwitz survivor Tadeusz Borowski’s 1946 collection of short stories Pożegnanie z Marią (This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, 1967), wherein the Vorarbeiter Tadeusz is a frequent protagonist.

CLL

The Vorarbeiter, or foreman, was responsible for supervising the prisoners’ labour. This was a privileged position within the Lager, for which extra food rations were provided (Megargee 2009-2012, 200). A study of another camp reports that those ‘employed as foremen (Vorarbeiter) represented the most hateful attitudes towards Jews’ (4), a finding that might inform our understanding of Levi’s account of Auschwitz. In SQ, Levi discusses the Vorarbeiter in the chapter ‘Il lavoro’, where he explains the discriminatory power that the role affords: ‘Il Vorarbeiter ha distribuito le leve di ferro a noi e i martinetti ai suoi amici’ (OC I, 44).

For confirmation of the violence with which this power was enforced, we can consult the archives of the United States Holocaust Museum, which contain the contents of a talk given to members of the French Army in October November 1945 in which the deportee Henry Cogenson testified that: ‘As for Kapos and Vorarbeiter, mostly German, Russian or Polish “common criminals”, they, like the SS, never knew when to stop; after having been hit by others when they were simple inmates, they returned the favor on their peers now that they were given a smidgen of power. It was rather common to bring back to camp in the evening a comrade who had been struck during the day and was unable to withstand the blows’. The Auschwitz Museum online hosts images of the armbands worn by the Vorarbeiter, and of the whips they used to beat prisoners. We might also compare Levi’s account with that contained in the Auschwitz survivor Tadeusz Borowski’s 1946 collection of short stories Pożegnanie z Marią (This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, 1967), wherein the Vorarbeiter Tadeusz is a frequent protagonist.

CLL

Levi explores the economy of cigarettes and smoking in the chapter of SQ entitled ‘Al di qua del bene e del male', where he explains that ‘Mahorca’, a low-quality tobacco, is officially distributed in the canteen in exchange for the coupons provided to the best worker, but because those coupons are distributed infrequently and inequitably, the tobacco is also sold unofficially in the Market, ‘in stretta obbedienza alle leggi dell’economia classica’, with the resulting booms and busts in price. Because it can be exchanged for more food rations, newer clothing, and other vital necessities, ‘Fra i comuni Häftlinge, non sono molti quelli che ricercano di Mahorca per fumarlo personalmente; per lo più, esce dal campo, e finisce ai lavoratori civili della Buna’. That Deutsch is smoking during this work detail is thus a sign of his status and position within the camp.

CLL

The chapter opens with Levi and his fellow prisoners working below ground in an underground cistern or tank and ends with the quotation from Dante about the sea closing over Ulysses’ and his companions’ heads. These two moments are further connected as the description of the tank – ‘scaletta di corda’ and ‘portello’, literally ‘hatch’ rather than ‘manhole’ – conjures up the image of a ship.

EL

The chapter opens with Levi and his fellow prisoners working below ground in an underground cistern or tank and ends with the quotation from Dante about the sea closing over Ulysses’ and his companions’ heads. These two moments are further connected as the description of the tank – ‘scaletta di corda’ and ‘portello’, literally ‘hatch’ rather than ‘manhole’ – conjures up the image of a ship.

EL

Sensorial descriptions help readers to get better involved in the story. The body is a universal signifier shared and recognised by all. Bodily signs, perceptions, and markers of suffering prove themselves to be universally intelligible. They can bridge the distance between readers and characters. On the body as signifier see, for example, Madelaine Hron’s ‘The Trauma of Displacement’ (in Kurtz 2018, 284-98).

MJ

The intense sensoriality of this sentence opens up questions of visceral geographies and material ecocriticism by way of stimuli pertaining to touch and taste in particular: the rusty environment gives rise to forbidding language associated not only with the exterminatory context (burning/blood) but also with the human being pervaded by the non-human, as the particles of iron oxide unsettle the functioning of the eyes and gullet.

DAFR

The intense sensoriality of this sentence opens up questions of visceral geographies and material ecocriticism by way of stimuli pertaining to touch and taste in particular: the rusty environment gives rise to forbidding language associated not only with the exterminatory context (burning/blood) but also with the human being pervaded by the non-human, as the particles of iron oxide unsettle the functioning of the eyes and gullet.

DAFR

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

The text of the chapter used here is from the 1958 edition of Se questo è un uomo (Turin: Einaudi), the second published edition of the book, as reproduced in the edition of Levi’s complete works (Opere complete, hereafter OC) from 2016-2018, also published by Einaudi (OC I, 224-29). For this and other key works referenced or recommended, see the Bibliography page.

The text of the chapter from the first edition of Se questo è un uomo (hereafter, SQ) from 1947 (Turin: De Silva) is also included for comparison on the Variants page of this site. This is based on the text republished in OC I, 81-86.

As the editor of the complete works, Marco Belpoliti, explains, several manuscript versions of SQ - or its constituent parts - exist from 1946-47, as do notes for revisions leading up to the 1958 edition. On manuscripts of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ in particular, see OC I, 1467-71.

After 1958, although the book underwent certain further changes, for example with the addition of notes for a Schools edition (1973), or the Appendix of questions most frequently put to Levi (1976), the text of the chapter remained unchanged.

The text of the first published English translation of this chapter, from 1959, by Stuart Woolf (London: Orion), is also available on this site on the English page.

RG

In the previous chapter, ‘Esame di chimica’, Primo has been admitted, through a kind of perverse and humiliating ‘chemistry examination’ carried out by Nazi official Herr Doktor Pannwitz, to a so-called ‘Chemical Kommando’. This Kommando will work, notionally, in a laboratory of the Buna-Werke industrial rubber plant, under construction by IG Farben next to the Monowitz-Auschwitz III concentration camp (and other POW and labour camps). The ‘cistern’ here is not a laboratory setting, but is probably a work site within the Buna complex.

Monowitz was the largest of the extensive network of so-called satellite- or sub-camps beyond Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau. For more information on Monowitz, see the Subcamps of Auschwitz project.

RG

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

Scholars tend consistently if not quite unanimously to emphasise the ambiguity of Levi’s term ‘gigantesco’. The discussion of Dante’s Ulysses is ‘broken off’, as Hayden White puts it, before Levi can tell us ‘what we are supposed to conclude’ (2015, 12). As a result, ‘there is no final manifestation of the message, of the meaning that Levi is so desperately trying to grasp and communicate’, argues Giuseppe Stellardi (2019, 715). ‘Nessuno potrà mai affermare nulla con sicurezza’, assert Alberto Cavaglion and Paolo Valabrega (515). The lack of certainty regarding the term’s meaning is perhaps responsible for the substantial divergence between the critical interpretations that this passage has inspired.

There are those who argue that Levi’s ‘gigantic’ discovery when reciting Dante in Auschwitz is an unconquerable ‘faith in his culture’ (Hartman 1996, 52), and those who claim, conversely, that Levi instead recognises how ‘behind the gas chambers, the ovens, the starvation rations, and the astonishing otherworldly everyday viciousness and cruelty can be found at the heart of Western culture’ (Feinstein 2003, 365). In other words, while some hold that Levi finds in Dante the antidote to Auschwitz, others argue that he finds the cause.

Levi’s subsequent glosses on this passage have done little to alleviate the uncertainty. In the version of SQ that he prepared for a 1964 radio broadcast, he clarified the meaning of the quoted phrase ‘come altrui piacque’ (OC I, 1237); for the 1973 Schools edition of SQ, intended for an audience of Italian students, he provided footnotes explaining the term ‘anacronismo’ and the phrase ‘il perché del nostro destino’ (OC I, 1417-18). In both instances, Levi left ‘gigantesco’ undefined. This apparent authorial reticence should inspire some restraint in our critical exegesis. There is no need to pursue false certainty where the text offers legitimate ambiguity.

What we may note, however, is that elsewhere in SQ, and with significant frequency in Levi’s subsequent writing, the term ‘gigantesco’ serves to identify the monstrosity of the Lager. In the chapter ‘I sommersi e i salvati’, he describes Auschwitz as ‘una gigantesca esperienza biologica e sociale’ (OC I, 217). In the aforementioned school edition of SQ, he explains the historical shift in Nazi policies that transformed concentration camps into ‘gigantesche macchine di morte’ (OC I, 292). In a 1955 article celebrating the tenth anniversary of Italy’s liberation from Fascism, he describes how the Nazis ‘[h]anno lavorato con tenacia a creare la loro gigantesca macchina generatrice di morte e di corruzione’ (OC II, 1293). In a 1968 preface to a book on Auschwitz, he argues that the vital question remains ‘per quali ragioni e cause, prossime o lontane, abbia potuto nascere in questo civile continente una gigantesca fabbrica di morte’ (OC II, 1357). In the 1975 article ‘Così fu Auschwitz’, he describes what he calls the Nazis’ ‘costituzione di un gigantesco esercito di schiavi, non retribuiti e costretti a lavorare fino alla morte’ (OC II, 1374). In a 1979 response to the broadcast of the TV mini series Holocaust, he notes how the public seemed to focus on the question of why the genocide of the European Jews had occurred, ‘e questo è un perché gigantesco, ed antico quanto il genere umano: è il perché del male nel mondo’ (OC II, 1456). The accretion of these examples is by no means definitive; the ‘qualcosa di gigantesco’ that Levi discovered in discussing Dante with Jean may well differ from the ‘perché gigantesco’, the ‘perché del male nel mondo’, on which he deliberated decades later. Nevertheless, there would appear to be a pattern.

It is a pattern, moreover, that obtains well beyond Levi’s own work. To cite just one relevant example, the Italian anti-Fascist expatriate Giuseppe Antonio Borgese entitled his 1937 study of the totalitarian movement in Italy Goliath: The March of Fascism. And in that text Borgese lay the ultimate blame for the enormity of Fascism not on the Duce—‘it is futile […] to explain Fascism as if it were the creation of a single man, Mussolini’—but rather on another ‘gigantic individuality’ in the Italian national pantheon: Dante, who ‘distorted the soul of his people’, giving rise to ‘Nationalism and Racialism’ (46). Many Fascists, too, claimed Dante as the founder of their movement (Albertini 2013). Not for nothing did ‘Giovinezza’, the Fascist anthem, boast that ‘la vision dell’Alighieri, | oggi brilla in tutti i cuor’ (Pugliese 2001, 55). A 1927 study of Dante Alighieri e Benito Mussolini argued that the Duce’s Italy was closer than ever to Dante’s ideal (7-8). The Fascist Party’s own 1940 Dizionario di Politica made the same claim (735). ‘Che Dante sia Fascista lo dimostrano tutte le sue opere’, insisted one of the regime’s intellectuals; ‘solo oggi possiamo riconoscere in Dante il profeta del nostro destino’, maintained another (Scorrano 2001, 92-93, 198).

It is perhaps tempting to hear the echo of such sentiments in Levi’s epiphany that in Dante’s ‘Canto di Ulisse’ is to be found ‘il perché del nostro destino’. After all, Levi had learned his Dante in an Italian school system that had been turned to Fascism’s totalitarian aims. If he is indeed suggesting to Jean that abuses of Dante - the appropriation of tradition to support the arrogation of power in the present; the fraudulent claims to a divine warrant for violence - bear responsibility for the Häftlinge’s tragic fate, he has good reason.

Yet those who interpret Levi’s Dante lesson in a more liberatory manner have good reason as well. If the inhuman contrapasso of eternal damnation ‘come altrui piacque’ is to be found in Dante, so, too, is Ulysses’ call for an innate and inviolable human dignity: ‘considerate la vostra semenza’. Borgese in Goliath recognised this duality (12). So, too, I suspect, does Primo Levi in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Perhaps this is the ‘gigantic’ discovery that Levi has made in his meditation on Dante’s Inferno: that in our cultural inheritance are to be found both the roots of Fascism and the seeds of resistance.

CLL

‘Intuizione’ is the key word of the aesthetic philosophy of Benedetto Croce, the most influential Italian thinker of the first half of the twentieth century, the ‘Crocean half-century’, as this era in Italian culture has been described (Antoni, Mattioli 1950, 352). Croce insisted upon what he described as ‘la teoria dell’arte come pura intuizione’, and with it ‘la verità […] che l’intuizione pura è essenzialmente liricità’ (Croce 1923, 15, 22). Underlying his idealistic aesthetics, therefore, was ‘la semplicissima formola: che «l’arte è intuizione»’ (Croce 1923, 23). Widely - almost universally - adopted for decades in Italy, this formula influenced nearly all artistic creation and reception in Levi’s time. So far as I am aware, Levi’s only explicit reference to Crocean aesthetics is to be found in ‘La misura della bellezza,’ a sci-fi short story about a machine that provides an ‘objective’ judgement of beauty, wherein the narrator recounts how his wife fails to share his faith in the machine’s verdicts because she was ‘un caso disperato di educazione crociana’ (OC I, 592). Yet Croce’s influence on Levi’s thought is clear, and is attested clearly elsewhere in his work.

Appointed minister of education in 1920, Croce set in motion many of the school reforms that would subsequently be codified by the Fascist government (Rizi 2019, 6). As a result, Primo Levi’s schooling was profoundly - and to his mind negatively - influenced by Croce. This point emerges most clearly in Levi’s reflections on the education he received from Azelia Arici, who taught him Italian literature for three years, inspiring in him ‘una certa avversione’ for the subject, because Arici ‘era una gentiliana, una crociana, riteneva che le scienze naturali e la fisica e la matematica fossero materie accessorie, ausiliarie, di serie B’ (OC III, 1027). Levi elsewhere referred to those who upheld this Crocean anti-science bias in the Italian school system as ‘la congiura’, summarising the message they transmitted to him in particularly resonant terms: ‘Tu giovane fascista, tu giovane crociano, tu giovane cresciuto in questa Italia non avvicinarti alle fonti del sapere scientifico, perché sono pericolose’ (OC III, 484). Levi thus blamed Croce for what he called the ‘hegemony’ of humanistic culture in Italy (OC III, 255) and the resulting diminishment of science - and the dearth of science fiction writing - in the Italian cultural scene (OC III, 51). Moreover, he framed his own penchant for the sciences in explicitly anti-Crocean terms. In the ‘Idrogeno’ chapter of Il sistema periodico, he contrasts his youthful passion for chemistry with his humanistic schooling, absorbed by ‘metamorfosi inconcludenti, da Platone ad Agostino, da Agostino a Tommaso, da Tommaso a Hegel, da Hegel a Croce’ (OC I, 876).

As for the potentially positive influence of Croce’s outspoken anti-Fascism on Levi’s fledgling resistance to Mussolini’s regime, the evidence is mixed. In the ‘Potassio’ chapter of Il sistema periodico, Levi recounts how his generation had to ‘«inventare» un nostro antifascismo, crearlo dal germe, dalle radici. Cercavamo intorno a noi, e imboccavamo strade che portavano poco lontano. La Bibbia, Croce, la geometria, la fisica, ci apparivano fonti di certezza’ (OC I, 898). However, in a 1976 interview he recalled instead the ‘confusion’ of the interwar period, when countervailing voices were scarce: ‘Di antifascismo si aveva paura a parlare; Marx non esisteva e Croce veniva censurato’ (OC III, 916). To what degree Levi found political inspiration in Croce in addition to the frustration he faced as a result of Croce’s humanistic prejudices thus remains in doubt.

What we can say with greater confidence is that the so-called ‘congiura’ that determined much of Levi’s schooling ensured that his reading of Dante was thoroughly Crocean. Indeed, scholars have demonstrated that the textbooks with which Primo Levi was taught his Dante emphasised Benedetto Croce’s analysis of the Commedia, based firmly on Francesco De Sanctis’s hegemonic nineteenth-century Storia della letteratura italiana (Pertile 2010, 30; Garullo, Rigo, Toppan 2020, 82). As he elaborated in the 1921 study La poesia di Dante, Benedetto Croce was largely uninterested in what he dismissed as the ‘bizzarre interpretazioni’ of the scholarly dantisti who dominated the academic interpretation of the Commedia, and who seized upon what he believed to be pointless questions of Medieval theology (Croce 1921, 25, 63, 197). Instead, and as a result of his aesthetic theory, Croce was interested exclusively in Dante’s poetic ‘intuizione lirica’ (31). This emphasis manifests itself in Croce’s famous distinction between the Commedia’s struttura, its historical and theological content, and its poesia, its inspired lyrical beauty (61-71). While questions of theology may have mattered to Dante, argued Croce, they need not trouble modern readers, who should treat them ‘con qualche indifferenza bensì, ma senza avversione e, soprattutto, senza irrisioni’ (204). The indifference to Dante’s religious beliefs allowed Croce to redeem in poetic terms many of those Dante had damned in theological terms.

This emphasis is evident in Croce’s analysis of the figure of Ulysses. Quoting the same lines that Levi would recite to Jean - ‘Fatti non foste a viver come bruti | Ma per seguir virtude e conoscenza’ - Croce argues that Ulysses emerges as a positive figure despite Dante’s intentions. Ulysses, Croce insists,

è una parte di Dante stesso, cioè delle profonde aspirazioni che la riverenza religiosa e l’umiltà cristiana potevano in lui contenere, ma non già distruggere. Donde la figura di questo Ulisse dantesco, peccaminoso ma di sublime peccato, eroe tragico, maggiore forse di quel che fu mai nell’epos e nella tragedia greca (97-98).

Whether directly or, what is more likely, indirectly, this analysis may well have influenced Primo Levi’s reading of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’.

Yet Levi goes further than Croce. With his ‘intuizione di un attimo’, Levi fixates not upon Dante’s fourteenth-century poetic intuition but instead upon his own admittedly ‘anachronistic’ discovery of the poem’s relevance to him and to Jean, ‘che osiamo ragionare di queste cose con le stanghe della zuppa sulle spalle’. With this intuition, Levi transcends the scholastic Dante drilled into him by the ‘congiura’ and discovers verses far more vital than those he had studied in school.

CLL

The subject of mothers arises often in the conversations between prisoners in SQ. When Schlome questions Levi in the chapter ‘Sul fondo,’ he asks 'Dove tua madre?' Standing in the long-awaited sunshine in ‘Una buona giornata,’ the teenager Sigi ‘[a]veva cominciato col parlare della sua casa di Vienna e di sua madre,’ and Levi tells us that, in this moment of relative peace, he and the other prisoners likewise ‘siamo capaci di pensare alle nostre madri e alle nostre mogli, il che di solito non accade’.

These references to mothers are likely to remind us of the mothers who were deported to the Lager, whom Levi describes in the chapter ‘Il viaggio’:

Ognuno si congedò dalla vita nel modo che più gli si addiceva. Alcuni pregarono, altri bevvero oltre misura, altri si inebriarono di nefanda ultima passione. Ma le madri vegliarono a preparare con dolce cura il cibo per il viaggio, e lavarono i bambini, e fecero i bagagli, ed all’alba i fili spinati erano pieni di biancheria infantile stesa al vento ad asciugare; e non dimenticarono le fasce, e i giocattoli, e i cuscini, e le cento piccole cose che esse ben sanno, e di cui i bambini hanno in ogni caso bisogno. Non fareste anche voi altrettanto? Se dovessero uccidervi domani col vostro bambino, voi non gli dareste oggi da mangiare?

This affecting passage - the first instance, after the introductory poem Shema, in which Levi confronts the reader directly, demanding that we place ourselves in the position of the prisoners - enacts a human connection intimately related to the bond that Levi and Jean share in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’.

CLL

In geographic terms, of course, the sea that Ulysses traverses is the broader Mediterranean and, at moments, its inner seas (e.g. the Ionian, Aegean, or Adriatic). As in Homer’s epic, however, ‘mare’ possesses a polyvocality in Levi’s text that far exceeds its cartographic meanings. The Fascist regime famously instrumentalised and misused Italy’s classical heritage. As early as 1918, Mussolini had linked ‘romanità’ with the sea, declaring in a speech at Pavia, ‘Now the mission of Italians is in the Mediterranean’ ('Ora la missione degli Italiani è nel Mediterraneo'). Yet even as the Duce confidently proclaimed that Italy would rule over a revived Mare Nostrum, the sea itself retained a historically ambivalent – at points, even marginal – status within the modern Italian state (Fogu 2020).

In a 1985 Paris Review interview (only published in 1994), Levi spoke of the revelation of reading Melville during the time of Fascism. According to Levi, the fascist censors allowed Cesare Pavese to translate the book as ‘it had no political implications’, a judgement that ignored the work’s entanglements with American narratives of imperialism and race politics. In Levi’s estimation, Pavese’s translation ‘distorted it [Moby Dick], fitted it into the Italian language’ – and thus into an ambivalent Italian imaginary of the sea. Like many Italians, ‘[h]e wasn’t a seaman – Pavese – he hated the sea’, commented Levi.

Such ambivalence towards the sea resonates in Levi’s biography, as well. Like many 20th-century Italians and Europeans more generally, Levi was familiar with the seaside as a place for recreation and tourism. Indeed, in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, Levi claimed that Rudi, the Blockführer in Auschwitz, liked Italy and wanted to learn Italian; this desire dated back to a month-long holiday in Liguria before the war, a vacation presumably spent along the shore. In the chapter, Levi likewise refers to ‘una qualche spiaggia estiva della mia infanzia’. Yet in his youth Levi embraced mountain climbing, with one biographer, Ian Thomson, claiming that on the eve of World War II Levi did not even know how to swim. For Levi, the sublimity of the peaks, rather than the sea’s vastness, symbolised freedom. In this, Levi was not alone. The classic terrain of both the Resistance and the civil war was resolutely a landscape (karst, forest, field, mountain) rather than a seascape.

In an indirect way, the project of Mare Nostrum threatened to shipwreck Levi’s own university hopes. In 1937, as Levi prepared for his ‘maturità’ exams, he received a demand to report to the Turin seaplane base. There he was accused of ignoring a draft summons for the Royal Navy. Levi’s sister, Anna Maria Levi, insisted, ‘Maybe my brother’s name was on a Fascist National Service list, but he never received an Italian Royal Navy summons’ (Thomson 2003, 66). A compromise was struck, with Levi expected to enrol in the university branch of the Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale (MVSN). Thus, unlike Ulysses, Levi was not destined to set forth on the open sea (in the latter’s case with the Navy). In the end, Levi never served in any branch of the Italian military or fascist militia. Rather, his brief three month career as a partisan played out in the mountain passes of the Valle d’Aosta, after Levi moved out of the Hotel Ristoro where he had initially sought refuge.

During those few months when Levi took up arms against the Fascists, there occurred an incident that profoundly demoralised Levi and his comrades: the execution at Frumy of two partisan brothers-in-arms, Fulvio Oppezzo and Luciano Zabaldano on December 9, 1943. In the estimation of historian Sergio Luzzatto, this episode would continue to haunt not only Levi’s conscience but also his writings (non-fiction, his novel, and poetry) (Luzzatto 2016). The ‘ugly secret’ Levi harboured was that these partisans - long celebrated as the first partisans killed in the Valle d’Aosta - did not fall at the hands of the Fascists but of their comrades, who appear to have punished Oppezzo and Zabaldano for indiscretion and greed. Perhaps it was only fitting that Zabaldono’s nom de guerre was ‘Mare’, given that this partisan’s life – and death – embodied the ambiguity and fluidity of what Levi would later conceptualise as the ‘grey zone’.

PB

While referring principally to the hero of the Homeric epic, ‘Ulisse’ also represents the kind of moniker that could serve Italian partisans as a nom de guerre. In his 1981 poem Partigia, Primo Levi enquires into the fate of his companions in the Resistance: ‘Dove siete, partigia di tutte le valli, | Tarzan, Riccio, Sparviero, Saetta, Ulisse?’ Historian Sergio Luzzatto reports that Levi’s 1946 application for recognition as a partisan listed his own code name as 'Ferrero' (Luzzatto 2016, 165-66).

PB

Giovanni Falaschi (Falaschi 2002) points out that for Levi to remember ‘compagna | Picciola’ but not the equally famous ‘orazion picciola’ is not credible. The same goes for ‘folle volo’, another almost proverbial expression. Falaschi explains this case of ‘selective memory’ as Levi fearing that these expressions might be perceived - either by Pikolo or by his readers - as diminishing or critical of Ulysses, and thus he ‘forgets’ them. However, ‘orazion picciola’ simply means ‘brief speech’, and Falaschi maintains that, while Levi certainly was aware of this, he might have wanted to avoid any confusion.

EL

In Inferno 26, Ulysses recounts how, as he was approaching the safety of a mountain-island in the middle of the ocean, a sudden whirlwind plunged his ship into the abyss, drowning him and all his mariners – ‘com’ altrui piacque [as pleased Another]’ (141), he comments. Reflecting on this ending, Levi lists, among the thoughts he desperately wants to share with Pikolo, the ‘cosí umano e necessario e pure inaspettato anacronismo [so human, so necessary and yet unexpected anachronism]’ that is implied in it. This is most likely the fact that, in Dante’s account, the Greek hero is struck down by the will of a god who belongs to a different time order. Perhaps, however, Levi’s ‘anachronism’ is more significant.

Odysseus, the Homeric hero, displays two contrasting impulses that drive him forward. One is his desire to return home, his nostalgia for Ithaca, his family and peace after ten years fighting the Trojan war and ten more trying, though not always convincingly, to return home. The other is his yearning to explore new lands and gain knowledge of unknown, undiscovered peoples. These impulses push him in opposite directions, keeping him wandering all over the Mediterranean for ten years. In the end, however, the centripetal force wins, and Odysseus returns home to resume his role as king, husband, father and son.

Dante is unlikely to have known the Odyssey but, being aware of the two impulses, he comes up with a concept that is absolutely brilliant. He collapses one impulse into the other – Ulysses’ desire for home, the known, and the past into a yearning for distant lands, the unknown and the future. He gives Ulysses a new, obscure but powerful purpose that urges him not back in, towards Ithaca, but out, in search of a loftier centre and home, an uninhabited world (mondo sanza gente) that he has never seen but that he, with his extraordinary intelligence, intuits must exist.

Though it may sound somewhat fanciful, Dante’s innovation is consistent with the medieval notion that a destiny is inscribed in the very name of the Greek hero. Uguccione da Pisa’s dictionary, among others, states that the name ‘Ulysses’ derives from olon xenos, an expression denoting ‘the wise man who inhabits this world as a pilgrim, a stranger’. To this information, Uguccione (d. 1210), whose work Dante knew, adds, quoting St Paul’s authority (Hebrews 13. 14), a crucial comment: 'non enim hic habemus manentem civitatem sed futuram inquirimus [For we have not here a lasting city, but we seek one that is to come]'. Accordingly, Ulysses may be viewed as an exile and a pilgrim in this world, who uses his genius to seek, in Pauline terms, his true home. Coming in sight of the ultimate centre, paradise on earth, he almost breaks into the world of the Christian myth. To his eyes, it is the only land where, after five months on the open sea, he might escape death, but it belongs to another time, another space and another moral order. No wonder that he is struck down, ‘as pleased Another’. He dies tragically, while exercising the genius that defines him. He dies in a manner that is unexpected and mysterious for him, though not for Dante and his readers, who watch his final exploit knowing full well that no one may reach earthly paradise before Christ re-opens its gates. Indeed, when Ulysses’ ship crashes against the storm, something truly awesome happens: two different eras, two different ethical orders and two poetic worlds intersect and clash – the ancient and the modern, the pagan and the Christian, the Homeric and the Dantean. By attempting to land on the shore of the earthly paradise before it is re-opened, Dante’s Ulysses is trying to break through the laws of time to reach an impossible destination that is in the future. The anachronism consists not just in his being stopped by the Christian God, as Levi suggests, but in his yearning to reach that God.

But then, how can Ulysses be guilty and why should he be stopped if he is searching for the supreme good? What kind of transgression has Ulysses committed? The answer comes from Thomas Aquinas who, writing about the fall of Lucifer, makes a very chilling point:

The devil sinned not by desiring something evil, but rather by desiring something good, viz., ultimate beatitude, but not in a fitting manner, that is, not in such a way as to attain it by God’s grace. (Quaestiones disputatae de malo, qu. 16, art. 3).

So, one can find damnation while looking for something good, be it knowledge, as Adam and Eve did, or power, as Lucifer did. This is Ulysses’ case as well. The difference is that Lucifer, Adam and Eve knew, Ulysses doesn’t: they are acquainted with God, Ulysses isn’t. However, Ulysses’ subjective innocence does not make him objectively less guilty. His mistake is wanting to reach God without God. A pagan and a sinner, Ulysses attempts to reach the sacred mountain by means of intelligence and strength alone. However heroic and noble, his attempt is destined to fail. Eternal bliss cannot be conquered by intelligence, nor even by virtue, for it is not enough to seek, one must be sought. As the choir of the Proud, on the first terrace of Purgatory, prays: ‘Vegna ver’ noi la pace del tuo regno, | ché noi ad essa non potem da noi, | s’ella non vien, con tutto nostro ingegno’ [May the peace of your kingdom come to us, | for we cannot attain it of ourselves | if it come not, for all our striving] (Purg. 11, 7-9).

By underlining the anachronism of Ulysses’ death, Primo Levi points the finger at his extraordinary relevance for us. Dante’s Ulysses is endowed with the mind of one whom Horkheimer and Adorno would call a follower of the Enlightenment, a free thinker, a modernist; and, while being intellectually fascinated by him, the poet shows that he runs to his undoing. His tragedy is a warning to all humans, Dante included, not to trust their intelligence alone, ‘perché non corra che virtù nol guidi [lest it run where virtue does not guide it]’ (Inf. 26, 22) – something that is becoming more and more evident in our time, when the vulnerability of modern society to its own inventions is becoming more apparent every day.

LP

The human--animal - the Darwinian, rather than Hobbesian, social animal endowed with ‘social instincts’ and ‘moral sense’ - is surely the anthropological substratum of the ‘study of certain aspects of the human mind’ that Levi carries out in SQ. However, these verses from canto 26 of Dante’s Inferno seem to contravene such evolutionary--anthropological assumptions, instead claiming the humanist identification of humanity with reason.

This apparent ‘conceptual anomaly’ has led interpreters to diverge, between those who see in this chapter a patent affirmation of Levi’s humanist creed (Farrell, Patruno) and those who remind us that these pages should always be read along with Levi’s naturalistic essays from the 1960s and the 1970s (Benvegnù, Ross), or indeed through the ‘Fascist’ Ulysses of the liceo (Druker). Of course, Levi’s reflection on the human mind is not immune from contradictions or unsolved questions.

However, we might propose that ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ can be read as an expression of Levi’s mindset as a man of science who does not conceive any rift between the so-called ‘two cultures’. Levi can pair Darwin and Dante without perceiving any contradiction; a mutual reinforcement that does not entail the lack of spirit in the former and the lack of matter in the latter. Put simply, for Levi, in certain moments, the Scholastic Dante (or the Catholic Manzoni) could say more about human experience than the materialists Darwin and Lorenz, but this is no escape from our finitude.

SG

Proper names. These are the first three of eleven or twelve (depending on how you count them) proper names of prisoners in the chapter (i.e. not including Dante and Ulisse). Levi uses them to create a vivid, peopled scene, to underline the mix of nationalities in the camp, and to bear witness to his fellow prisoners, many now dead. Later in the chapter, ‘Primo’ appears as a proper name for one of only three times in the whole book.

RG

In the linguistic framework of the chapter, and in light of the Dantean subtext on which it relies, the figure of this non-speaking character is particularly meaningful since it evokes, as a foil, the character of Nimrod in Inferno 31. Dante introduces Nembrotte as the speaker of an unintelligible language, embodied in a single five-word enigmatic utterance: Raphèl maì amecche zabi almi (v. 67). Three elements seem pertinent to establish the contrastive connection. First, the position: both Nimrod and the ingegner Levi stand in a hole, visible only from the waist up. Secondly, the speaking: Virgil mocks Nimrod’s inability to move out of his own private, untranslatable language, while ingegner Levi ‘makes a gesture’ (‘mi fa un cenno’), entrusting to a non-verbal cue its expression of charitable and friendly connection with Primo. Finally, the restriction of what may be conveyed verbally: Nimrod does not speak intelligibly, while ingegner Levi ‘never speaks of eating’. The verb for “eating” (It. mangiare) is a particularly sensible one in the linguistic domain of the Lager, having been violently shifted in the semantics of the Lager from the human and communal ‘essen’ to the animal and isolating ‘fressen’. Ingegner Levi’s character in the episode reinforces the notion that a desire for communication is at the root of a human community, the exact opposite of ‘life as brutes’.

(Note: L’ingegner Levi appears twice earlier in SQ: first in ‘Il viaggio’ as the father of three-year old Emilia - ‘una bambina curiosa, ambiziosa, allegra e intelligente’ (OC I, 146) - murdered on arrival at Auschwitz; and then in ‘Sul fondo’, nervously asking Primo where his daughter and wife might be.)

SM

The chapter ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ in SQ ends with a shipwreck. Levi closes the chapter with the same line that Dante uses to conclude Inferno 26, ‘Infin che ’l mar fu sopra noi rinchiuso’. (As Alberto Cavaglion has pointed out, the citation contains a significative lapsus: ‘rinchiuso’ instead of ‘richiuso’.) How should we interpret this ending? I would like to offer a creative reading that plays on the metaphorical meaning of navigation and shipwreck in Western culture.

In Shipwreck with Spectator, Hans Blumenberg argues that humans have sought to grasp the movement of their existence above all through the metaphor of the perilous sea voyage. As the reverberations of the Greek idea of the κυβερνήτης (governor) show, navigation is a widespread metaphor for politics, philosophy, and life itself. Among these reverberations we find an ancient motto that is particularly interesting for its ambivalence and paradoxical structure: naufragium feci, bene navigavi. This motto was first mentioned by Diogenes Laertius, but we find multiple versions of it throughout European culture. To cite a couple of examples from the Italian context, I would recall Leopardi’s ‘naufragar [...] dolce’ (‘L’infinito’) and Ungaretti’s Allegria di naufragi.

How can we interpret the seeming contradictoriness of this motto? The motto calls into question the idea that shipwreck is the sign of bad navigation. On the contrary, there is a mutual implication between good navigation and shipwrecking. This is made explicit by Erasmus in the Adagium 1878:

Nunc bene navigavi, cum naufragium feci (Now that I am shipwrecked, my navigation has gone well/I’ve learnt how to navigate)

Here shipwreck is not in contrast with navigation, but is rather a necessary passage, something without which we cannot have a full and proper ‘navigation’. To put it a different way, only when we have experienced shipwreck can we claim to have navigated well. On the one hand, ‘shipwreck’ is an enriching experience, a possibility that gives meaning to every metaphorical ‘navigation’. On the other hand, in our human existence, it is impossible to navigate without ever experiencing shipwreck. In our finite, imperfect world, shipwreck is ultimately unavoidable.

With this in mind, I would like to suggest that we could read ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ in SQ through the prism of the motto naufragium feci, bene navigavi. I am not arguing that this is what Levi intended to say, but simply that this is one of the ways of reading the text. If we see ‘texts and readers as co-creators of meaning […], [whereby] interpretation becomes a co-production between actors that brings new things to light rather than an endless rumination on a text’s hidden meaning or representational failures’ (Felski 2015, 173-74), ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ could be read as a (metaphorical) navigation on three levels. First, Levi and Pikolo’s journey to get the soup is a navigation through the camp that provides a ‘moment of reprieve’. Second, Levi’s translation of Dante is a metaphorical navigation in the labyrinth of memory, an attempt to trace a route through a sea of oblivion. Finally, Levi’s translation is also a ‘metanavigation’, for it concerns another navigation and shipwreck, that of Ulysses. By overlapping his navigation with that of Ulysses, Levi raises crucial questions regarding the human condition and the fate of the Häftlinge in the Lager.

As in the case of Ulysses, each of the three levels of navigation ends with a shipwreck. But is Levi’s translation of Dante really a failure, or could it be read as the sign of a good navigation? In the Preface to SQ, Levi argues that when the idea that ‘every stranger is an enemy’ becomes the ‘major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager’. The whole Lager could indeed be read through the curse of the Tower of Babel (see ‘Una buona giornata’). Translation is therefore a way of countering this course, a way of reining in the effects of Babel by restoring the humanity of the stranger and building a bridge through language, as Levi argues in ‘Tradurre ed essere tradotti’. By translating Dante to Pikolo, then, Levi is not just recovering fragments of memory. He is countering the logic that lies at the root of the Lager and restoring – if temporarily – his and Pikolo’s humanity. The translation ends with a shipwreck, yes, but that experience – the attempt of ‘enacting’ the human through a navigation – is a good shipwreck: naufragium feci, bene navigavi.

SB

Very often, when we think about ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, we tend to recall only the most famous pages in which Levi tries to remember Dante’s canto. The depth and sense of urgency of the Ulyssean passages are so overwhelming and passionate that they may distract us from other elements in the chapter. However, if we go back to the text and read it closely, we cannot avoid noticing that, after a brief opening in which Levi introduces Pikolo and narrates how he came to be Pikolo’s ‘fortunate’ chaperone to collect the soup for the day, ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ also dwells quite significantly on a moment of domestic memories. While going to the kitchens, Levi writes: ‘Si vedevano i Carpazi coperti di neve. Respirai l’aria fresca, mi sentivo insolitamente leggero’. This is the first moment in the chapter in which Levi refers to the mountains as something that revitalises him and makes him feel fresh and light, both physically and mentally.

This moment foreshadows another, also in this chapter, when Levi goes back to his mountains, those close to Turin, and compares them to the mountain that the protagonist of Dante’s canto, Ulysses, encounters just before his shipwreck with his companions:

... Quando mi apparve una montagna, bruna

Per la distanza, e parvemi alta tanto

Che mai veduta non ne avevo alcuna.

Sì, sì, ‘alta tanto’, non ‘molto alta’, proposizione consecutiva. E le montagne, quando si vedono di lontano... le montagne... oh Pikolo, Pikolo, di’ qualcosa, parla, non lasciarmi pensare alle mie montagne, che comparivano nel bruno della sera quando tornavo in treno da Milano a Torino! Basta, bisogna proseguire, queste sono cose che si pensano ma non si dicono. Pikolo attende e mi guarda. Darei la zuppa di oggi per saper saldare ‘non ne avevo alcuna’ col finale.

The significance of the mountains in Levi’s narration is confirmed in this passage. For him, the mountains represent his experience of belonging, his youthful years, and his work as a chemist – the job he was doing when he commuted by train from Turin to Milan. At the same time, Levi’s own memories of the mountains intertwine and overlap with another mountain, Dante’s Mount Purgatory. Here, a deep and perhaps not fully conscious intertextual game starts to emerge and to characterise Levi’s writing. The lines that Levi does not remember are these:

Noi ci allegrammo, e tosto tornò in pianto,

ché de la nova terra un turbo nacque,

e percosse del legno il primo canto.

For Dante’s Ulysses, Mount Purgatory signifies the final moment of his adventure and his desire for knowledge. The marvel and enthusiasm that Ulysses and his company feel when they see the mountain is suddenly transformed into its contrary. From the mountain, a storm originates that will destroy the ship and swallow its crew: ‘Tre volte il fe’ girar con tutte l’acque, | Alla quarta levar la poppa in suso | E la prora ire in giù, come altrui piacque’. Dante’s Mount Purgatory, so majestic and spectacular, represents the end of any desire for knowledge that aims to find new answers to and interpretations of human existence in the world without God’s word.

Going back to Levi’s text, we find that, instead, in a kind of reverse overlapping between his image and that of Ulysses, the image of the mountain of Purgatory suggests to Levi a very different set of thoughts that, although seemingly and similarly overwhelming, opens up new interpretations: ‘altro ancora, qualcosa di gigantesco che io stesso ho visto ora soltanto, nell’intuizione di un attimo, forse il perché del nostro destino, del nostro essere oggi qui’. For a moment, it is almost as if Levi, a new Dantean Ulysses in a new Inferno, stands in front of Mount Purgatory and forgets the terzine and the shipwreck. Maybe Levi cannot or does not want to remember those terzine because the mountain in Purgatory represents something very different for him than for Dante’s Ulysses. Levi’s view of the mountain does not lead to a moment of recognition of sin, as it does in Dante’s Ulysses. For him, the mountain, like his mountain range, is the gateway to knowledge, enrichment, and illumination and to a world that lies beyond the imposed limits of traditional, constricting, and distorted views and that awaits discovery (‘qualcosa di gigantesco che io stesso ho visto ora soltanto’). Something about and beyond the Lager.

To better understand how the mountains are central in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, we have to remember that Levi’s view of the mountains strongly depends on his anti-Fascism, which he expressed particularly vigorously in two moments of his life: during his months in the Resistance, just before he was captured and sent to Fossoli, and, even more intensely, during the adventures of his youth, when he was a free young man who enjoyed climbing the mountains surrounding Turin. As Alberto Papuzzi has suggested, ‘le radici del suo rapporto con la montagna sono ben piantate in quella stagione più lontana: radici intellettuali di cittadino che cercava sulla montagna, nella montagna, suggestioni e risposte che non trovava nella vita, o meglio nell’atmosfera ispessita di quella vita torinese, senza passato e senza futuro’ (OC III, 426-27). Indeed, reports Papuzzi, Levi confirms that:

Avevo anche provato a quel tempo a scrivere un racconto di montagna […]. C’era tutta l’epica della montagna, e la metafisica dell’alpinismo. La montagna come chiave di tutto. Volevo rappresentare la sensazione che si prova quando si sale avendo di fronte la linea della montagna che chiude l’orizzonte: tu sali, non vedi che questa linea, non vedi altro, poi improvvisamente la valichi, ti trovi dall’altra parte, e in pochi secondi vedi un mondo nuovo, sei in un mondo nuovo. Ecco, avevo cercato di esprimere questo: il valico.

The heart of that epic story made its way into the chapter ‘Ferro’ in Il sistema periodico. The discovery of this (brave) new world, ‘mondo nuovo’, is an integral part and a direct achievement of Levi’s experience in the mountains. The mountains open a new understanding and a new perspective on the world.

Something that escapes common understanding is revealed through the experience of the mountains, both in Levi’s memories of his youth and in his literary recounting of Auschwitz. Reciting Dante in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ is therefore not only an intertextual exercise for Levi. Only by inserting Levi’s literary references in the complexity of his own experience – before, during, and after Auschwitz – can we fully capture the depth of his reflections. Levi mentally and metaphorically brought to Auschwitz not only Dante but also his ‘metafisica dell’alpinismo’. Together, they contributed to his attempt to come to terms with that reality.

VG

My reflections here build on Lino Pertile’s 2010 essay, ‘L’inferno, il lager, la poesia’. Pertile notes the profound correspondence between the opening poem of the book (OC I, 139) and this chapter. He points out how the main theme of Levi’s book, the dehumanising experience in the Lager, based on the annihilation of people’s identity, is expressed in the poem and resurfaces explicitly again in the chapter dedicated to Dante’s Ulysses. The key term revealing the correspondence of themes and intentions is ‘Considerate [consider]’, used twice in Levi’s poem (‘Consider if this is a man | … | Consider if this is a woman’) and rooted in the memory of Dante’s famous tercet where Ulysses addresses his crew as they sail towards the horizon of their last journey beyond the pillars of Hercules: ‘Considerate la vostra semenza: | fatti non foste a viver come bruti, | ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza’ (Inf. 26, 118-20 and OC I, 228).

There are many other correspondences between the chapter of Ulysses and the opening poem, besides the ‘Considerate’, and that they are profound and filtered through the theme of memory, an eminently Dantean theme: the urgency to fix in the memory itself what is or will be necessary to tell, or the urgency to express and recount what is deposited in memory. Indeed, for Levi, the memory of each individual person contains that person’s humanity.

Memory is immediately activated as Primo and Jean exit the underground gas tank (‘He [Jean] climbed out and I followed him, blinking in the brightness of the day. It was warm [tiepido] outside; the sun drew a faint smell of paint and tar from the greasy earth that made me think of [mi ricordava] a summer beach of my childhood). Temporarily escaping hell by means of a ladder (a sort of Dantesque ‘natural burella’), it is the tiepido sun and a characteristic smell that evoke the childhood memory and that at the same time the reader cannot avoid connecting to the tiepide case of the initial poem (‘You who live safe | in your heated houses [tiepide case]’ [my emphasis]). It is then around the memory ‘of our homes, of Strasbourg and Turin, of the books we had read, of what we had studied, of our mothers’ that another theme in the chapter coalesces, the theme of friendship (‘He and I had been friends for a week’), a theme that had already emerged in a more general connotation in the opening poem (‘visi amici’). Warmth, friendship (visi amici…Jean), the kitchens as destination for Primo and Jean’s walk (the walk from the tank with the empty pot is ‘the ever welcomed opportunity of getting near the kitchens’, not for that hot food [cibo caldo] evoked in the poem, but for the soup of the camp, an alienating incarnation of Dantesque ‘pane altrui’ whose various names are dissonant). During the respite of the one hour walk from the tank to the kitchens, the intermittent memory of Dante’s canto emerges as if from an underground consciousness, the memory of Inferno as a partial and imperfect mirror of the human condition in the Lager, Ulysses as poetic memory, a sudden epiphany of a semenza, a seed, of humanity that the Lager is made to suppress, and Primo’s wondering in the face of this sudden internal revelation of still possessing an intact humanity. Primo’s memory of his home resurfaces as if springing from the memory of Dante’s text: the ‘montagna bruna’ of Purgatory is reflected in the memory of ‘my mountains, which would appear in the evening dusk [nel bruno della sera] when I returned from Milan to Turin!' But the real, familiar landscape is too heartbreaking a memory of ‘sweet things cruelly distant’, one of those hurtful thoughts, ‘things one thinks but does not say’. There is an epiphanic memory then, the poetic memory that surfaces during the walk and that reveals to Primo that he still is a man, a memory to which he clings despite the sense of his own audacity (‘us two, who dare to talk about these things with the soup poles on our shoulders’); there is also a more intimate memory, equally pulsating with life and humanity - but dangerous, because it makes Primo vulnerable to despair, threatening his own survival in the camp.

The urgent need to remember Dante’s verses in this chapter develops the theme of memory, which has been central from the opening poem. In Levi’s poem, though, memory is perceived from a different angle: the readers (who live safe…) must honour that memory and transmit it as an imperative testimony of what happened in the concentration camp from generation to generation, testifying to the suffering of the man and the woman ‘considered’ in the poem. This is a memory to be carved in one’s heart, which must accompany those who receive it in every action and in every moment of each day like a prayer. Not coincidentally the poem follows the text of the most fundamental prayer of Judaism, the Shemà Israel, which is read twice a day, a memory to be passed on to one’s own children, a responsibility which is a sign of one’s humanity. The commandment to remember of the opening poem (‘I consign these words to you. | Carve them into your hearts') issues a potential curse to the reader, threatening the destruction of what most fundamentally characterises their humanity - home, health, children: ‘Or may your house fall down, | May illness make you helpless, | And your children turn their eyes from you’. Finally, Primo’s act of remembering during the walk to the kitchens is submerged by the Babelic soup (‘Kraut und Rüben…cavoli e rape…Choux et navets…Kàposzta és répak…Until the sea again closed – over us’) and yet the memory of it becomes part of his testimony in such a central chapter of the book written after surviving the Shoah. If the memory of Dante’s verses contributed to Primo’s faith in his own humanity and his psychological and physical survival in the camp, he then accomplishes the commandment of memory and his responsibility as a man through his own writing.

CS

This “qui” is a fulcrum around which the temporal and spatial dimensions of Levi’s narrative turn. After Levi’s initial passato remoto (‘Passò una SS’) shifts to present-tense narration (‘È Rudi’) in paragraph 15, Primo and Pikolo’s itinerant conversation unfolds in the now. Levi then develops an analogous spatial proximity with his insistence on the demonstrative “questo”, culminating in paragraph 28 (beginning ‘Pikolo mi prega…’), where he twice uses the word “qui”: in the first instance indicating the “hereness” of yet another gap in his memory; in the second, in ‘... come si dice qui’, effectively erasing any distance between the episode and its narration.

LI

In the Schools edition of SQ, Levi glosses his own chapter ending as follows: ‘Il verso, che chiude il Canto di Ulisse col tragico naufragio in vista del Monte del Purgatorio, chiude anche un altro “folle volo”, e cioè la breve parentesi umana, lo sforzo dell’autore e di Pikolo di sollevarsi per un momento al di sopra dell’orizzonte desolato della prigionia’ (OC I, 1418).

RG

Levi wrote some brief explanatory notes of his own for a Schools edition of SQ, published by Einaudi in 1973. Most of these are linguistic, translating foreign words and phrases, or simply explanatory. The note here to ‘il perché’ has more substance, but has also been treated tentatively by critics, as it seems somewhat partial or incomplete as an explanation of this remarkable, climactic moment. Levi writes: ‘In quell’istante, all’autore pare di intravvedere una conturbante analogia fra naufragio di Ulisse e il destino dei prigionieri: l’uno e gli altri sono stati paradossalmente “puniti”, Ulisse per aver infranto le barriere della tradizione, i prigionieri perché hanno osato opporsi a una forza soverchiante, qual era allora l’ordine fascista in Europa. Ancora: fra le varie radici dell’antisemitismo tedesco, e quindi del Lager, c’era l’odio e il timore per l’“acutezza” intellettuale dell’ebraismo europeo, che i due giovani sentono simile a quella dei compagni di Ulisse, e di cui in quel momento si riconoscono rappresentanti ed eredi’ (OC I, 1417-18).

RG

The text of the chapter used here is from the 1958 edition of Se questo è un uomo (Turin: Einaudi), the second published edition of the book, as reproduced in the edition of Levi’s complete works (Opere complete, hereafter OC) from 2016-2018, also published by Einaudi (OC I, 224-29). For this and other key works referenced or recommended, see the Bibliography section.

The text of the chapter from the first edition of Se questo è un uomo (hereafter, SQ) from 1947 (Turin: De Silva) is also included for comparison on the Genetics page of this site. This is based on the text republished in OC I, 81-86.

As the editor of the complete works, Marco Belpoliti, explains, several manuscript versions of SQ - or its constituent parts - exist from 1946-47, as do notes for revisions leading up to the 1958 edition. On manuscripts of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ in particular, see OC I, 1467-71.

After 1958, although the book underwent certain further changes, for example with the addition of notes for a Schools edition (1973), or the Appendix of questions most frequently put to Levi (1976), the text of the chapter remained unchanged.

The text of the first published English translation of this chapter, from 1959, by Stuart Woolf (London: Orion), is also available on this site on the Translation Lab page.

RG

This is not the only porcupine to appear in Levi’s writing. In The Truce, we learn that Levi’s companion Cesare, disappointed after a misadventure on the black market, spent two days ‘huddled on his bed, bristling like a porcupine’ (CW I, 338). In The Wrench, Faussone identifies a clearing in which ‘a porcupine was advancing cautiously, with brief stops and starts’ (CW II, 1025). These English translations suggest a possible connection to SQ that is less obvious in the original Italian, where the text refers not to an ‘istrice’ but rather to a ‘porcospino’. In La tregua, Cesare is described as ‘ispido come un porcospino’ (OC I, 417), and in La chiave a stella, Faussone points out that ‘un porcospino avanzava cauto, con brevi arresti e riprese’ (OC I, 1099).

The terms ‘istrice’ and ‘porcospino’ refer to animals of the same family, Hystricidae, and identify the same species, Hystrix cristata, the crested porcupine, which is native to Italy. In the Grande dizionario italiano dell’uso, ‘porcospino’ is listed as a synonym of ‘istrice’, which is defined scientifically as a ‘piccolo mammifero con il corpo coperto di aculei appuntiti ed erettili’, with a second figurative meaning as a ‘persona intrattabile, scontrosa’ (805).

Despite their similarity, there is a notable difference between the two synonyms with regard to their literary resonances. As the Tesoro della lingua Italiana delle Origini demonstrates, ‘istrice’ was the preferred term for medieval philosophers, historians, and poets, including Boccaccio, who used it in his Caccia di Diana and Ameto, where the husband’s beard is described as being ‘né più né meno pugnente che le penne d’uno istrice’ (Tutte le opera di Giovanni Boccaccio, 774). The Grande dizionario della lingua italiana attests subsequent citations from Parini, D’Annunzio, De Amicis, and Foscolo, with the latter two adopting the term metaphorically to refer to a person who is taciturn and cagey (615).

I suspect that Levi had another literary reference in mind when he opted for ‘istrice’ rather than ‘porcospino’ in SQ. Here are the words with which the Ghost in Shakespeare’s Hamlet reveals both his identity and the infernal torments he suffers in the afterlife:

I am thy father’s spirit,

Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,

And for the day confined to fast in fires,

Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature

Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid

To tell the secrets of my prison-house,

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word

Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,

Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,

Thy knotted and combined locks to part

And each particular hair to stand on end,

Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:

But this eternal blazon must not be

To ears of flesh and blood. List, list, O, list! (Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5, vv. 14-28)

In standard Italian translations dating back at least to the early nineteenth century, Shakepeare’s ‘fretful porpentine’ is rendered as a ‘pauroso istrice’ (Amleto, 59). This word, and these lines, would seem to resonate remarkably well with Levi’s description of the hell of Auschwitz, which is the context for his invocation of ‘la difesa dell’istrice’.

After all, Hamlet’s Ghost is compelled to speak quickly, in the brief interval he has been granted in his eternal suffering:

My hour is almost come,

When I to sulphurous and tormenting flames

Must render up myself (Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5, vv. 5-7)

Cannot Levi and Jean say the same thing? The ‘lungo giro’ that Jean has arranged buys them a brief respite, but this precious time has begun to disappear as soon as it arrives: ‘quest’ora già non è più un’ora’. Cannot Hamlet’s Ghost say the same thing?

The moment of connection and communication at the heart of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ can be said to have begun with Jean’s clever strategy to curry favour with cruel Alex, the Kapo Levi describes as ‘un bestione violento e infido’, who is won over by Jean’s ‘opera lenta cauta e sottile’, finally ceding to him the coveted role of Pikolo. It is this victory that Levi describes as penetrating ‘the porcupine’s defence’. And it is this victory that frees Jean to choose Levi for the task of fetching the daily soup ration, enabling the disquisition on Dante that gives the chapter its title.

If I am correct that the reference to ‘la difesa dell’istrice’ is thus evidence that Levi and Jean’s Dantean voyage begins under the sign of Hamlet, this would be a particularly elegant literary manoeuvre, since the voyage concludes under the very same sign. As their hour runs out once they have reached the kitchen, Levi finds himself unable to say all that needs to be said and is forced to concede that ‘il resto è silenzio’, an unmistakable echo of Hamlet’s final words: ‘the rest is silence’ (Hamlet, Act V, Scene 2, v. 395).

If further evidence for a Shakespearean source text is warranted, I would note that Levi included in Ad ora incerta a poem that explicitly references Hamlet’s Ghost, who is referred to as an ‘old mole’ because he continues to speak from beneath the floorboards (Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5, v. 183). Italian translations render this line as ‘vecchia talpa’, words that Levi borrowed for the title of a 1982 poem, which literalises the reference - the poem is in fact written from the perspective of an old mole - while nevertheless conveying the sense of the original, with its profound intimations of the latent power of buried knowledge.

In altri tempi seguivo le femmine,

E quando ne sentivo una grattare

Mi scavavo la via verso di lei:

Ora non più; se capita, cambio strada.

Ma a luna nuova mi prende il morbino,

E allora qualche volta mi diverto

A sbucare improvviso per spaventare i cani. (OC II, 727)

The reference to an ‘istrice’ in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ similarly suggests hidden depths.

CLL

In an August 2013 article in The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates describes how Levi’s account of Auschwitz evokes for him the Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. Reading SQ, writes Coates, ‘I see my African ancestors here in America, suddenly aware that they will never go back, that they are dead to everyone they have known and loved’.

CLL

The high sea opens up new possibilities of connecting. This passage of the chapter follows a moment of solid and fixed textual memory. After managing the recitation of two terzine from Inferno 26 that initiate the encounter with Ulysses, Levi indicates his frustration at his inability to translate, but also points to Jean’s ability to connect from afar, from a cultural and linguistic remove. Then a gap in memory, a struggle to recall. Half phrases finally crystallise in a well-remembered line, ‘Ma misi me per l’alto mare aperto’ (Inf. 26, 110). This line first prompts Levi to play the role of teacher, explaining to Jean how ‘misi me’ is not the same as the French ‘je me mis,’ but rather something bolder. In doing so, in envisioning the liberatory potential of breaking a boundary, a chain, putting oneself beyond a barrier, Levi sees a precious and telling connection between himself and Pikolo: ‘noi conosciamo bene questo impulso’. There is a flattening of difference here, a forging of a bond between two men that stretches across the Mediterranean, across a linguistic and poetic divide. Levi is no longer explaining, translating, teaching; instead, they have found a connection in seeking to go beyond, to break out and be free.

Importantly, this oceanic connection privileges Jean’s experience over Primo’s technical knowledge. It is by no means the same as the disdain for intellectuals shown by Alex at the beginning of the chapter. Rather, this emphasis on Pikolo’s experience - ‘Pikolo ha viaggiato per mare e sa cosa vuol dire…’ - is a way to privilege what might be gained through the perspective of the cultural outsider. Jean has been on the sea; he apparently knows what Primo describes as that feeling of freedom when there is nothing left but the aroma of the ocean. Has Primo not had that? (Perhaps only in the pages of books, by Salgari, Conrad?) Is he thus able to have a wholly different, more potent experience of Inferno 26 as a result of this ‘non-native’ reading? Earlier in the chapter, the ‘leggero odore’ of paint and tar have - strangely, almost paradoxically - brought to Levi’s mind ‘qualche spiaggia estiva della mia infanzia’, but this is of another order. Primo’s experience seems to have been shore-bound; Jean has truly sailed.

Because Pikolo knows (and the use of ‘sapere’ is telling here, in contrast to the ‘canoscenza’ of Ulysses’ dictum to follow), Primo can convey with both precision and lyricism that mode of apprehension and feeling of emancipation: ‘è quando l’orizzonte si chiude su se stesso, libero diritto e semplice, e non c’è ormai che odore di mare’. He is envisioning and embodying the possibilities of freedom, of being unbound and certainly not being inundated by odours of a very different kind, such as the paint and tar evoked earlier. The image of the horizon closing in on itself stands in stark contrast to the end of both Dante’s Inferno 26 and the end of this chapter, when it is the sea that closes over Ulysses and his companions, and - by implication and association - over Primo and Jean once more as well. The use of the verb ‘rinchiudere’ in that final moment is also striking, almost as if to imply that there are moments such as this one that open out to the world at large but there is the inevitable return to the horror of the camp that once more closes over them. Here, though, the sea is freedom: it is a simple, straight line of the horizon that connects these individuals together in their desire to escape.

In that exquisite, bittersweet phrase ‘dolci cose ferocemente lontane,’ there is something not just Ulyssean (‘né dolcezza di figlio…’), not just hybrid (‘dulcis’ and ‘ferox’ together, which also resonates with the ‘viver come bruti’ to come), but also a channeling of Purgatorio. One might think in particular of the opening of Purgatorio 8: ‘Era già l’ora che volge il disio | ai navicanti e ’ntenerisce il core | lo dì c’han detto ai dolci amici addio…’. Here, too, the sweet memory of things left behind is made bitter by their absence and separation across the sea. Such a way of thinking Ulysses and the ocean voyage across the Commedia is almost a banality; it nonetheless serves to give us some impetus to thinking about Levi as a reader of not just Inferno, but of other parts of the poem as well.

And it serves to have us perhaps think about this powerful moment of Mediterranean connectivity a little differently, to take that insight of valorising Jean’s non-native perspective out to the world at large. In his 1990 work Poetics of Relation, Martinican philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant espouses Relation as a means to connect globally and valorise the multilingual, multicultural nature of the Caribbean as a model for global culture that is rhizomatic and not tied to a single, Western line of becoming. Glissant sees the Mediterranean as an enclosed sea, ‘a sea that concentrates’, while the Caribbean is ‘a sea that explodes the scattered lands into an arc. A sea that diffracts’. In this moment of SQ, I wonder if we might find the Caribbean model as one that resonates more with the Primo-Jean dynamic, as Jean’s experience of the open sea asks us to see Dante’s text as one that is not enclosed but rather must be opened up to the global reader. Indeed, Glissant himself characterises Dante’s Commedia as a work that is committed to cultural mixing, dwelling on how ‘one of the greatest monuments of Christian universalisation stresses the filiation shared by ancient myths and the new religion linking both to the creation of the world’. Perhaps this moment of connection, of seeing the liberatory possibilities in the open sea that beckons, is not just a way to palpably feel the strength of Primo and Jean’s new bond, but also to urge us as global readers to embrace the diffractive, rhizomatic potential of a decolonised Dante.

AK

The prisoners’ gait is in focus throughout. The minimal characterisation of Limentani here (his name, his origin, his hidden bowl) is striking for its emphasis on his ambulatio, the result of his wooden clogs – ‘strascicando i piedi’. Shoes are a recurrent obsession of Levi and all the prisoners in SQ, as established in ‘Sul fondo’: ‘Né si creda che le scarpe, nella vita del Lager, costituiscano un fattore d’importanza secondaria. La morte incomincia dalle scarpe.’ The stakes of this gait are summarised early in the work: ‘Dobbiamo camminare diritti, senza strascicare gli zoccoli [...] per restare vivi, per non cominciare a morire’ (‘Iniziazione’). The brief exchange between Levi and Limentani here, which Jean listens in on attentively, is then also one between living and dead.

Jean, at the beginning of this chapter, was recognised by his clogs (‘appena si riconobbero le sue scarpe [...], tutti smisero di raschiare’) – as Pikolo, he has a right to discarded clothes and shoes, ‘vestiti e scarpe “nuovi”’ (‘Le nostre notti’). These clogs, ‘zoccoli’, frequently impede the kind of conversation which Levi and Jean accomplish today, drowning out even furtive exchanges: ‘si può tentare di scambiare qualche parola attraverso l’acciottolio delle diecimila paia di zoccoli di legno’ (‘Esame di chimica’), or clamorously announcing a presence too abject for human exchange: ‘I nostri zoccoli di legno sono insupportabilmente rumorosi [...]. Con noi non parlano, e arriciano il naso quando ci vedono trascinarsi [...] disadatti e malfermi sugli zoccoli’ (‘Die drei Leute vom Labor’).

Here their clop must accompany the ‘pleasant walk’ in which the Italian lesson takes place. Perhaps the clogs scan the rhythm of the lines, or are audible in Jean’s recitation of new words, “Zup-pa, cam-po, ac-qua”, or indeed in Levi’s ‘pedestrian commentary’.

RP

As in ‘Argon’ in Il sistema periodico, Levi here demonstrates a philologist’s interest in historical grammar. The grammatical difference that separates the marked ‘Ma misi me’ and its unmarked equivalent in Italian is not expressly stated (the French je me mis is the ordinary, unremarkable grammar, and hence can’t serve to illustrate it). Levi’s free indirect discourse here indicates how much store he put in this difference: he explains its effect in three different ways to Jean (as ‘audacious’, as a broken chain, as the other side of a barrier).

The expected fourteenth-century Italian syntax is Ma misimi. (It is unlikely to be Ma mi misi, as it would be today, because in old Italian ma frequently triggers the postposition of the pronoun). But Levi does not limit himself to describing impressionistically the effect of the marked grammar. Scientifically, he analyses the form of mettersi via comparison with other instances of the same lemma in the passage. Of si metta: ‘I had to come to the Lager to realise that it is the same expression as before’.

The difference between Ma misimi and Ma misi me is that the unaccented, enclitic pronoun mi has become the accented, separate word me. This completely changes the rhythm of the line: *Ma mísimi per l’álto máre apérto (accents on 2, 6 and 10) becomes Ma misi mé per l’álto máre etc. (with accents on 4, 6 and 10). A number of Commedia manuscripts, in fact, have misimi – another clue to precisely the ‘audacity’ that Levi detects in Dante’s rhythmical and grammatical usage here.

Dante’s me makes his reflexive pronoun mi into (almost) a transitive object – a distinct, real-existing entity, separate from the grammatical subject: ‘I’ act on a ‘me’, not just ‘myself’.

What Levi hears, via a kind of solecism, is a prominent, sticking-out me – ‘oggi mi sento da tanto’. This is a sense of self that grows – ‘Per un momento, ho dimenticato chi sono e dove sono’ – into almost an answer to his title’s question.

RP

This paragraph fascinatingly exemplifies how a text can build on bodily patterns and sensorimotor experience to produce an effect that enriches its semantic meaning. Positioned towards the end of the chapter, it coincides with the emotional peak of Levi’s attempt to explain Dante’s Commedia to Pikolo. The conversation leads Levi’s mind outside of the camp and far from his present condition (‘Per un momento, ho dimenticato chi sono e dove sono’), back to Turin (‘non lasciarmi pensare alle mie montagne, che comparivano nel bruno della sera quando tornavo in treno da Milano a Torino!’) and to a place where it is possible to devote time and mental effort to existential issues other than bare survival. Yet, at the same time, it is Levi’s present condition that makes it all the more important to convey to Pikolo the relevance of Ulysses’ story and Dante’s recounting of it.

The feeling of this sudden expansion – towards other geographical places, past times, and higher meanings – is rendered through various stylistic devices. While the average length of sentences in the chapter is 16.5 words (Voyant Tools), this sentence counts 74 words; the anomalous length of the sentence dovetails with the unusual breadth of Levi’s thoughts, with how far he concedes himself to go with his mind away from the concerns of his life in the camp. Within this continuous flow of words, the urgency of Levi’s present task is formally conveyed through the accumulation of paratactic sentences linked via asyndeton, which reinforce the idea of a linear proceeding, simply propelled forward without strong control (which would be expressed by a period with a more complex and rigid structure), stretching out towards meanings that seem to escape Levi’s reach (and whose scope progressively increases: specific textual passages; the Middle Ages; human destiny). However, this long, loosely ordered period is delimited by words with a high deictic power: ‘Trattengo’ and ‘oggi qui’. Both the opening verb and the closing pair of adverbs (temporal and spatial) identify a deictic centre that coincides with the narrator (and the reader): in between, the paragraph unfolds in a flow that leads both narrator and reader far from the camp, in an encompassing movement that reaches out in time and space to the point of touching and almost enfolding something ‘gigantesco’, which is the sense of destiny of the entire human race, and then swiftly reverts to the starting point of the here and now (‘oggi qui’).

The meaning of Levi’s words is reinforced thanks to a conceptual metaphor operating unconsciously which is that of THINKING IS MOVING (writing conceptual metaphors in capital letters is a linguistics convention). THINKING IS MOVING is an elaboration of the very general conceptual metaphor MIND IS BODY, which means that we automatically tend to conceptualise mental activities in terms of bodily activities, because the latter are those of which we have immediate experience. In this paragraph, the encompassing wandering of Levi’s thoughts, its breadth and immense distance from the reality of the camp, is conveyed through strategies that all variably rely on the reader’s bodily experience. Sensorimotor experience operates unconsciously and yet plays a crucial role: it is our non-representational knowledge of what is feels like to move through open spaces, to be held vs. be released, to roam freely with our bodies, that scaffolds and enriches our understanding of what it means to metaphorically roam with one’s mind. Thanks to this metaphor, because the deictic centre at the beginning and at the end of the period is the same and is close to the narrator (reader), this period is endowed with a feeling of circularity, of reaching out and returning to the starting point, which is not explicitly expressed in the text and is rather projected by the reader’s embodied experience.

MB

‘The Canto of Ulysses’ records a truly remarkable feat of cultural memory, as Levi recalls and recites Dante amidst the ruin of Auschwitz. He does so to teach Italian to his campmate Jean. But as he recites the words of Dante, Levi also feels his past come back to him. He begins to recover something of his identity and his humanity in the degraded world of the Lager, to feel again that he is ‘a man’.

Dante is not, however, the only canonical writer to appear in ‘The Canto of Ulysses’. So too does Shakespeare. <br /> Levi admits to ‘gaps’, ‘holes’, and ‘lacuna[e]’ in his memory as he recites Dante, some of which would seem to be ‘irreparable’. Unable to recall his Dante, Levi is forced to confront ‘silence’:

I would give today’s soup to know how to connect ‘the like on any day’ to the last lines. I try to reconstruct it through rhymes, I close my eyes, I bite my fingers – but it is no use, the rest is silence [il resto è silenzio]. Other verses dance in my head: ‘…The sodden ground belched wind …’, no, it is something else. [Woolf’s translation.]

‘[T]he rest is silence’: Levi is quoting the last words that are spoken by Hamlet, before he dies:

O, I die, Horatio!

The potent poison quite o’ercrows my spirit.

I cannot live to hear the news from England.

But I do prophesy th’election lights

On Fortinbras; he has my dying voice.

So tell him, with th’occurrents more and less

Which have solicited – the rest is silence.

With his ‘spirit’ succumbing to the ‘potent poison’ Claudius and Laertes have used to kill him, Hamlet undertakes the impossible: to testify to his own death, to ‘tell’ in words his fall into deathly silence. This is his ‘dying voice’.

What is Hamlet doing in ‘The Canto of Ulysses’? Why does Levi place it where he does, in ‘the caesura’, the abyssal gap between Auschwitz and his cultural identity and memory, embodied by Dante? It is certainly ironic that Levi draws once again on the Western canonical literary tradition to record the moment of its ostensible breakdown. What emerges from the lapse, the silence that Levi testifies to, is another tie to his compromised past, and the literary culture that would seem to have been obliterated by the Holocaust – even if Levi does not choose to bring obvious notice to his allusion by using quotation marks or by writing, ‘as Hamlet says’. The poetry of Hamlet appears to be among the ‘other verses’ Levi has confusedly ‘dancing in his head’ while he tries to fill the gaps in his memory.

By quoting Hamlet, Levi would appear to again testify to the power of literature as a mainstay of culture and humanity, evincing his commitment to humanist ideals. This is certainly the positive interpretation of Hamlet in ‘The Canto of Ulysses’. I would make the case, however, that Levi is using Shakespeare for an altogether more challenging purpose. By appropriating the ‘dying voice’ of Hamlet, Levi records the place where his memory and his identity collapse, testifying to the reduction of the camp inmate to silence and oblivion. Bryan Cheyette writes that ‘even when his memory self-consciously fails him’, Levi is always ‘at pains to bear witness to those moments of failure’ (Cheyette 1999, 64). Levi seeks to testify to the silence, to show that ‘something has occurred even if it cannot be understood’ (Druker 2009, 64). This is the role played by Hamlet in ‘The Canto of Ulysses’. Levi does not use the play to testify to the endurance of the human spirit in the camps, but to silence, to a ‘world of negation’ (OC I, 235). Hamlet, perhaps ironically given its near-unrivalled canonical and cultural status, marks the space beyond language and culture, into which Levi is at risk of falling. This, as Levi called it, is the ‘black hole’ of Auschwitz (OC II, 1663).

Through his allusion to Hamlet, Levi rewrites Shakespeare from the perspective of Auschwitz, endowing the play with new meanings as he confronts the lacunae and voids produced by the world of the concentration camp. Levi uses the play to record the disintegration of humane values in Auschwitz, as memory and language are brought to the point of collapse. Jacques Derrida does much the same in his own work on the play. He draws Hamlet into conversation with Holocaust testimony when he compares the play to the poetry of survivor Paul Celan in his 1995 piece ‘The Time is Out of Joint’. Derrida contends that the paradox of testimony is that the witness must uncannily ‘outlive his life’ (3.2.117) – or ‘survive’ that which is not ‘survivable’: the collapse of all meaning and death (Derrida 1995). This is the sense in which Hamlet is a play about the ‘impossible possibility of testimony’, as Derrida calls it. Hamlet has ‘seen the worst’ and is ‘the witness of the worst disorder, of absolute injustice’, writes Derrida. Hamlet has witnessed too much for words – but testimony, ‘though it hath no tongue, will speak’ (2.2.546).

Levi must also confront and testify to the painful death of memory, the destruction of human identity and culture, before the event of physical death itself – or as Jacques Lacan would call it, ‘symbolic’ before ‘actual’ death, the death of the self before physical death. Lawrence Langer uses the phrase ‘deathlife’ to name the same phenomenon, of ‘dying while one is living’ (Langer 2021, 13). Not unlike the melancholic prince, Levi attempts the impossible of testifying to his own demise. He deploys Hamlet to record his fall into a place beyond humanity and beyond culture – even beyond language. It is, to adopt the words of Jean Améry, an act of both resignation and revolt: resignation to silence, and a determined revolt against oblivion, by testifying to it. It is an astonishing moment.

RA

Examples are everywhere in SQ, but this is arguably the most striking instance of how an elevated style and references taken from literary tradition clash continuously with plurilingualism in Levi’s writing; abstract concepts with harsh materiality; ‘destiny’ with ‘Kraut’. In this case, ‘cavoli e rape’ is repeated in four different languages. The harsh sound of these words in German, Hungarian, French, and Italian clashes with the philosophical reasoning of the vertiginous previous lines. Language underscores the tragic irony of the entire sequence (a tragic irony that was present even in Dante’s original treatment of Ulysses’ story, in his Inferno 26).

FB

In his Il m’appelait Pikolo, published 20 years after Levi’s death, Samuel’s recollection of his encounter and conversation with Levi differs conspicuously. Samuel reports, for instance, how he saw the sea for the first time only after the war. Samuel’s book also features correspondence between the two fellow inmates in which they hint at their different memories.

FB

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

This spot in the second edition of SQ (1958) is one of the few from which Levi actually removed words appearing in the 1947 edition. He removed ‘Sua madre è finita a Birkenau’, a sentence implying that Jean’s mother did not survive her deportation. In fact, she did survive.

JD

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

As Levi writes in the preface to the theatrical adaptation of SQ - produced in collaboration with Pietro Alberto Marché - all those imprisoned in the Lager hoped to find an attentive audience: ‘speravamo non di vivere e raccontare, ma di vivere per raccontare. È il sogno dei reduci di tutti i tempi, e del forte e del vile, del poeta e del semplice, di Ulisse e del Ruzante’ (OC I, 1195). In this chapter, therefore, Ulysses’s canto does not simply identify the monologue of Dante’s Ulysses, which Levi painfully pieces together from memory and translates for Pikolo; it also signifies the song of the hero who has survived his ordeal and is eager to tell his story to anyone who is willing to listen. Levi drew inspiration for his radio and theatre adaptations of SQ from an earlier, independent radio program on Canadian national radio. Levi praises this experiment for its ability to capture the lack of communication, aggravated by the confusion of languages, that had been a central device in the Lager’s machine of dehumanisation and annihilation. As Levi reports, the Canadian authors explained their decision not to translate the bits of dialogues in different languages to convey the author’s experience, ‘perché questo isolamento è la parte fondamentale della sua sofferenza, e la sofferenza, sua e di tutti i prigionieri, scaturiva dal proposito deliberato di espellerli dalla comunità umana, di cancellare la loro identità, di ridurli da uomini a cose’ (OC I, 1196). Tellingly, the moment of catharsis between Levi and Pikolo is made possible by the act of translation, the only instrument capable of redeeming the Babelic confusion of languages.

A willingness to listen, however, is the key precondition for successful communication and a veritable ‘flaw of form’ in the universe of the Lager, especially when this attitude is displayed by someone (like Pikolo) who enjoys a superior position in the camp’s hierarchy. Levi’s gratuitous election to be Pikolo’s travelling companion in the journey to the kitchen, and Pikolo’s openness to listen, may be fittingly celebrated through a subversive reinterpretation of Ulysses’s last words, ‘come altrui piacque’. Could this be part of the unspoken realisation that is capable of reshaping, albeit only contingently, Levi’s own understanding of their condition in the Lager?

In two contiguous short stories from Lilít e altri racconti, Levi further elaborates on the ethical imperative to listen that is at the heart of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. In these stories, I argue, Levi reworks the same narrative situation and Dantean subtext from ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, but inverts the characters’ roles and their symbolic movement outside the ‘infernal’ hole (see also the story ‘Capaneo’).

In ‘Lilít’, a heavy downpour of rain makes it impossible for prisoners to work and compels them to find shelter and temporary rest. Levi slides into a large pipe. From the other side of the pipe, another inmate known as Tischler enters. Tischler spends this recreational time sharing with Levi the story of Lilít. According to some Kabbalistic interpretations of the Bible, Lilít was Adam’s first wife. For rebelling against both Adam and God, she was turned into a devil and eventually became God’s mistress. Their union continues today and is the cause of evil and suffering in the world. Tischler teases Levi for not knowing this story and jokes about Levi being an Epicurean like all other Westerner Jews. The use of the label ‘Epicurean’ to define the ‘miscredenti’, I suggest, gestures to the subtext of Dante’s Inferno 10, where the sin of heresy is named precisely as Epicurus’s sin. Those punished for this sin are condemned to burn in a sarcophagus. Each sarcophagus houses several souls who, like Levi and Tischler, must share the same narrow space, but, crucially, are uninterested in communicating with each other. (Indeed some of Tischler’s phrasing echoes Dante: e.g. verrà un potente… farà morire Lilít’, and cf. Inf. 1.101-02.) This Dantean reminiscence is not the only element that links ‘Lilít’ to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Both stories recount a successful act of communication and storytelling in the Lager. But there are two significant inversions: this time, the protagonists move inside a hollow space and Levi is the one who plays the part of the attentive listener. This shift, I believe, is signalled in the text by Tischler’s injunction: ‘perché oggi la mia parte è di raccontare e di credere: l’incredulo oggi sei tu’ (OC II, 252; emphasis added). Tischler’s words seem to echo Levi’s thoughts in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ that ‘Se Jean è intelligente capirà. Capirà: oggi mi sento da tanto’. That Tischler plays the part that had been Levi’s in his dialogue with Pikolo is further confirmed by the former’s gesture of sharing an apple with Levi, before telling his story, as a way to celebrate their common birthday. This act amounted to blasphemy in the Lager, where everyone used every means to survive, even stealing food from other inmates. In ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, Levi tells us that, like Tischler, he would be willing to give up his daily ration of food in exchange for being able to remember Dante’s text correctly and share it with Pikolo: ‘Darei la zuppa di oggi per saper saldare “non ne avevo alcuna” col finale’. Like Pikolo, and unlike Dante’s Epicureans, Levi pays attention to Tischler’s story and, by retelling it, saves it from annihilation.

In ‘Un discepolo’, Levi is back in the underground tank and, as with Pikolo, he is trying to translate to another Häftling, Bandi, the text of a letter from his family that had been smuggled into the camp by an Italian worker. The episode is almost identical to the one narrated in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Once again, moreover, Levi emphasises his listener’s attention: ‘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’ (OC II, 258; emphasis added). Bandi too shares food with Levi. Hence, the act of sharing/giving up food becomes a physical marker of their desire to share their lives through human communication and let themselves be nurtured by it.

For Levi, the real protagonists of these exceptional acts of communication in the Lager are not the messengers but the listeners. Those, in other words, who were able to resist the continuous and exhausting process of reification enforced by the camp and could muster enough human empathy and curiosity to listen con attenzione.

FG

Interlinguistic mutuality. Shuttling between recitation of Dante’s text in the Italian original and its hurried and utilitarian French prose version, the lesson Primo imparts to Jean is deeply interlinguistic. The exchange between Jean and Primo is also mutual, at the very basic level of collaboration that any linguistic exchange requires. In addition, Jean is not a passive learner. He takes part in the process of communication, which unfolds in a living dialogue and requires that dialogue to exist. The first words of Italian that Jean picks up and adopts emerge from the living context of a spoken exchange, by the ‘natural’ and immediate imitation of two native speakers. The syllabification of the initial vocabulary Jean apprehends (“zup-pa, cam-po, ac-qua”) from those exchanged between Primo and another prisoner from Rome, Limentani, is not a marker of alienness but of co-participation. More importantly, the learning process is from the start accompanied by a smile, a pre-linguistic sign of mutual understanding.

Levi’s insistence on the collaborative work that undergirds the acts of interlinguistic communication taking place in the episode resonates with Walter Benjamin’s notion that translation is the cultural practice which best captures the intrinsic drive of all languages to communicate through their apparent mutual exclusiveness: ‘All suprahistorical kinship between languages consists in this: in every one of them as a whole, one and the same thing is meant […]. Whereas all individual elements of foreign languages - words, sentences, associations - are mutually exclusive, these languages supplement one another in their intentions’ (‘The Translator’s Task’, 156). The experience of shared humanity, which Primo and Jean achieve within the Babel of the Lager, and notwithstanding its violence, relies on the same underlying philosophy of language as Benjamin’s.

SM

Interlinguistic necessity. Although containing the record of a ‘lesson’ on Dante’s Inferno 26, the central experience recounted in this chapter is set in motion by linguistic rather than literary elements. Jean desires to learn a new language, Italian, and Primo’s teaching accordingly combines his intermittent recitation of Dante’s text in the original language with a hesitant French commentary on, often a paraphrase of, salient elements in it. At its core, thus, the chapter relates an attempt at interlinguistic mediation. The text’s emphasis on interlinguistic communication is projected against the backdrop of the Lager’s Babel-like dehumanising confusion of languages that Levi explored in other texts (SQ, I sommersi e i salvati). As such, the circumstances of the episode are exceptional.

Jean is an exceptional, and exceptionally positive, character in the universe of the book. He speaks and thinks in two languages: most importantly, he is native in both (‘Jean parlava correntemente francese e tedesco’). As established on the chance encounter with an SS, Rudi the Blockführer, bilingual utterances are for him the norm: ‘È indifferente, può pensare in entrambe le lingue’. The role he plays in the structure of the concentration camp, facilitated by the distinction of his bilingualism, however, is not what is at stake in the episode per se. While Jean certainly has acquired a linguistic capital of sorts, Levi’s narrative insists on what he decides to share of that privilege. His multilingualism is not associated with exclusionary practices, but with the work of intermediation it brings about and the community of intents it creates. The language learning situation is presented as a space in which the power dynamics of the Lager’s languages are suspended and ultimately refused.

SM

In the previous chapter, ‘Esame di chimica’, Primo has been admitted, through a kind of perverse and humiliating ‘chemistry examination’ carried out by Nazi official Herr Doktor Pannwitz, to a so-called ‘Chemical Kommando’. This Kommando will work, notionally, in a laboratory of the Buna-Werke industrial rubber plant, under construction by IG Farben next to the Monowitz-Auschwitz III concentration camp (and other POW and labour camps). The ‘cistern’ here is not a laboratory setting, but is probably a work site within the Buna complex.

Monowitz was the largest of the extensive network of so-called satellite- or sub-camps beyond Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau. For more information on Monowitz, see the Subcamps of Auschwitz project.

RG

The system of rationing reached its extreme in the Nazi Lager. Nonetheless, Levi and many of his companions had already experienced the dilemmas of provisioning in the context of war and the violent repression enacted by the Salò Republic. This situation of scarcity and black market profiteering proved acute in the Valle d’Aosta to which Levi and his family had fled, along with many draft evaders and foreign Jews from the Balkans. When Levi joined his partisan comrades in the Col de Joux, they likewise experienced the challenges all partisans faced: how to safely secure supplies without alienating the local population or risking capture.

PB

Food is a fundamental aspect of war and captivity narratives. Cabbage and turnips become emblems of misery in Günter Grass’s Der Butt (The Flounder), Ernst Jünger’s In Stahlgewittern (In Storms of Steel), and Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front). In Levi, these vegetables symbolise the bleak reality of the Lager that makes any daydreaming futile.

GC

This verse is not from Inferno 26 but from Inferno 3, the canto of ‘lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’intrate’ and of ‘diverse lingue, orribili favelle, parole di dolore, accenti d’ira’. Both Inferno 3 as a whole, and this line in particular, could have served Levi well to describe his internment in Auschwitz (a land of despair, a Babel of languages, sorrowful words, angry imprecations). Here, however, Levi does not want to refer to the Dante of Inferno 3, the poet whose words could possibly be read as a direct reminder of the world of the camp, but to the Dante of Inferno 26, whose lines offer a revelatory insight into Levi’s (and the other inmates’) existence and destiny.

VG

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

Possibly the first time that Levi refers to the fundamental difference between prose and poetry and a certain natural superiority of poetic expression (see ‘Introduction’ to his poetry collection Ad ora incerta).

VG

Dante is one of Primo Levi’s most important cultural touchstones. His use of the Commedia, across multiple works, reflects a sophisticated and intimate reading of the poem. It may come as some surprise that Dante does not appear in Levi’s 1981 literary anthology, La ricerca delle radici, which provides a highly eclectic collection of some of his preferred authors and texts, from Homer to Darwin and Rabelais to Celan. However, Levi justifies this omission on account of the medieval writer’s universal importance: Dante, Levi states in an interview from the same year, is ‘part of any reader’s heritage’.

Allusions to Dante have been identified in Levi’s fiction, essays and poetry. However, it is here in SQ that we witness his most sustained engagement with the Commedia. The most explicit and celebrated use of the poem comes in the present chapter, ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, where Levi uses the famous Ulysses episode from Inferno 26 to teach some Italian to his friend and fellow inmate Jean, and skilfully incorporates into his text suggestive fragments of Dante’s own poem. The Ulysses canto, read in the secularised, Romantic tradition of Croce and De Sanctis, resonates powerfully in the context of Auschwitz and becomes a parable of human courage and self-emancipation. In particular, the Greek hero’s rousing words to his crew and invocation of their very humanity (‘Considerate la vostra semenza…’) resonate viscerally in the dehumanising world of the camp. The recollection of Ulysses sailing beyond the pillars of Hercules into the forbidden sea allows Levi momentarily to imagine breaking beyond the confines of the infernal Lager. The chapter ends, however, with the climactic words of Dante’s canto, describing the sea closing over Ulysses’ boat and the curtailment of his doomed journey, as Levi and Jean’s momentary taste of freedom ceases, and they must again confront the horror and banal misery of the camp. The omnipotent God of Dante’s tale of Ulysses, who punishes the voyager’s doomed attempt to reach Mount Purgatory without divine sanction, implicitly becomes here the Nazi regime that confines him.

In ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, Dante offers Levi a fleeting antidote to the horrors of Auschwitz. Elsewhere in the testimony, however, Levi draws on Dante as a kindred author of the infernal, adapting imagery from the medieval poet’s first cantica in describing his experience of an all-too-real Hell. In the book’s second chapter, Levi explicitly designates his new surroundings as a modern Inferno (‘Questo è l’inferno. Oggi ai nostri giorni, l’inferno deve essere così’). Thereafter, Levi often uses deictic expressions (‘sul fondo’, ‘lassù’, ‘laggiù’), some with Dantean resonance, that construct his experience of the camp as a kind of infernal descent. More specific narrative, topographical and structural echoes appear, too. Nazi guards are compared, both directly and more implicitly, to devils and guardian figures in Dante’s Hell. Different regions of Dante’s Hell (Antinferno, Limbo, Malebolge) are invoked in describing the different parts of the camp. Levi also seems to draw on the example of Dante’s Inferno as a model of confronting the negative limits of language and verbal communication. The topos of inexpressibility that features in the closing cantos of the Inferno also appears in SQ. Both writers imagine the existence of a uniquely ‘harsh’ language (‘rime aspre e chiocce’ | ‘un nuovo linguaggio aspro’) that might do justice to the horrors of their infernal experiences, but which they do not possess. However, while Levi may take inspiration from Dante in numerous ways, there is a powerful and bleak irony at stake when Levi establishes parallels between the medieval poet’s imagined account of a medieval Christian hell, founded upon an infallible notion of divine justice, and his own experience of the historical hell of Auschwitz, a place of the most extreme and barbarous injustice and racialised hate.

Levi’s use of Dante is all the more striking in light of the ways in which the Italian Fascist regime had appropriated and frequently distorted Dante and his poetry in the years prior to his deportation. In the Risorgimento and in liberal Italy, Dante had been endlessly appropriated as a kind of symbol and embodiment of the new nation. Under Fascism, however, there had emerged an even more heavily and crudely instrumentalised cult of Dante. The poet was invoked not only as a source of fervent cultural pride, but as a prophet of the fascist state and of Mussolini. He was given a central place in fascist schooling and was used in irredentist and expansionist campaigns, in setting out highly restrictive language policy, as a model of fascist virility, and on account of his imperial associations. In the late 1930s, passages from the Commedia even appeared on the cover of the magazine La difesa della razza, with Dante appropriated to support the regime’s later politics of racial purity and antisemitism. It is thus all the more striking that Levi makes such imaginative and deft use of Dante across his works. He found in Dante, a poet so freighted with nationalistic interpretations during the period in question, a powerful, personal and highly adaptable resource of language, meaning, and understanding.

TK

Levi and Jean’s fleeting Dantean reprieve is abruptly halted by the return to the ‘sordid, ragged crowd of the soup queue’. Standing in contrast with Dante’s majestic verses and Ulysses’ voyage of discovery is the cramped enclosure of the queue and the banality of the description of the day’s cabbage-and-turnip soup. But the contrast is also between Levi’s own Italian language and sense of cultural identity and the Babelic experience of the Lager. Linguistic chaos is a key component of Levi’s experience and subsequent description of the camp, and one to which he was unusually attentive. Early on in his testimony (and once again, Dante is an important model here), Levi designates the camp a ‘perpetua Babele’. He evokes the linguistic confusion of the camp by including in his account unfamiliar tongues. We see this here in the soup queue but also, for example, in his recollection of the distribution of bread (‘la distribuzione del pane, del pane-Brot-Broit-chleb-pain-lechem-kenyer’) and in his description of the industrial tower in the camp (‘i suoi mattoni sono stati chiamati Ziegel, briques, tegula, cegli, kamenny, bricks, teglak’). Linguistic chaos contributes acutely to the condition of extreme isolation associated with the Lager.

Levi’s most sustained meditation on language in Auschwitz comes in the essay ‘Comunicare’, found in the 1986 collection I sommersi e i salvati. Here he reflects not only upon the extreme linguistic isolation of the camp and the psychological damage this often wrought, but also upon the degradation of language he witnessed. Violence and brute force would often replace linguistic exchange as the ‘communicative’ medium between individuals. Levi describes how, for those who did not speak German, words were used not on account of their referential function but as blunt aural instruments that could elicit the desired response from the receiver. The linguistic interaction between guards and prisoners became more reminiscent of that between humans and working animals than that between human beings existing on the same level.

TK

Similarly in the story ‘Lilít’, Levi describes as ‘sweet’ and ‘ferocious’ his chance encounter in the Lager with a woman: ‘A quel tempo capitava di rado di vedere una donna da vicino, ed era un’esperienza dolce e feroce, da cui si usciva affranti’ (OC II, 251). Tellingly, the story also recounts a rare moment of human warmth and respite from work during which Levi bonded with a fellow prisoner, Tischler, thanks to the power of narrative - Tischler told him the story of Lilìt.

EL

This recalls Giuseppe Ungaretti’s famous poem ‘Il porto sepolto’ (‘The Buried Port’). In the same way that Levi momentarily escaped from the Lager thanks to Dante’s verses, in ‘Il porto sepolto’, poetry allowed Ungaretti to evade the trenches of the Great War where he was fighting. However, Levi here seems to use this reference to object to Ungaretti’s poetics of the fragment, as well as to the role of ‘vates-poet’, able to unveil meanings otherwise hidden to common people. The fragments from Dante that Levi manages to share with Pikolo do not communicate an ‘inexhaustible secret’, but rather reveal the impossible struggle to find poetry in the Lager.

Il porto sepolto

Mariano il 29 giugno 1916

Vi arriva il poeta

e poi torna alla luce con i suoi canti

e li disperde

Di questa poesia

mi resta

quel nulla

d’inesauribile segreto

EL

The ‘hole in the memory’ that swallows up Dante’s verses and prevents Levi from sharing them with Pikolo is reminiscent of both the underground tank described at the beginning of the chapter, and the vast crater that is Dante’s hell. Visually these ‘holes’, be they real or metaphorical, are the negative cast of the mountains mentioned later in the chapter: Levi’s beloved Alps, and Ulysses’ Mount Purgatory - these, instead, bearers of positive meanings, as they respectively represent home and human ambition. (Levi’s very last newspaper article was given the title ‘Il buco nero di Auschwitz’, OC II, 1662-65.)

EL

Ulysses can be considered as an alter ego of Levi in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ and other passages of the writer’s works. By considering the nature of the link between the author and the classical hero, we can also clarify the reasons behind Levi’s choice of presenting to Pikolo the core episode of canto 26 of Dante’s Inferno. Levi himself connects his experience to that of Ulysses in a 1973 interview, where he states: ‘[M]i ero reso conto che proprio il canto di Ulisse era abbastanza importante, perché è un’evasione anche quella: cioè ero evaso raccontando di un’altra evasione. Questo Ulisse che si strappa dalla vita quotidiana per fare un viaggio che non ha ritorno: mi sembrava che avesse una vaga analogia con la [mia realtà]’ (OC III, 988).

First, Levi underlines the parallel between his condition of deportee and that of Ulysses, driven by his nature and fate (‘fortuna’?) to embark on a journey without return. On a smaller scale, in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ we also find one of the few physical movements in SQ – Primo and Jean’s trip to collect the soup. The chapter also represents a textual journey, where, while reading about Primo translating and interpreting Dante’s canto for Jean, we follow the path towards knowledge of the two characters. Finally, we can read it as a sentimental journey: the chapter is a nostos, a (temporary) memorial homecoming of the two protagonists to their homes and pre-Auschwitz lives. In the chapter, there is a constant superimposition of the experience and memory of Dante’s Ulysses with those of Levi (and Pikolo). Far from his home and family, Dante’s character sees Mount Purgatory in the distance before the shipwreck; this episode triggers in Levi the memory of the Piedmontese Alps he used to see on the horizon while going back home by train: ‘E le montagne, quando si vedono di lontano…le montagne…oh Pikolo, Pikolo, di’ qualcosa, parla, non lasciarmi pensare alle mie montagne, che comparivano nel bruno della sera quando tornavo in treno da Milano a Torino!’

When we consider the presence of Ulysses in Levi’s works, we should not only think of the Commedia. We must consider Homer’s Ulysses too, a character appreciated by Levi since his high-school years and often remembered in his writings and interviews. If we analyse Levi’s quotes from the Odyssey, we can find further points of contact emerging between Levi and his alter ego. We can start with the episode of Ulysses’ deception of Polyphemus, quoted explicitly in the chapter ‘L’ultimo’ in SQ. Here Levi narrates that as he was leaving the shower, ‘un fiduciario del Block si installa sulla porta, e tasta come Polifemo chi esce per sentire se è bagnato’. Primo and Alberto manage to trick the guard and even gain a generous amount of bread from their kombinacja. The common ground between the Greek hero and Levi are versatility and resourcefulness, the most famous traits of Homer’s Ulysses.

Levi considered this episode of the Odyssey crucial and included it also in his auto-anthology La ricerca delle radici with the title ‘Un uomo da nulla’. First of all, the physical description of Ulysses in the passage quoted in La ricerca delle radici – the hero is described as ‘un uomo da nulla, slombato, piccino’ – recalls Levi’s aspect in SQ. More importantly, the whole passage quoted by Levi revolves around the double name and identity of Ulysses. Introducing the excerpt, the writer notices that, while talking to Polyphemus, Ulysses ‘è fiero del suo nome, che finora aveva taciuto’. The name Nobody, chosen by Ulysses to fool the cyclops, recalls the loss of individual identity and the attribution of a new name (the number tattooed on the forearm) to Auschwitz prisoners.

In this sense, Ulysses can be seen not only as an alter ego of Levi, but also as an allegory of the Jews detained in Lagers. This is true also for some aspects of Dante’s Ulysses, as we can read in Levi’s comment to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ in the notes to the school edition of SQ: ‘In quell’istante, all’autore pare di intravvedere una conturbante analogia fra il naufragio di Ulisse e il destino dei prigionieri: l’uno e gli altri sono stati paradossalmente “puniti”’. In his narration of Ulysses’ shipwreck, Dante tells us that everyone on the boat is punished and dies. If we go back to consider the story of Homer’s Ulysses instead, the character could instead be an example of being ‘saved’. Having wandered for ten years, he was finally able to return to Ithaca, just as Levi managed to go back to Turin. Ulysses’ fellows represent instead the ‘drowned’, just like the majority of the prisoners detained in Levi’s barrack.

A final, crucial shared aspect linking Levi to Homer’s Ulysses is the narrative ability and the urge to relate his misadventures to others. The ethical need to share with others the trauma of Auschwitz is strong in Levi already during his detention and impelled him to write SQ. In the 1976 Appendix to the book, he remembers that ‘era talmente forte in noi il bisogno di raccontare, che il libro avevo incominciato a scriverlo là’ (OC I, 281). Levi will reconsider his previous accounts of the Lager from a new perspective in the 1970s. On several occasions, he compares the urge to communicate his experience of the concentration camp to Ulysses’ narration of his decade-long wanderings at the court of Alcinous. In I sommersi e i salvati, Levi adopts this comparison as the opening of the chapter ‘Stereotipi’, writing: ‘[È] bello sedere al caldo, davanti al cibo ed al vino, e ricordare a sé ed agli altri la fatica, il freddo e la fame: così subito cede all’urgenza del raccontare, davanti alla mensa imbandita, Ulisse alla corte del re dei Feaci’. Ulysses is seen here as a prototypical model of the oral narrator and the founder of the genre of the memorial accounts of the survivor (‘reduce’) of traumatic events. Thus, an alter ego not only of Levi as a character but also of Levi as writer.

MM

The causative connector in inverted commas aims at highlighting the perverted logic regulating life in the Lager. Levi repeatedly noticed this disturbing lack of consequentiality, which prevented the prisoners from deducing from observation what the expected behaviour was, which in turn translated into a constant state of insecurity and danger: ‘ogni congettura è arbitraria ed esattamente priva di ogni fondamento reale’. Pikolo’s privileged condition follows another ‘fierce law’ of the Lager: ‘a chi ha, sarà dato; a chi non ha, a quello sarà tolto’.

EL

In this sentence we are encountering a barter of survival, biological survival versus the survival of memory. What matters most in this exceptional moment, a state of exception within the state of exception of the Lager, is not keeping one’s body alive but restoring life to a handful of verses. Can literature be against survival?

MAM

Memories of childhood always send a pang through the heart. Not because they are sad. Perhaps they are, but the pang can be deeper when they are good, for they tell us of what is utterly lost and are thus redolent of our relentless passage through time, projected as we are towards death with, so it seems, an increasing rapidity as we get older. Levi passes quickly over this moment of thought of his infancy. But it sets the tone for ‘Il canto di Ulisse’: the tone of something utterly lost and yet completely present. The childhood beach with its peculiar smell of paint and tar is wholly past and yet it is Levi, here, now. In this moment it is everything he is. Just so, the canto is utterly gone, belonging to a different life, the life Levi had before Auschwitz, and yet is here, now, making him this particular individual man with this burden of identity. He is freighted with the memory of the beach as he is with the memory of those lines from Dante.

When I was a child, I was sometimes taken in the summer in my parents’ car to one of the few sandy beaches near to where I grew up. The car park was behind the dunes and was itself a vast expanse of coarse grass worn flat and of impacted sand. The smell of that beach was the smell of the grass and sand mingled with that of the hot interior of the car, leather and metal warmed through, the bench seat offering to my child’s body a kind of place of perfect rest, long enough for me to stretch out on it to warm myself after the coldness of the sea. For me, leather and metal are what paint and tar were to Levi: the odours of these at the beach, suffused with the smell of hot sand.

I cannot think of those odours and all they bring back to me of my childhood without pain, intense but somehow delicious in its melancholy. This is all lost but it is mine and no-one else’s, giving me an acute sense of my individuality. I grasp that Levi had the same sense in remembering that smell of paint and tar from his childhood, even in this dark place. This is why he needs to mention it; this is why he passes over it so rapidly. It is everything and nothing; it is painful and sweetly delicious. This experience of the memory of the beach, surging up out of the nowhere of the camp, is at one with the eruption in Levi’s mind of the canto from Dante. Not everyone can read Dante. But everyone knows of these odours of childhood. Levi is saying: somewhere in this nightmare, in this hell created by some human beings to torture other human beings, there is someone else who, perhaps deprived of culture and learning, ill-educated and uninterested in books, nonetheless has a feeling for his or her childhood as I do for mine. I move from that to Dante; this other person will not. No matter. What binds me to that other, even this side of good and evil where theft is honoured and cheating praised, in this world of remorseless self-concern for the sake of survival, is that he or she too will smell the tar and paint, or some other material, and then be joined again to a moment of childhood. There is a common fellowship after all, a fellowship forged by the fact that that other unknown person and I are both returned to our childhood in some fleeting moment that is saturated in an odour.

Levi then tries to express this in turning to Pikolo and grasping after those fragments from Dante in order to get him to understand these words of a – for Pikolo – foreign language and feel the depth of Levi’s response to Dante. But it is the beach that is at the back of that: the Dante stands proxy for a more universal feeling – that feeling that we can have, says Levi, even here, perhaps especially here, for our lost childhood.

CH

Part of the concentration camp uniform, the cap is the first, grotesque piece of clothing that Levi spots upon arrival in Auschwitz, on the ‘strani individui’ (the prisoners already assimilated to the camp system) whose condition prefigures the fate of the newly arrived inmates: ‘In capo avevano un buffo berrettino, ed erano vestiti di una lunga palandrana a righe, che anche di notte e di lontano si indovinava sudicia e stracciata […]. Questa era la metamorfosi che ci attendeva’. Within the camp, prisoners have to quickly remove their caps in front of the Nazis as part of a quasi-military routine: ‘Il regolamento del Lager prescriveva di mettersi sull’attenti e di scoprirsi il capo’. (The Kapo of the Chemical Kommando shows the same deference in front of the official testing Levi’s ability as a chemist: ‘Alex bussa rispettosamente, si cava il berretto’; ‘C’è solo il Doktor Pannwitz, Alex, col berretto in mano, gli parla a mezza voce’.)

This action, featuring for the first time in the present chapter and then as a recurring automatism throughout SQ (see ‘giù i berretti di scatto davanti alle SS’), assumes new meaning in the final chapter of the book, ‘Storia di dieci giorni’, where Charles’ conscious decision to take off his cap as a sign of mourning of the death of fellow prisoner Sómogyi attests to a resurgence of human habits. In the same chapter, Levi refers to him as ‘l’uomo Charles’, and he himself regrets not having a cap to tip: ‘Charles si tolse il berretto. A me dispiacque di non avere il berretto’. The same words mark the narrative continuity between SQ and Levi’s second book. At the beginning of La tregua, a specification reinforces the gravity of Charles’ gesture, marking the transition from the death hovering above the camp to the future life of the prisoners after liberation: ‘Charles si tolse il berretto, a salutare i vivi e i morti’.

GM

Levi’s encounter with Ulysses in Auschwitz centres around his painful yet exhilarating struggle to reconstruct Dante’s text from memory. But when Levi talks of his hope that, despite his inadequate rendering, Pikolo ‘got the message’, he is pointing at something other than pure philology. Uttered in the death camp, Dante’s words shine through the dust of school commentary. This estrangement effect triggers a kind of epiphany: ‘ha sentito che lo riguarda, che riguarda tutti gli uomini in travaglio, e noi in specie; e che riguarda noi due, che osiamo ragionare di queste cose con le stanghe della zuppa sulle spalle’. The momentary sense of liberation Levi derives from owning and sharing Dante’s sublime language has been interpreted as a celebration of humanist values that however fails to recognise the way in which these values are entangled with the very structures of domination that created the Lager (Druker 2004). Yet Levi never provides a univocal interpretation of ‘the message’ of Ulysses’ story. In fact, the episode has had a ‘bifurcated’ critical reception and its meaning has been contested since the Middle Ages (Barolini 2018). Moreover, the figure of Dante in general and his figuration of Ulysses in particular became central to Fascism’s nationalist cultural programme, something Levi could hardly have missed.

As with other protagonists of the Inferno, the issue has been how to reconcile Ulysses’ heroic stature as a character with the fact that he is ultimately condemned as an unrepentant sinner. While the prevalent opinion among early commentators of the Commedia was that Ulysses was a transgressor, there were some who presented him as an admirable figure. Cristoforo Landino calls Ulysses’ speech ‘honest and honourable’. Bernardino Daniello notes that the ancient myth of the ne plus ultra was ‘a false and futile belief’. On the other hand, not all modern critics praise Ulysses’ daring. John Ruskin warily observes that humans are yet to learn the ‘danger of this novelty of wisdom’. Still, it is in the modern period that a more positive view of Ulysses’ intellectual hubris starts to gain traction.

The frontispiece to Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) is often cited as the symbolic watershed between medieval deference to traditional beliefs and the modern project of exploration and innovation. This frontispiece depicts a ship which is about to pass through the pillars of Hercules, just like Dante imagined Ulysses and his crew dared to do. Another ship, near the horizon, is also approaching. Below the depiction of the ships, a Latin motto, taken from the Vulgate, recites: ‘Many shall pass through and knowledge shall be increased’. There is no indication of shipwreck; on the contrary, the ships move confidently ahead in full sail. The world has entered a new era and the ancient prohibition has become void: ‘these times may justly bear in their word […] plus ultra, in precedence of the ancient non ultra’ (Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605)).

To Horkheimer and Adorno, Bacon is the ‘herald’ of the modern belief that ‘knowledge, which is power, knows no limits’ – a principle that, taken to its extreme logical conclusion, leads to the gates of Auschwitz. Had Ulysses gone under, as Dante decreed, the world would have been a better place. However, the postmodern critique of rationalism disregards another, parallel line that connects Enlightenment conceptions of the human to emancipatory discourses in both politics and aesthetics. The revolutionary and Romantic era gave us many versions of the self-sacrificing heroes of knowledge, striving for the emancipation of humankind. Shelley’s Prometheus ‘gave men speech, and speech created thought | Which is the measure of the universe. | And Science struck the thrones of earth and heaven | […] for which he hangs | Withering in destined pain’ (Prometheus Unbound). As Dante does with the Homeric story, Shelley rewrites and extends a classical myth in a way that challenges the idea that knowledge is sinful or transgressive. In the preface to Prometheus Unbound, Shelley declares he would ‘rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon than go to Heaven with Paley [eighteenth-century theologian] and Malthus’. Shelley also names Dante as one of the stylistic predecessors to his own use of imagery ‘drawn from the operations of the human mind’. In his readings of the Commedia, Shelley was particularly attracted to similes that illuminate ways of seeing and knowing. But a shadow of Dante’s ambivalence lingers in Shelley’s suggestion that his Prometheus is similar to Milton’s Satan, minus the ‘taints of ambition […] and personal aggrandisement’.

From his long English exile, the Italian revolutionary and nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini contributed to making Dante into a national icon at the service of the Italian Risorgimento. In The Duties of Man, he defines humans as ‘creatures capable of rational, social, and intellectual progress’, warning his readers that ‘you descend to the level of brutes whenever you suppress, or allow to be suppressed any of the faculties that constitute human nature either in yourself or others’ (Mazzini 1892, 45). ‘Brutes’ (‘bruti’) is Dante’s term, and the passage as a whole reads like an extended paraphrase of Ulysses’ ‘orazion picciola’, whose rhetoric Mazzini puts to work here in support of ‘the emancipation of Woman [and] of the working man’ (146).

Mazzini’s duties of man were recast into the Fascist doctrine of the primacy of the state over the individual. The canto of Ulysses was similarly enlisted to the cult of Italian exceptionalism and imperial conquest. Responding to a survey to establish which was the most popular passage of the Commedia, Mussolini apparently nominated the line ‘de’ remi facemmo ali al folle volo’. The quotation struck some as scarily apposite. In the clandestine paper ‘Il Ribelle’ of 31 October 1944, the anti-fascist priest don Giacomo Vender, writing under the pseudonym Sancio Empörer, used the same verse to expose il Duce’s seductive lies: ‘Fascism’s great accomplishment has been to dress its sick [‘folle’] idea of life, humanity, nation and religion in seductive attitudes. [Everything] was made into a wing to hurl ourselves […] beyond the pillars of Hercules…de’ remi facemmo ali al folle volo’.

Levi leaves out the line altogether. His act of subversion is even more radical: as the Resistance fighters, he feels that Dante’s text is ‘about us’, but the role he chooses for himself is not that of the acquiescent victim, one of Ulysses’ anonymous crew. He writes himself and his fellow prisoner as the heroic, tragic protagonists of Ulysses’ ‘shipwreck with spectator’ (Blumberg). Far from being complicit with the master narrative of Fascism, Levi invokes Dante in the death camp to liberate and reclaim his words and restore to them all the force of their moral questioning.

RMuc

Proper names. This Levi was also named in the chapters ‘Il viaggio’ and ‘Sul fondo’.

RG

Proper names. Both the other mentions of Levi’s first name in the book come in the final chapter, ‘Storia di dieci giorni’. All three, strangely, are spoken by French companions.

RG

Proper names. Alex was a key protagonist/antagonist in the previous chapter, ‘L’esame di chimica’.

RG

Levi returned on a handful of occasions elsewhere in his work to Dante’s Ulysses, for example in another text written at the same time in 1946, the poem ‘Ostjuden’ (‘Padri nostri di questa terra, | Mercanti di molteplice ingegno, | Savi arguti dalla molta prole | Che Dio seminò per il mondo | Come nei solchi Ulisse folle il sale’ (OC II, 690)).

In fact, he was as much, if not more drawn to the Homeric figure of Odysseus, regularly evoking his intelligence, his powers of narration and speech, and of friendship. He includes a proud speech by Odysseus in his anthology of formative books, La ricercar delle radici (OC II, 27-29).

Another poem, ‘Patrigia’ (1981), mentions Ulisse as a nom de guerre of an anti-Fascist Resistance partisan (‘Dove siete, partigia di tutte le valli, | Tarzan, Riccio, Sparviero, Saetta, Ulisse?’, OC II, 722).

RG

Levi wrote this chapter in early 1946, apparently during a brief 45-minute lunch break at the Montecatini chemical plant at Avigliana, outside Turin, where he was then working (e.g. OC I, 1469). It is interesting to note that the chapter tells the story of another 'lunch break', in another chemical--industrial plant, an unimaginably darker, distant workplace.

RG

Among many other layers to this chapter and its revelations, the ‘qualcosa di piú’ is also a reference to poetry as a means to escape Auschwitz. Poetry itself becomes the means to resist the process of bestialisation and reification.

MJ

This is a powerful moment of connection between Ulisse and Primo Levi, both in Hell for having followed their belief: Ulysses for his desire for knowledge, Levi for his rebellion against the RSI and the German occupiers. For more on this, see Giovanni Pietro Vitali’s essay, ‘Le ultime lettere di Primo Levi e i suoi compagni ad ogni passo verso Auschwitz’ (in Garullo, Rigo, Toppan 2020, 209-69).

MJ

Jean Samuel’s memories of this episode are described in Il m’appelait Pikolo, pp. 39-40. Consider, for example, this sentence: ‘Encore maintenant je m’interroge sur ce mystère de la mémoire: nous avons eu tous deux le sentiment d’une rencontre cruciale, inoubliable, mais elle ne se fondait pas sur les mêmes gestes, les mêmes paroles, les mêmes sensations’ (Samuel, Dreyfus 2007, 40).

MJ

Despite this and other gaps in his recall, Levi actually succeeds in reconstructing just under half of Dante’s narrative of the encounter with Ulysses in Inferno 26, wholly or almost wholly recalling (a notable) 26 out of 58 verses (24 complete verses, two partial) - and with remarkable accuracy. Jump to the ‘Dante’ tab on this site if you'd like to explore more of this comparison for yourself.

[IMAGE TO FOLLOW]

KP

Levi made direct reference to Ulysses also in the poem ‘Ostjuden’, collected in Ad ora incerta (1984; OC II, 530) but composed on February 7, 1946, while he was also working on SQ. As in the chapter, the cunning Homeric hero is a figure of Jewish people, in the poem of Eastern European Jews specifically.

Ostjuden

Padri nostri di questa terra,

Mercanti di molteplice ingegno,

Savi arguti dalla molta prole

Che Dio seminò per il mondo

Come nei solchi Ulisse folle il sale:

Vi ho ritrovati per ogni dove,

Molti come la rena del mare,

Voi popolo di altera cervice,

Tenace povero seme umano.

7 febbraio 1946

EL

The urgency of this phrase is very different from the other references to the passing of time in SQ, where ozio (idleness) and attesa (waiting) are usually precious for the momentary relief they provide for the prisoners from the harshness of the camp’s daily life (see, for instance, the chapters ‘Iniziazione’ and ‘Esame di chimica’).

VG

Dante’s text ‘riguarda’, ‘has to do with’, Levi and Pikolo. ‘Considerate la vostra semenza: | Fatti non foste a viver come bruti, | Ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza.’ What I would emphasise is that by remembering and translating and discussing Dante, Levi and Pikolo live out that terzina from Inferno 26, or rather, they live out a new version of the terzina. That action - ‘ragionare di queste cose con le stanghe della zuppa sulle spalle’ - is a particular living out of Ulysses’ words. For Levi and Pikolo here, discussing Dante becomes a way of seeking after ‘virtute e conoscenza’, and of going beyond the camp’s Pillars of Hercules; ‘è scagliare se stessi al di là di una barriera’, as Levi writes earlier in the chapter. Yet while Dante’s Ulysses casts aside bonds of friendship and affection - seeing the ‘piéta | del vecchio padre’, the ‘debito amore | lo qual dovea Penelope far lieta’ as obstacles to his pursuit of ‘virtute e conoscenza’ - Levi and Pikolo seek after knowledge through conversation, through attention to each other. In the chapter Pikolo listens, he pays attention, he suggests possible translations, he reassures Levi. Interpreting Inferno 26 - ‘ragionare di queste cose’ - is a joint endeavour (Gordon 2001, 68-70; Insana 2009, 107-10; Montemaggi 2020, 127-42), an endeavour in which Levi and Pikolo pursue virtue and knowledge, but do so in a mode quite different to Ulysses (Montemaggi 2020, 133-35; Montemaggi 2011, 66-67, 71-72).

What seems to matter particularly in this passage is that Pikolo and Levi realise that Dante’s is a text about them. ‘[F]orse […] ha ricevuto il messaggio, ha sentito che lo riguarda, che riguarda tutti gli uomini in travaglio, e noi in specie; e che riguarda noi due’ (emphasis added). The ‘messaggio’ arising from Levi and Pikolo’s joint interpretation of Dante is not only a fuller understanding of the ideas Dante is expressing, important as that is, nor is the message limited to assessing the truthfulness of Dante’s words, important as that is too. But - and perhaps underpinning both of these - the ‘messaggio’ also involves recognising that Dante’s words speak about and to Levi and Pikolo. The repeated ‘riguarda’ casts the terzina as not just concerning humanity as a general, abstract category, but as concerning specific, particular lives: Pikolo’s and Levi’s. In the movement from Pikolo (‘lo riguarda’) outward to all those in travail and then narrowing inward to those in the camps (‘noi’) and then inward again to Pikolo and Levi (‘noi due’), the ‘riguarda’ also cast the terzina as open to be encountered in an equally personal light by others.

At least here, the value of the Commedia seems ultimately to lie not in the particular elaboration that Dante offers of various worldviews, but in how the text becomes part of a reader’s lived experience. The two are, however, connected, and one of the questions arising from this chapter is: How? Levi tells us that Dante’s words - in and through the context of Levi’s encounter with them in Auschwitz - revealed to him, ‘perhaps’, ‘forse’, ‘il perché del nostro destino, del nostro essere oggi qui’. A question perhaps worth investigating further would be: How might moving towards fuller understanding of the Commedia and particular lived experiences of Dante’s text inform each other?

HPR

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

‘Il canto di Ulisse’ describes a translation process like no other. Absent are the quiet room, the pen, paper, keyboard, screen, dictionary that nowadays usually accompany the translator’s work. Instead, there are two friends walking in the fresh air, momentarily released from labour. Absent, moreover, are the words on the page to be translated, that comforting object that is at once static and mutable, authoritative and open-ended. Instead, there is flawed memory, conversation, communion. The translation that happens in the canto (named for an act of song, a bodily, expressive, fleeting thing) has other priorities, other aims, other strengths at hand. It is first and foremost a translation between and of persons; a carrying across (trans-latio) of one self to another. Like the Dantean text it translates, it enacts a going-beyond the limits, a desperate striving for liberty and fully lived humanity, but it is a liberty of mind, of language, and not of body.

The impetus for the translation that takes place in the canto has desire at its core. A desire to learn, a desire to seize a moment of liberty, to communicate, to be understood, to go beyond the awful limits of the present time and place. The shared desiring of Primo and Jean (Jean who, unlike Ulysses, ‘non trascurava di mantenere rapporti umani’, as Levi comments earlier in the chapter) pushes the translation forwards despite its shortcomings in terms of accuracy or creativity (it is ‘scialba’, ‘pedestre’). Though words might be forgotten, something fundamental of the absent Dantean text is expressed in this urgent desiring – Ulysses’ narrative of unquenchable desire, striving, desperate: ‘il messaggio’ comes through.

Perhaps the translation is so full of feeling because the text to be translated is not on the page, an object, but is an integrated part of Primo’s memory. He is not translating Dante, he is translating his memory of Dante, Dante learned and remembered in who-knows-what circumstances - at home, at school - with who-knows-what feelings and associations. A text learned a world away from where he is. And yet his current situation makes the (memory) text take on meaning it did not have before. The gradually increasing pace of the narrative and the shift from past to present tense amplifies the sense of urgency; he is changing, the text is changing, everything is happening now, all made possible by the openhearted interlocutor Jean, who experiences with him. The intimacy of this translation act is breathtaking. Unlike other acts of translation that have an object which is (to varying degrees) fixed, external, safe, a book we can close at the end of the day, here the object is within, maddeningly intangible, bearing with itself not a third party’s words to be ‘interpreted’, but those words passed through the translator’s own living memory. The person of Primo through Dante is the source text.

As Alexander has pointed out in relation to this chapter, ‘all translations […] bear the imprint of the moment’ (Alexander 2007, 160). The physical circumstances of this act of translation are tangible (‘gradevole marcia’, ‘aria fresca’), manifesting the momentary liberty of the participants (‘mi sentivo insolitamente leggero’). I would add to this: not only is the moment imprinted on the translation but the persons involved in it. The canto manifests in an extreme way the fact that ‘translators are never […] neutral, impersonal transferring devices. Translators’ personal experiences – emotions, motivations, attitudes, association […] are indispensable’ (Robinson 1991, 260). In the canto, the personal experiences of the translator are not only indispensable, they are inescapable, they are the text itself.

The meaning of the text is generated in the willing coming together of the two friends, Primo and Jean. The text’s ‘message’ is not something external but emerges from their lives; meaning is found in the interpersonal act of translation itself, ‘at the heart of [which] is recovery’ (Woods 2014, 3). Primo and Jean are seeking to recover something of themselves in this stolen, fleeting translational exchange. Where words fail, Primo relies on Jean’s experience to fill in the gaps (‘Pikolo ha viaggiato per mare e sa cosa vuol dire’). But it is the present moment and the people they are now that makes possible a new reading, a new translation of the Dantean lines filled with revelation, empathy, resonance: ‘Dovevo venire in Lager per accorgermi’. It is their present state as ‘uomini in travaglio’ that enables Jean to ‘receive the message’ of the text, which is as much Primo’s life as it is Dante’s words.

We do not hear the ‘dull’ (‘scialba’) translation that is produced in this encounter between the friends. It does not exist, only their living of the process of translating is recorded. The production of an object was never the aim of the encounter or the subsequent narrative Levi weaves around it. We are left with a message which, though composed of words, expresses the ineffable.

RC

Test annotation by LeviAdmin aka Kath