Journal of Italian Translation

Traumatic Translation: Levi’s “Ancient Mariner” from
English to Italian—and Back Again
by Lina Insana
Lina Insana is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Pittsburgh,
where she teaches courses on Holocaust Literature, Fascism and Resistance,
Sicilian Writers, Italian Detective Fiction, Translation Studies, Italian
American Studies, and Migration and Identity. She has published on
Italian American children’s literature, gender and Fascist culture, Boccaccio,
Beppe Fenoglio, and Primo Levi, and is currently completing her manuscript
on Levi’s use of translation as a metaphor for Holocaust testimony.
Introduction
Holocaust survivors, returning home after liberation and the long
homeward odysseys that followed, soon found themselves prey to
a new conflict: between the “burning need” to tell of their brutalizing
experience and a profound confusion over how to go about representing its
singular and unspeakable events. This crisis of representation stemmed, in
part, from specific aspects of the Final Solution, which deployed tactics of
cruel dehumanization, the debasement of significative language, and the
eradication of all subject hood and agency, not to speak of unheard-of
physical hardships, slavery, and torture. The result is an unbearable
proximity between the Lager’s new reality and the limits of our imaginative
capacities. As Terrence Des Pres has theorized, “what we experience,
symbolically, in spirit only, survivors must go through, in spirit and in body.
In extremity, states of mind become objective, metaphors tend to actualize,
the word becomes flesh” (174).
When traditional literary figures are no longer appropriate as an expressive
strategy, what recourse does the survivor-writer have? Levi’s response
to the incommensurate communicative environments of Auschwitz
and the world of survival grew out of his belief that effective communication
was fundamental to the human condition. 1 As such, at the heart of his testimonial
project was an attempt to convey the reality of the camps by recoding
its various sign systems for “gli altri,” who had not been there to experience
it for themselves; in other words, to translate it. The translational metaphor
for Holocaust testimony is particularly apt in Levi’s case because of his
consistent attention to language issues in his writing, his focus on the
Lagerjargon 2 as a constituent element of the univers concentrationnaire, and his
own considerable translation work. 3
Across Levi’s testimonial oeuvre, translation acts 4 become textual sites
of survivor hood, where processes of testimony and aspects of the survivor’s