Journal of Italian Translation

Lina Insana/Primo Levi
sapienza, di raccontare non solo il nostro destino, ma anche quello degli
altri, dei sommersi, appunto...Parliamo noi in loro vece, per delega” (65).
Implicit in this model is the fact that the weight of responsibility must be
distributed among speakers and listeners alike at many different levels, as
the “salvati” must become witnesses to the atrocities committed against the
“sommersi” and the survivor’s listener-reader must, in turn, bear witness to
that which is recounted to him by the survivor. It is not enough merely to tell,
but the reader-listener after the fact must also be a willing interlocutor and
witness, mirroring and repeating the narrative testimonial act of the survivor
to create an infinite chain of witnessing and telling, listening and witnessing.
Similarly, for Coleridge there is a tendency to “dissolv[e] the distinction
between the roles of speaker and audience: both here are equally in
thrall to the tale” (Eilenberg 287-88). For both the Holocaust survivor and the
protagonist of the “Rime,” each link in the transmission of the tale is simultaneously
narrator and narratee, yet another example of the manner in which
the representation en abyme of the transmissive act shines a particularly
bright meta-narrative light on the process of witnessing. Referring to the
Coleridge poem, Eilenberg identifies this phenomenon as a thematic “doubling”
of the protagonist in that “each person who hears the story becomes,
like the Mariner, the teller of that story” (277). For Eilenberg, these textual
doubles include the sixteenth-century “mistral who narrates the poem that
the antiquarian would gloss” (291), as well as the Hermit and Wedding
Guest who are the Mariner’s most immediate interlocutors. Upon close inspection,
it becomes clear that Levi’s own poem shares Coleridge’s predilection
for textual doubles, though not as explicit as those present in the “Rime.”
Ultimately, the poet and his survivor persona are at once elements and propagators
of the poem’s doubling mechanism: a poet who quotes Coleridge’s
original English text, who knows but sets aside a good-faith Italian translation
of Coleridge (Beppe Fenoglio’s), who puts forth his own translation of
Coleridge; and a survivor, who, in his vehement denial of any wrongdoing
against the “gente sommersa,” implicitly cites the charges of his accusers.
Even the final line of the poem constitutes another layer of this game of
doubling through citation, as the survivor translates Dante (“e mangia e bee
e dorme e veste panni” [Inferno 33.141]), once again making revealing changes
of person and perspective (“E mangio e bevo e dormo e vesto panni” [v. 20]),
to invoke the double of the traitor Branca D’Oria. 9
But in keeping with poetry’s role as the space in which this author
works through his more conflicted responses to survivor hood, Levi’s unfaithful
translation of the fourth verse also serves to undermine this very
narrative model whereby interlocutors, and therefore witnesses, are created
within the textual space of testimony. While Coleridge’s main verb is decidedly
indicative (“And till my ghastly tale is told”), Levi’s version is constructed
on the first part of a hypothetical phrase, presenting the possibility
of an audience in the subjunctive mode—possible, but not certain: “E se non
trova chi lo ascolti.” Levi’s translation of Coleridge, then, prompts us to ques-
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