Journal of Italian Translation

Lina Insana/Primo Levi
sents Levi’s translation of v. 582 (“Dopo di allora, ad ora incerta”) as the first
verse of the new poem. This is followed by a direct citation of vv. 581-85 of the
English-language Coleridge poem, tali quali, as verses 2-5, eliding Levi’s
changes to the Coleridge source text. In both published versions, these verses
are set apart graphically from the rest of the poem, both in terms of the size of
their font and by a space between verses 5 (“This heart within me burns”)
and 6 (“Once more he sees his companions’ faces”); in the 1986 epigraphic
version this separation is rendered still more striking by the fact that the first
5 verses are all in italics, implying that as a whole they represent a direct and
faithful translation (or citation) of some original text, either Coleridge’s or
Levi’s.
In both of Feldman’s versions of the poem, the Coleridge citation stands
in epigraph to the rest of the poetic text, but is not incorporated into it, nor is
the voice of the Ancient Mariner-cum-survivor ever conflated with the survivor-persona’s
voice. As a result, the imagined dialogue that moves the second
part of the poem becomes a very different kind of conversation, one
where the ownership of the survivor position is not formally problematized
within the poem’s formal structure. The poet here can simply be said to have
adopted a “voice” of anxiety vis à vis the survivor’s condition, but without
linking that persona textually or graphically to the Ancient Mariner character
who in Levi’s version takes on far more than mere emblematic value for
the survivor persona in question. With the effacement of Levi’s violence to
the Coleridge text comes a negation of the complexity of Levi’s relationship
to the Ancient Mariner character inherent in his explicit and forceful rhetorical
distancing from that character in the Italian poem.
Feldman’s return to Coleridge’s original text suggests a refusal to participate
in an exercise of circular translation, a reticence to acknowledge
either the translator’s presence in the process of transmission, or the uniqueness
of the translational act. Her decision to privilege Coleridge’s source text
also suggests an underlying anxiety about accuracy in the representation,
transmission, and translation of Holocaust texts, and the Holocaust source
text in general; Feldman’s profound desire to accurately represent the Holocaust
signified ultimately manifests itself in the “return” to a pristine, uncorrupted
source text. Paradoxically, however, readers of Feldman’s Englishlanguage
translation of Levi’s “Il superstite” are given less than the full
picture of survivor testimony when they are denied access to Levi’s poetic
refraction of Coleridge’s text, and his use of it to figure the complexities of
transmission, translation, and the testimonial process.
Primo Levi’s translation of this fragment of Coleridge’s “Rime of the
Ancient Mariner” and its incorporation into his 1984 poem “Il superstite”
reveal the importance of translation as a textual site of meditation on the
testimonial process and on the condition of survivor hood. His manhandling
of the Coleridge fragment establishes Levi’s agency as a testimonial
and poetic subject, and at the same time allows him to perform a complex
commentary on his own position of survivor hood between life and death,
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