Primo Levi

The first fortune of Primo Levi's literary production in the United States is linked to the second Italian edition of If This is a Man (Einaudi, 1958), which followed the release of the first one by Franco Antonicelli's small publishing house (De Silva, 1947) by more than a decade. However, at least two attempts to circulate the text in the United States even before its Italian publication are known, both based on the channels of Levi's personal acquaintances in the context of Jewish emigration overseas. As early as 1946, with his writing unfinished, the author sent ten chapters of If This is a Man to his cousin Anna Foa in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who unsuccessfully proposed the famous Song of Ulysses to the Boston-based Little, Brown & Company. A few months later, writer Laura Capon began a translation of the book (that she never completed), probably at Levi's request and with editorial intentions.

The first edited translation of the volume also followed paths that were anything but institutional. It was taken care of by a young PhD student from Oxford visiting Turin, Stuart J. Woolf (later a well-known professor of Contemporary History at Ca' Foscari University, Venice), who met Levi in their mutual friend Leonardo De Benedetti's home, and undertook the work alongside the author himself. In 1959 If This Is A Man was thus issued by a small New York publishing house with a detachment in Italy, Orion Press, which failed, however, to ensure its widespread distribution.

Far more successful was two years later the reissue of the text at Collier Books, which acquired the rights to Woolf's translation and republished it with a new title (Survival in Awschwitz. The Nazi Assault on Humanity) and an editorial guise that, distorting the letter of the text, presented the book as an account of the "Nazi brutality" of the German "butchers" (not without an allusion to the Jewish origins of the author, whose writing had a "biblical simplicity"). Somewhat similar was the fate of The Truce, published in Italy in 1963 (Einaudi) and again translated by Woolf for Little, Brown & Company, which issued it in 1965 under the title The Reawakening. A Liberated Prisoner's Long March Home Through East Europe, inspired from the concluding chapter (The Rewakening) and openly opposed by the author. The volume, while positively reviewed, was not a great success with the public, and there followed years of little interest in the works of Levi.

The trend was reversed by the prompt English translation and success of The Periodical System (Schocken Books, 1984), which was followed by a Levi's trip to the United States, organized by the publisher, between April and May 1985. In the meantime, Levi's work had attracted the interest of many colleagues overseas, including Saul Bellow and Philip Roth (who published a famouse interview with the writer in 1986), that shared with him their common Jewish origin, as well as harsh criticism for his stances against Israel after the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The publication of Levi's works in the United States continued after his death (1987), until the extraordinary monumentalization given by the three boxed volumes of the Complete Works, edited by Ann Goldstein (Norton-Liveright, 2015).

Related Vectors