“These are necessary poems, if ever any have been”

So wrote Primo Levi, introducing the Italian edition of Y. Katzenelson’s Il canto del popolo ebreo massacrato. The notes that follow take their cue from this statement and wish to be nothing other than an invitation to read Levi’s poems. To read them as an important part of Levi’s work as a whole, and a founding moment of that elaboration, that moral reflection, which unmistakably marks the whole of his literary work, but to read them above all for what they are: poems.
In 1947, back from the experience of Auschwitz, Levi was looking for a publisher for his first book. He met with more than one rejection. Worth recalling is the reason with which, generally (Einaudi included), the proposal was declined: namely that the times were not ripe, that the war had only just ended and people had had enough of suffering, that it was not the moment to return to it, at least not so soon. In the end the book was published by a small publisher, De Silva, whose director, Franco Antonicelli, a retiring but far-sighted intellectual, at once understood its worth. The book was well received by the critics, but of the print run of 2,500 copies little more than half sold. Shortly afterward De Silva closed down, and the remaining 600 copies of that first printing drowned in a warehouse of remainders during the Florence flood of 1966.
One has to wait until 1957, in a changed climate, when by then several works of memoir and historical essay had opened the way to discussion of the extermination camps, for Einaudi to take Se questo è un uomo into its catalogue, though, with good reason, in a series of essays.
Today Levi’s text is translated into the main languages of the world, and is read, albeit more or less in anthologized form, by the great majority of Italian students.
Se questo è un uomo, like other works of Levi’s, carries a poem as its epigraph. The poem, which everyone knows – or at least should – is entitled Shemà, but what not everyone knows is that the Shemà is the fundamental prayer of the Jewish people (Shemà Ysrael, Ado-nai Eloheinu, Ado-nai ehad.., Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one…). The Shemà is recited in the morning on waking and in the evening before going to bed. Levi takes up its cadence and part of its wording: what counts, what binds prayer and poem, is the imperative: remember. But for Levi what must be remembered is not the Lord, the one God, jealous and bountiful; on the contrary, with a drastic inversion, what must be remembered is rather the silence of God: it is the evil that has been, to meditate on what has been and what can return at any moment.
Anaphora, the rhetorical repetition that appears at once in Shemà, is the figure that marks much of Levi’s poetry, a legacy, perhaps unconscious, of so much devotional poetry, not only Jewish, but also, and perhaps above all, a need to impress itself on the memory of the reader.

Voi che vivete sicuri/Nelle vostre tiepide case,

Voi che trovate tornando a sera/Il cibo caldo e visi amici

Considerate se questo è un uomo,

Che lavora nel fango/Che non conosce pace

Che lotta per mezzo pane/Che muore per un sì o per un no

Considerate se questa è una donna,

Senza capelli e senza nome/Senza più forza per ricordare Vuoti gli occhi e freddo il grembo/Come una rana d’inverno. Meditate che questo è stato:

Vi comando queste parole./Scolpitele nel vostro cuore

Stando in casa andando per via,/Coricandovi alzandovi/Ripetetele ai vostri figli. O vi sfaccia la casa,/La malattia vi impedisca/I vostri nati torcano il viso da voi.

It has been noted, by Cesare Segre, that Shemà can be read as an extreme synthesis of the prose that follows it, so that it is easy, and perhaps obvious, to see the analogies of the latter with the traditional form of the midrash, which is, to put it hastily, a homiletic method of interpreting Scripture. Something analogous, to stay within the sphere of Jewish literature, may be ventured for the parable Di fronte alla legge , published by Franz Kafka as an autonomous work, and later inserted by Max Brod into his edition of Il Processo. It is not so far-fetched an idea that the story of Joseph K., as it was handed down to us by Brod – betraying, perhaps, the will of the author, who wanted all the papers left unpublished to be burned – cannot be traced back to a commentary on the parable itself: an infinite commentary, un-finished, interminable, as is fitting if one wishes to remain within the hermeneutic tradition of the Talmudic masters. Worth recalling is that Levi, however distant from Kafka – intellectually, emotionally, even spiritually – left us a translation of Il Processo.
Another analogy that we can grasp without great forcing between Kafka and Levi is the astonishment of the relatively late discovery of East European Judaism: for Kafka it is Itzak Loewy’s Yiddish theatre company that brings its shows to Prague; for Levi it is the Ostjuden met in the extermination camp. The Ostjuden are the Jews of Eastern Europe who suffered the pogroms, and who now go to their death, docile as a flock of lambs. To them Levi dedicates the poem we reproduce below:

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.

At least in part it is to this discovery that both owe a deeper reflection on their own belonging, on their own origins, and on the effects of assimilation. But let us not forget that Kafka comes before Auschwitz, and even if with a kind of prophetic far-sightedness he sees its early signs and grasps its virulence, he has nonetheless the good fortune to die first. Levi spends a year at Auschwitz, manages by luck to survive, but he carries that year with him like a piece of baggage, like a tumor, for the remaining forty years of his life.
Se non ora, quando?, another title in Levi’s bibliography, is taken from a verse of the Pirké Avòt (1, 14), a Talmudic wisdom text. In Pasqua we find, immersed in the poetic fabric, with fine parenetic artifice, passages of the Seder (the ritual supper of Pesach, the Jewish Passover, which, be it said in passing, celebrates neither resurrections nor miracles of any kind but, once again, recalls the exodus from Egyptian captivity). La tregua too opens with a poem, Alzarsi, a translation of the imperative “Wstawác” shouted on the mornings of the camp, in the harsh Polish of the Kapos, a command that the survivors will go on waiting to hear resound every morning of their lives.
Those we have cited, except for Pasqua, which dates from 1982, are among Levi’s earliest poems, written in 1946, right after his return from captivity, and bound ineluctably to that traumatic experience.
Almost as if to refute, a priori, the famous and later overused dictum of T.W. Adorno, namely that there could be no more poetry after Auschwitz (if one chooses to pass over Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs, perhaps the two greatest Jewish poets of the twentieth century, but there are many others).
Primo Levi continued, though with extreme parsimony, to write poetry for the rest of his life: Almanacco, the last in the collection, dates from 1987, the year of his death.

All told, Levi left a little more than some eighty poems; a rather slim little book gathers them all, together with a handful of translations, almost all of the latter from Heinrich Heine’s Libro dei Canti. The collection is entitled Ad ora incerta, is published by Garzanti, and is still in print. The title is taken from a line of S.T. Coleridge’s Ballata del vecchio marinaio, and not by chance that line: the ghost of the old mariner tries to stop the guests on their way to the feast, he wants to tell someone of his misfortunes, but no one stops. Later Levi would say that this had been one of the worst nightmares among those that accompanied so many of his nights: to have come back and to want to tell of the inferno and to find no one willing to listen. It would later emerge that this nightmare had been common currency for countless former deportees. But Coleridge’s line, (in its original version: “Since then, at an uncertain hour”) is also the opening line of Il superstite (1981), the poem that stands as epigraph to I sommersi e i salvati, Levi’s last text devoted to the work of extermination. In the closing lines of Il Superstite Levi states, with the clarity and concision that are his own, the other and worse evil that poisons the air and the blood of the survivors: the sense of guilt.

Indietro, via di qui, gente sommersa,

Andate. Non ho soppiantato nessuno,

Non ho usurpato il pane di nessuno,

Nessuno è morto in vece mia. Nessuno.

Ritornate alla vostra nebbia.

Non è mia colpa se vivo e respiro

E mangio e bevo e dormo e vesto panni.

It is true, and it is an undeniable fact, that Primo Levi’s fame is due first of all to the texts bound up with the experience of Auschwitz, and I refer to the fundamental trilogy comprising Se questo è un uomo, La tregua e I sommersi e i salvati, yet it is also true that Levi’s work is far vaster and amply transcends memoir. Primo Levi was without doubt one of the greatest Italian authors of the twentieth century. The spare and precise prose, the moral perspective that underlies all his narrative, even the fictional, the crystalline clarity, are the qualities that made him a classic from the outset. Beyond the internment at Auschwitz, which is undoubtedly one of the sources, perhaps even the most important, that leads Primo Levi to write, it is well to recall that by training Levi was a scientist, a chemist, a profession he practiced throughout the whole span of his working life. But it should not be forgotten that the humanistic foundations of his culture had been formed at the D’Azeglio in Turin, when the Italian Liceo Classico was still a great school, and the preparation one received there was, in many respects, incomparable with what happens today. Levi, moreover, like so many illustrious Piedmontese more or less his contemporaries (I think of Massimo Mila, of the Ginzburgs, and so on), loved the mountains, but his gaze upon nature was at once the objective gaze of the naturalist and the gaze of the poet.
A line of Il Pangolino, a poem by Marianne Moore, says: “Per spiegare/ la grazia è necessaria/ una mano curiosa”. Primo Levi had curious hands and repeatedly affirmed the need to know with one’s hands, to feel reality physically.
Agave (which you can read below), Meleagrina, La chiocciola, L’elefante, are late poems and all imbued with a great pity for every living thing, a pity expressed, however, in dry and rough terms, at times with precise technical terms.

Non sono utile né bella,

Non ho colori lieti né profumi;

Le me radici rodono il cemento,

E le mie foglie, marginate di spine,

Mi fanno guardia, acute come spade.

Sono muta, parlo solo il mio linguaggio di pianta,

Difficile a capire per te uomo.

È un linguaggio desueto, Esotico, poiché vengo di lontano, Da un paese crudele

Pieno di vento, veleni e vulcani.

Ho aspettato molti anni prima di esprimere Questo mio fiore altissimo e disperato, Brutto, legnoso, rigido, ma teso al cielo.

È il nostro modo di gridare che

Morrò domani. Mi hai capito adesso?

With sentimentalism, lyrical embellishment, and hermetic intellectualism banished, Levi’s poetry bears few or no analogies with the Italian poetry contemporary to it. Levi himself was perfectly aware of this, and with natural understatement he spoke of his poetry almost apologetically, calling it a vice, a quirk, perhaps the only one he allowed himself as an author and that at times he could not manage to suppress. Proof of this is that few (two?) are the love poems he left us, and so we close this note with 12 luglio 1980:

Abbi pazienza, mia donna affaticata,

Abbi pazienza per le cose del mondo,

Per i tuoi compagni di viaggio, me compreso,

Dal momento che ti sono toccato in sorte.

Accetta, dopo tanti anni, pochi versi scorbutici

Per questo tuo compleanno rotondo.

Abbi pazienza, mia donna impaziente,

Tu macinata, macerata, scorticata,

Che tu stessa ti scortichi un poco ogni giorno

Perché la carne nuda ti faccia più male.

Non è più tempo di vivere soli.

Accetta, per favore, questi 14 versi,

Sono il mio modo ispido di dirti cara,

E che non starei al mondo senza di te.

Works consulted
Primo Levi, Ad ora incerta, Gli Elefanti Poesia, Garzanti.

On the duty of remembering, for the Jewish people, see Y.H. Yerushalmi’s Zakhor. Storia e memoria ebraica (Parma 1993).

For what it is worth to read poetry in dark times, a little book by Alfonso Berardinelli may help: Poesia non poesia (Torino, 2008), from whose jacket flap we quote: “I do not believe in poetry. I believe only in those poems that make me believe in them. If it convinces the reader, poetry has no need to be defended. If it does not convince him, why defend it?”.

Giorgio Pangaro, an editor of Studi Umbri, edits with L. Cimmino the series of texts “Corpo a corpo” between literature and cinema for Rubbettino Editore.