Cussedness

The Auschwitz Report by Primo Levi and Leonardo Debenedetti

My friend bought me this little book for my birthday (thanks Amy!), knowing that I’m a Primo Levi fan, and I was pleased to discover that it was translated from the original by Judith Woolf, who was my tutor for Modern Italian Narrative, one of the few courses in my degree for which I actually managed to raise some enthusiasm. I’m in no position to comment on technical details, having neither the original text nor the ability to read it properly, but I will say that Woolf never let even a mere undergraduate like myself get away with sloppy translation in her seminars, so I’m confident she will have done a good job here. I certainly get the distinct impression that the voice of Levi we hear in other English versions of his work is present in the parts of the report written by him, so I think this must be a sound reading.

The Auschwitz Report was actually the first published work by Levi, and in it we can see the germ of what eventually became If This Is A Man, the story of his time in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. (If you’re not familiar with that, go and read it now. It’s one of the most important books ever written.) Debenedetti, Levi’s co-author in the report, was also a survivor of the same camp, and together they wrote up their experiences and observations for their Russian liberators. The tone is calm and factual, befitting the authors’ scientific backgrounds, and although there are no grand revelations here, the details are grimly fascinating and the different perspective provided by Debenedetti, who was a doctor, covers some new areas passed over by Levi.

This is probably not the best place to start if you’ve not encountered Levi before, but it’s an essential piece of reading for anyone who wants to know where his writing came from, and how he was able to be so lucid and rational in his account of the horrors he lived through.

2 comments • 2007-01-02 14:03 • Categories: Books, Reviews • Tags: Holocaust Literature, Primo Levi