Presentamos el caso de las traducciones francesas de una obra canónica de la literatura de la Memoria del Holocausto: Se questo è un uomo de Primo Levi, superviviente judío italiano del campo de ...exterminio de Auschwitz-Birkenau. La primera, publicada en 1961, arrastró el estigma de mala calidad y de que se tardase más de cuarenta años en conocer al autor en el ámbito francófono, justo hasta que se publicó la segunda en 1987, que recibió todos los reconocimientos. Queremos demostrar que la traductora de 1961 no ejerció mal su oficio, únicamente siguió las consignas editoriales marcadas por los paratraductores.
The publication of Laura Marcus's Auto/biographical Discourses: Criticism, Theory, Practice (1994) coincided with a conference that I co-organised with her called 'Modernity, Culture and "the Jew"' ...(1994). We both expected the conference to be a modest event, but it turned out to be over-subscribed with many hundreds in attendance. In the light of our conference, my essay explores some of the reasons why the 1990s was thought of as an 'age of testimony' which is addressed in Auto/biographical Discourses and subsequent essays by Laura. The essay will then compare the playfulness of the autobiographical genre with the ethical seriousness of Holocaust testimonies and slave narratives. At the heart of the essay is Laura's conceptualisation of autobiography and its connections with those who write testimonial memoirs in extremis.
In this article, I discuss Primo Levi's Holocaust survivor testimonies in Moments of Reprieve, arguing that these stories illuminate a concept I term 'the reprieve'. Using the reprieve as an ...undecidable word I argue that the reprieve is a moment of humanisation in the camps in which our inherent responsibility for one another becomes clear. Though it does not offer freedom or salvation, it does allow for a moment of loosening in the midst of repression and horror.
This essay follows Primo Levi's journey home to Italy after the liberation of Auschwitz, as narrated in his 1963 memoir The Reawakening La tregua. Levi's repatriation convoy bound for Italy under ...Soviet guard traveled inexplicably east instead of south, traversing and being detained within the landscape of the Pripet Marshes. As Europe's largest wetlands, the nearly impassible Pripet Marshes had stalled a Nazi advance into Russia and saw partisan fighting in both World Wars. This essay examines Levi's journey into the Pripet Marshes through two temporal frames--both its haunted legacy of genocidal pogroms, as well as its near future: the site of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Traumatic overlays resonate across Levi's memoir of the cease-fire interval after the war, an uneasy peace Levi terms a "parenthesis of unlimited availability" (p. 206). Thinking through Levi's writing on the afterlife of trauma, Freud's concept of the "uncanny" is employed alongside trauma theory to illuminate a traumatic anamorphosis emerging from Levi's text. This essay pursues an ecological reading of trauma to gather traces strewn across human, nonhuman, and inhuman landscapes of annihilation.
Mankind has this tendency to preserve time through various mediums. For centuries, people have used different methods to preserve time from Egyptian custom of mummification to contemporary arts that ...not only preserves time, but also represents realties of past and it, in turn, teaches generation to bind time in a way that develops human race instead of degrading it. It is this tendency to be remembered that leads human being to preserve time in vivid forms. Alfred Korzybski, having witnessed atrocities of the First World War, was curious to unfold this mystery of what makes human being what they are, which led to the creation of his book "Manhood of Humanity." This article aims to study "If This Is a Man" by Primo Levi, who was imprisoned in a concentration camp and has undergone worst nightmare of humanity. This article is focused on mapping the systematically planned Nazi method of dehumanizing the Jews of not only their basic rights but to strip them of their individuality, culture, and very sense of their existence. "If This Is a Man" stands as an example for mankind to not repeat the worst crimes committed against humanity but to learn from it.
Within debates surrounding "Levi's Paradox"—the idea that through their survival, survivors are not necessarily the "complete witnesses" of the Holocaust—the Muselmann is frequently posited as able ...to reconcile this conundrum. Within testimonial literature, these emaciated prisoners were perceived as ghost-like entities who were neither alive nor dead but somehow between life and death. The observed absence left in witness narratives thereby appears to be testimony from inside the experience of these Muselmänner . What is ubiquitously overlooked in such analyses is that the Muselmann primarily functions as a metaphor—rendering the absent dead legible in language. Ignoring this risks instrumentalizing the Muselmann , which threatens to allow the metaphor to become shorthand for something more generic—obfuscating the reality that Muselmänner signify real Holocaust victims. However, all metaphors contain a potential for semantic flexibility. Cannot the Muselmann's ability to pollute rigid dichotomies therefore be approached productively and more ethically when refocalizing him as a ghostly entity in testimonial literature? By examining passages from Primo Levi's If This Is a Man and Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz and After , this article asks: if the Muselmann is viewed as a ghostly or spectral metaphor—a haunting force within the Holocaust's literary corpus—how might this spectral witness be able to draw attention to erasure and historical blind spots? Constituting an ethical and an interpretive undertaking, this refocalization simultaneously allows one to speak with the Muselmann and enables these anonymous victims to manifest themselves anew as haunting forces through literary testimony.
Drawing from Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophical ethics and Paul Celan’s dialogical poetics, this article interrogates the impossible memorial and ethical demands that literary responses to the ...Holocaust place upon their readers. While Levinas reveals our position as summoned to radical responsibility, Celan shows us how that responsibility plays out in the form of ethical reading. By attending to the imperative commands found in Celan’s longest poem, “Engführung”, this article demonstrates how Holocaust literature memorializes the Shoah through an invocation of Levinasian ethics and the concept of the immemorial—that which exceeds memory. Following the discussion of Levinas, Celan, and “Engführung”, I turn to Primo Levi’s “Shema”, a paradigmatic text that likewise directly challenges us, calling us into question as readers during the moment of reading and demanding an attentiveness to the text that proves beyond our ability to deliver. Throughout, I aim to show how dialogical memory enables us to better comprehend the ethical burden we encounter in the literary texts of the Holocaust.
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