Primo Levi in the World:
Visual Translations

Today Primo Levi is read all over the world. Translated into almost fifty languages, he was first regarded as the clearest and most compelling voice on Auschwitz thanks to his first books on his own experience as a deportee: If This is a Man and The Truce. Able to transcend the barriers between different generations, he continues to speak to the many who, even in cultural contexts that are far apart, suffer from the severe traumas caused by war and mass violence.

“One soul, enviably capacious”, as Philip Roth described him, Levi, a chemist by trade and curious about astronomy, ethology, linguistics and other branches of knowledge, has also been known since the mid-1980s for The Periodic Table, a highly original interweaving of autobiography, chemistry and literature. Subsequently, international critics and audiences approached his other books – The Monkey’s Wrench, If Not Now, When?, the poems and others – with a particular penchant for The Drowned and the Saved, the last reflection on the most disturbing and paradoxical aspects of extermination. With greater delay, his fantasy and science-fiction stories also came to the fore.

The awareness that Levi was a great writer, capable of grappling with the crucial questions of today’s world, established itself with a certain slowness, hindered by the prevailing idea that he was essentially a witness of the Lager; but where publishers and the public finally came to evolve that conviction, Primo Levi as a witness could also be appreciated to a greater extent.

The persistence and even growth of interest in the writer from Turin – who has become, with the passage of time, an essential point of reference in contemporary culture – has been confirmed by the countless initiatives promoted worldwide on the occasion of the centenary of his birth. The publication in 2015 by the New York-based publisher Liveright, of the complete works in English – the only complete republication of an Italian author in another language – is undoubtedly destined to have a long-term impact on a broad cultural universe. The rapid succession of translations into Chinese and other Asian and African languages in recent years will, on the other hand, mark the author’s fortunes in the near future.

It is precisely the American translation that helps to show in a clear form how Levi now tends to assert himself in his complex thematic and stylistic versatility and, in that form, has also become a necessary presence in the cultural context of the contemporary world on an international level.

The selection of the cover images and the editing of the relevant captions are by Giulia Arduino.

Fabio Levi, President of the Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi in Turin.