Today I would like to present to you a very famous poem in Italian, probably one of the best known by Primo Levi. It is taken from Se questo e un uomo ( If This Is a Man ), published in 1947, in the aftermath of the Second World War, and bears witness to the horror of the concentration camps.
Here first is the poem in its original version:
If you are a person
who is safe
in your life,
you will find it torn
and will be warm and friendly:
Consider if you are a person
who loves nothing
but does not know what
to do with each other
for a while. if o per a no.
Consider this questa è a donna,
senza capelli e senza nome
senza più forza di ricordare
vuoti gli occhi e freddo il grembo
comme una rana d’inverno.
Meditate this question states:
I commend this speech.
Scolpitele nel vostro cuore
stando in casa andando per via,
coricandovi, alzandovi.
Ripetetele ai vostri figli.
Wherever you are at home,
the malattia is impeded,
and you can see it next to you.
The second person plural is omnipresent in this poem, and the pronoun “you” (“voi”) is both the first and last word. The imperatives, numerous and often placed at the beginning of the lines, attest to the insistence on the conative function of language: it is a question of attracting the attention of the recipient, of soliciting a reaction from him, in this case not to forget the horror of the concentration camps and the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis.
Primo Levi paints a portrait of the recipient to whom the poet addresses himself: those who, enjoying a certain material comfort, could be tempted to refuse to see the horror and to leave this dark period of History in oblivion, at the risk of it repeating itself. The “warm houses” (tepid case ), the “hot food” ( il cibo caldo ), and the “friendly faces” ( visi amici ) describe a certain material and moral comfort and suggest that this does not encourage political struggle in favor of those who have suffered.
The repetition of the imperative “Consider” thus allows the poet to ensure that the reader sees reality.
The poet then points out the reality of extreme destitution, of misery that goes as far as famine, a reality where life expectancy is very low. Primo Levi is probably describing here the horror of the concentration camps, a hell that he experienced in 1944. As for the women “without hair and name”, they are perhaps the “shorn” of the liberation, forcibly shaved for having loved a man from the enemy camp. Unless these livid-looking women are also victims of the concentration camp hell.
“Meditate che questo è stato”: think that this happened. The facts are so serious, so tragic, that it is hard to believe that they happened. So it is necessary, for Primo Levi, to repeat it to himself, to meditate on it carefully: it happened, it happened, it is not just a bad nightmare. The poet orders his readers to remember, not to forget. This is what will later be called the “duty of memory”. This must be kept in mind at all times and passed on to future generations.
The poem ends with a curse. The verbs in the subjunctive promise great misfortunes to those who forget. The duty of remembrance is thus invested with an almost sacred dimension. This allows the poet to signify the gravity of forgetting, which appears as an irreparable fault.
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“If this is a man”… Concentration camps are a place of denial of humanity, and in the face of this crime against humanity, Primo Levi reminds us that the victims are indeed men and women, doomed to survive as best they can, deprived of their dignity and their humanity. The poet takes up his pen so that we do not forget. So that we remember how humanity has been trampled. We who live in warmth, protected from hunger and war, may neither our comfort nor our fear of losing it make us forget what happened, on the very soil of our Europe, only eighty years ago.
