Work is fiction’s greatest blind spot. Work occupies more of our hours than sleep, love, and family, yet it’s rare to find a novel that takes as its main subject the daily routines, obligations, and petty indignities that consume most of our lives. (Novels about writers don’t count.) Work tends to be a secondary consideration, useful for providing character detail, a plot point, or a setting, and little more. It has been this way since the invention of the form. The earliest novels, written by people wealthy enough not to have to work, tended to be about the lives of people wealthy enough not to have to work. The subject of work has been largely avoided ever since, as if it is seen as pedestrian, tedious, even distasteful. Novels are about what happens after punch-out.
Primo Levi’s The Wrench (La chiave a stella) is a glorious exception to this rule. It is an unapologetic ode to the joys, and frustrations, of labor. It is a celebration of diligence, exertion, and the pride required to doing a job well, no matter what job—whether it’s erecting a derrick, designing a varnish to coat the interior of tin cans, or even combining words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs.
The translation of Levi’s novel, as it turned out, was one of the most challenging literary jobs I’ve had—not nearly as difficult as, say, rigging a gantry crane, but perhaps on the order of assembling a small truss tower, or at least just as time-consuming. One difficulty was posed by Faussone’s “particular language,” as clunky as a bag of hammers and screwdrivers, with its run-on sentences, liberal use of vernacular terms, phrases drawn from obscure regional dialects, and frequent divagations. But the greater challenge was his heavy use of industrial vocabulary: the cofferdams, ball bearings, mandrels, autogenous welding, coke forges, and bevel gears that, as Levi writes, “are effectively the heroes of the stories.”
When I translate I keep two dictionaries within arm’s length, an Italian dictionary and an Italian-English dictionary. Translating Levi’s novel I found myself reaching, at least electronically, for a third kind of reference text: technical manuals and trade journals. More than definitions, I needed diagrams. I watched industrial videos and I sent queries to Italian engineers. Even the novel’s title, La chiave a stella, presented an unresolvable linguistic puzzle. Literally, it means a “star-shaped key,” or “key to the stars”; practically, however, it describes what is known in English as a socket wrench. “The Wrench” lacks the original’s celestial aspect, though it does evoke something of the novel’s linguistic complexity. Faussone’s language is frequently throwing a wrench into the narrator’s efforts to understand him.
It was reassuring to read that Levi himself had misgivings about the novel’s language. The use of regional dialect meant that other Italians only got, by his estimation, 70 percent of the jokes. He also worried that the technical terms would be lost on most Italian readers. But he needn’t have worried. The joy of the novel lies not in understanding exactly how to float an oil derrick in the middle of a churning sea, but in sharing in Levi’s appreciation for the joy that Faussone finds in doing difficult work, and doing it well. This is a universal joy and I felt it too while translating Levi, as he translated Faussone.
NATHANIEL RICH