The Drowned and the Saved, which was first published in 1986, was written over a period of almost ten years. According to Marco Belpoliti, who prepared the two-volume critical edition of Levi’s works (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), the genesis of the book can be traced back to Levi’s translation of Jacob Presser’s novel The Night of the Girondists, in 1975–76 (the original Dutch edition was published in 1957, and the work appeared in English one year later, as Breaking Point). In his foreward Levi touched on the themes he later developed in the chapter “The Gray Zone,” namely, “to explore the space that separates the victims from the tormentors . . . and to do so with a lighter touch and a less troubled spirit than has been the case, for example, in certain movies” (he was referring to The Night Porter, directed by Liliana Cavani).
Earlier in 1975, Levi had written an appendix for a scholastic edition of If This Is a Man, designed to answer the questions most frequently raised by his student readers, and providing him with another opportunity to revisit the themes of his first work and the polemics it aroused. In November 1977, he published an essay in Turin’s daily newspaper, La Stampa, entitled “Il re dei Giudei” (“The King of the Jews”), telling the story of Chaim Rumkowski, which he republished in Lilith and Other Stories (1981) and used to form the last part of “The Gray Zone.” Belpoliti considers this chapter to be the oldest previously published part of the book, while also pointing out that the idea for the last chapter, “Letters from Germans,” has a much earlier origin, the publication of the German translation of If This Is a Man, in 1961.
Levi was particularly active in 1979, when, between January and August, he published eleven newspaper articles and a story, all focused on the concentration camps and the extermination of the Jews. This activity was prompted by the attention being generated in Europe by Holocaust deniers, particularly two letters written to Le Monde by Robert Faurisson.
The Preface of The Drowned and the Saved is taken from a paper that Levi prepared for the 1982 Congress of Jewish Communities. “The Memory of the Offense” was first published under the title “Il Lager e la memoria” (“The Lager and Memory”) in the anthology Il trauma della deportazione (Milan: Mondadori, 1983). He also used this text for a paper at the conference “Il dovere di testimoniare” (“The Duty to Bear Witness”) held in Turin in October 1983.
Levi weaves these pieces into a sustained narrative not only through the thematic arrangement of the work but also on the strength of the moral authority of his voice and the emotional trajectory he builds. The Preface and opening chapter take up the questions underlying any history of the massacre of the European Jews. Who could believe that human beings were capable of such monstrosity? Can the memories of eyewitnesses and survivors be trusted? And always and insistently, how could this atrocity have been prevented? From there Levi proceeds to pick apart the various questions and objections that had been raised over the years to his earlier accounts of life and death in the Lagers, culminating in his indictment of the Germans in perhaps his most powerful and emotional essay, “Letters from Germans.”
The author’s shocking death in 1987, a few months after the publication of The Drowned and the Saved, turned this work—already a commentary in many respects on his writing as a whole—into his final statement. Levi seems to have sought out every written or oral document on the Holocaust he could find, whether in English, French, or German, and he reviews them in succession. “Works Cited” lists only the books that he mentions explicitly. I felt no need to include his cherished Italian literary classics, confining myself to an occasional footnote. But the text to which Levi returns most obsessively, especially in the final pages, is his own first work, If This Is a Man.
A few of the works he surveys, particularly the testimony of the Sonderkommandos, can make for uncomfortable reading, but Levi defies us to judge the authors for the gruesome actions that enabled them to survive. Their raw and brutal style could not be more different from Levi’s, however, and he could not resist an occasional tweak to his translations of quoted passages, such as his substitution of “completo abbattimento” (complete collapse or destruction) for Filip Müller’s “complete anticlimax,” to describe the experience of liberation. It is hard not to see this one word and its departure from its English source as a window into Levi’s own despondency at the time of writing. The realization that he was not always a dispassionate translator of the works he cites—whether such a stance is even feasible or desirable—guided my approach to the translation, leading me, for example, to translate the German letters directly from the original language, where available.
The greatest challenge in translating Levi’s language is to locate the tipping point between the concrete and the abstract of which he is a master. His style is commonly described as “clinical” or “scientific,” an observation that simply does not hold up to the sheer variety of his works or to the literary ambitions implicit in his emulation, direct and indirect, of the great Italian writers, from Dante to Leopardi to Manzoni. The most difficult words to translate were of course the simplest and the most recurrent. The term “colpa” in Italian can refer to a crime, a sin, a moral or material transgression, and their corollaries, fault and guilt. The colpa of the Germans and senso di colpa of the survivors are intrinsically linked, a bond that is broken when we translate into English. To my sensibility the attempted annihilation of European Jewry is an atrocity that cries out for a word louder than “crime” or “sin,” but colpa is the term that Levi uses, with characteristic restraint, and I hope that my decision to translate it as the “wrongs” of the Germans conveys his moral authority.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, the word cultura and its variants (primarily colto, coltivato, and incolto) present a different order of difficulty. In the Italian language, the notion of “culture” can be quite concrete, as a result of a century-old standardized school curriculum that prioritizes (some might say imposes) a shared artistic and literary heritage. A person “of culture” is someone who is educated, well spoken, versed in the classics, art, music, and even decorative, sartorial, and culinary delights. Levi, however, attacks this notion of culture in the chapter “The Intellectual in Auschwitz,” in defense of the prestige of his own education in the sciences. The stakes are even higher with the opposite, the incolto, the uneducated or uncultured person. It is to this lack that Levi attributes the acquiescence of the German people in Hitler’s monstrous design.
Finally, a word on the title. Levi had originally considered calling his first work I sommersi e i salvati, and eventually adopted it only as a chapter title. The Italian title echoes the Inferno of Dante, particularly the poet’s puzzling use of the word sommersi in Canto XX, line 3. Robert Hollander, in his translation of the Inferno, remarks on “the apparently strikingly inexact word sommersi, which has seemed to many commentators wrong, since the damned are not submerged in water but buried under earth” (New York: Doubleday; 2000; p. 340). Some critics of the previous translation of I sommersi e i salvati have argued for the more literal rendering, “submerged.” I have elected to keep the previous title, with its bitter paradox, for while the “submerged” are indeed the dead, the drowned, the survivors were never completely saved, as Levi attested in his life and work.
—MICHAEL F. MOORE