Primo Levi

1919–87

Levi hated labels. Throughout Il sistema periodico (The Periodic Table), a work of literature impossible to define, he talks about the Germans’ love for classifying things. Levi survived Auschwitz, and he resists classification. He was a human polyhedron who contemplated the act of transformation throughout his life: the conversion of elements, and the double nature of things. He was a writer who worked in multiple genres and a chemist who worked for years at a paint factory. Born to a Jewish family in Turin, Levi was a young man of letters long before his deportation in 1943 – a lover of adventure stories, of Herman Melville, of François Rabelais. The story included here, at once cruel and magical, features a centaur as a character and celebrates life, desire and the animal aspect of man. It comes from Storie naturali (Natural Histories), published in 1966. The collection was dismissed as science fiction, and Levi published it under the pseudonym, Damiano Malabaila, perhaps to evade the label which had been affixed to him as a ‘Holocaust writer’ after the publication of Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man), an account of his time in Auschwitz. Poorly received when first published, Se questo è un uomo was reprinted and widely appreciated only in 1958, with the flap copy anonymously written by Calvino, and is now required reading for every high-school student in Italy. The flap copy of Storie naturali, which Levi composed himself, was also anonymous, but more or less reveals his identity: ‘I would not publish them if I had not noticed (not immediately, to tell the truth) that a continuity – a bridge – existed between the Lager [camp] and these inventions.’ Levi received the Strega Prize in 1979 for La chiave a stella (published in English as both The Wrench and The Monkey’s Wrench), a novel in the form of interlinked stories featuring a manual labourer as one of its main characters and incorporating Torinese dialect. He ended his life eight years later, throwing himself down the stairwell of the apartment building where he had been born.

Quaestio de Centauris

Translated by Jenny McPhee

et quae sit iis potandi, comedendi et nubendi ratio. Et fuit debatuta per X hebdomadas inter vesanum auctorem et ejusdem sodales perpetuos G.L. et L.N.

My father kept him in a stall, because he didn’t know where else to keep him. He had been given to him by a friend, a sea captain, who said he had bought him in Salonika: I, however, learned from him directly that he was born in Colophon.

They had strictly forbidden me to go anywhere near him because, they said, he was easily angered and would kick. But from my direct experience I can confirm that this was an old superstition; so from adolescence I never paid much attention to the prohibition and, actually, especially in the winter, I spent many memorable hours with him, and other wonderful times in the summer, when Trachi (this was his name) put me on his back with his own hands and took off at a mad gallop towards the woods on the hills.