Bibliografía anotada

Abstract

In “A Good Day” (“Una buona giornata”) included in If This Is a Man – Se questo è un uomo (1947/1958) – Levi refers to Auschwitz as “the Tower of Babel; and that is what we call it, Babelturm, Bobelturm” (Levi 2016a, I: 69) – “la Torre di Babele, è così noi la chiamiamo: Babelturm, Bobelturm” (Levi 2016b, I: 193). This extermination camp was a multilingual inferno which fostered human beings’ incommunication and dehumanization. For her part, the Gulag writing scholar Leona Toker, one of the contributors in this special issue, also points to Levi’s “theme of the Babel tower,” and refers to the Gulag camps’ “heteroglossia” which “became a part of the counterculture” (2000: 98). And for his part, Philippe Mesnard, one of Primo Levi’s biographers, points out that “[Levi] believes in the humanity of languages, in the humanizing virtue of the spoken exchange and the sense it stems from” (translation mine; not translated into English) – “[Levi] croit en l’humanité des langues, en la vertu humanisante de l’échange parlé et du sens qui en provient” (Mesnard 2011: 461). Behind this claim is our idea of listening to the witness-survivors’ voice in the original version supported by the corresponding translation into English so that it can be more widely rea