“Eclipse of the Word”: Passages in “Canto of Ulysses” of Primo Levi

Abstract

“Today Primo is the one who goes with me to get the soup” (LEVI, 1988, p. 163). The phrase, apparently simple, symbolizes the invitation to an exchange that is barely possible. The concentrationary space, where language undergoes what, wisely, the Italian writer Primo Levi (1919-1987) defines as the “eclipse of the word”, at that moment opens itself, more specifically in the chapter “The canto of Ulysses” of If this is a man? (1947), for another possibility. The word that little by little is losing life finds in the dialogue between the two characters, Primo Levi and Pikolo, a re-encounter with their subjectivities but not only. It is thinking about this chapter, and above all, about the translation gesture as an act of love, that this essay is inscribed. In this sense, as an encounter, the translation will be part of movements that do not necessarily need to be binary, that is, a split between an inside and an outside, between the self and the other. In fact, in Translation as culture, Gayatri Spivak refers to translation as not only an act of intimate reading but also an act of love, surrender, and solidarity. It is by listening to Pikolo that the translating act of Levi who recites the verses of the Divine Comedy is made possible. And if “No speech is a speech until it is heard” (SPIVAK, 2015, p. 58), it is intended to reflect      how translation takes place in “The canto of Ulysses” and what paths it makes possible within an environment as bordered as the Camp.