“Labour of Civilization and Peace”: Primo Levi Looks at Interpreters and Interpreting

Abstract

“We can and must communicate,” Primo Levi states uncompromisingly at the beginning of the chapter “Communicating” in I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned and the Saved). He sharply dismisses the notion of incomunicabilità—the inability of alienated individuals in capitalist societies to convey thoughts or feelings to others—made famous by the debates arising from the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, and makes his point by referring to a scene from one of Antonioni’s films, The Red Desert (1964). Toward the end of the film, the main character wanders around a harbor at night and meets a Turkish sailor. In broken Italian sentences, she attempts to tell him about her feelings of disorientation and aimlessness; the sailor repeats, in Turkish, that he cannot understand her, but offers coffee and help. While Antonioni’s scene focuses on the two characters’ failure to communicate, Levi’s reading emphasizes their attempts to do so: they do not have a common language, but they do try to speak to each other. “On both sides … there is the will to communicate,” stresses Levi:

We can and must communicate. It is a useful and easy way of contributing to people’s peace of mind, including our own, because silence—the absence of signals—is in itself a signal, but it is ambiguous, and ambiguity produces unease and suspicion.¹

Human beings, he adds, are “biologically and socially predisposed to communication” because they can speak, and therefore refusing to communicate is ethically wrong (“è colpa”).²