The Survivor
Primo LeviSözler ve Alıntılar
February 25, 1944
I'd like to believe something beyond,
Beyond death destroyed you.
I'd like to be able to say the fierceness
With which we wanted then,
We who were already drowned,
To be able someday to walk again together
Free under the sun.
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The Girl of Pompeii
Since the anguish of each belongs to us all
We're still living yours, scrawny little girl
Clinging convulsively to your mother
As if you wanted to get back inside her
When the sky went black that afternoon.
To no avail, because the sky, turned poison,
Infiltrated the shut windows of your quiet
House with its thick walls to find you
Happy
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Buna
Wounded feet and cursed earth,
The line long in the gray mornings.
Buna's thousand chimneys smoke,
A day like every other day awaits us.
The sirens are terrific in the dawn:
‘You, multitude with wasted faces,
Another day of suffering begins
On the monotonous horror of the mud.'
I see you in my heart, exhausted comrade;
Suffering comrade, I can read your eyes.
In your breast you have cold hunger nothing
The last courage has been broken in you.
Gray companion, you were a strong man,
A woman traveled next to you.
Empty comrade who has no more name,
A desert who has no more tears,
So poor that you have no more pain,
So exhausted you have no more fear,
Spent man who was a strong man once:
If we were to meet again
Up in the sweet world under the sun,
With what face would we confront each other?
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Airport
We're leaving. The great cavelike bird
Sucks up everyone indiscriminately:
We cross Acheron
Via a telescopic concourse.
It taxis, accelerates, gathers power,
Lifts off, and suddenly is raised into the sky
Body and soul: our bodies and souls.
Are we worthy of Assumption?
Now it flies into the purple twilight
Over the ice of nameless seas,
Or above a mantle of dark clouds,
As if this planet of ours
Had hidden its face in shame.
Now it's flying with dull thuds
Almost as if someone were driving piles
Into the Stygian swamp;
Now along soft,
Smoothed tracks of air.
The night is without sleep, but brief,
Brief the way no night has ever been:
Light and carefree like a first night.
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Autobiography
I'm old like the world, I who speak to you.
In the dark of origins
I swarmed in the blind furrows of the sea,
Blind myself: but already I wanted the light
When I was still lying in the sea floor's filth.
I swilled salt with a thousand infinitesimal throats;
I was a fish, sleek and fast. I avoided traps,
I showed my young the sidewise tracks of the crab.
Taller than a tower, I offended the sky,
The mountains trembled at my storming step
And my brute hulk obstructed the valleys:
The rocks of your time still sport
The incredible mark of my scales.
I sang to the moon the liquid song of the toad,
And my patient hunger perforated wood.
Impetuous skittish stag
I ran through woods that are ashes today, and gloried in my strength.
I was drunk cicada, astute horrendous tarantula,
And salamander and scorpion and unicorn and asp.
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Shemà
You who live safe
In your heated houses
You who come home at night to find
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man,
Who toils in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for half a loaf
Who dies by a yes or a no.
Consider if this is a woman,
With no hair and no name
With no more strength to remember
With empty eyes and a womb as cold
As a frog in winter.
Ponder that this happened:
I consign these words to you.
Carve them into your hearts
At home or on the street,
Going to bed or rising:
Tell them to your children.
Or may your house fall down,
May illness make you helpless,
And your children turn their eyes from you.
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