February 14, 2019
“Il Canto di Ulisse” is not only the generative cell of Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo; it is also the testament of a perceptive reader of Dante. In particular, it offers an opportunity to see a call to understand translation as Dante’s final linguistic horizon for his poem as well as the antidote to the prevarication and violence inscribed at the core of any nationalistic approach to language. Moving between the texts of Levi and Dante (in both his pre-comedic works and the co-numerary cantos of Inferno XXVI) as well as Augustine and Walter Benjamin (from De Doctrina Christiana to the Task of the Translator) my talk traces the contours of a cultural connection.
