primo levi

Shemà

You who live secure
In your warm houses,
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:

Consider whether this is a man,
Who labours in mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or no.
Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter.

Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,
When you go to bed, when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble,
Disease render you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.


trans by ruth Feldman and brian swann

primo levi

Memorandum Book

In such a night as this,
Of north wind and rain mixed with snow,
There is someone who drowses in front of a TV,
Someone who resolves to rob a bank.
In such a night as this,
Distant as it takes light to travel in five days,
There is a comet that plummets onto us
From the black womb without height or depth.
The same one Giotto painted,
It will bring neither luck nor disasters,
But ancient ice and a reply, eprhaps.
In such a night as this
There is a half-mad old man,
Fine metalworker in his day,
And now he sleeps at Porta Nova, drinks.
In such a night as this
Someone stretches out next to a woman
And feels he no longer had weight,
That his tomorrows no longer have weight.
And the flow of time pauses briefly.
In such a night as this
witches used to choose hemlock and hellebore
To pick up the light of the moon
And cook in their kitchens.
In such a night as this
there's a transvestite on Corso Matteotti
Who would give a kidney and a lung
to grow hollow and become a woman.
In such a night as this
There are seven young men in lab coats,
Four of them smoking pipes.
They are designing a very long channel
In which to unite a bundle of protons
Almost as swift as light.
If they succeed, the world will blow up.
In such a night as this,
A poet strains his bow, searching for a word
That can contain the typhoon's force,
The secrets of blood and seed.


trans by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann