Arduous tasks : Primo Levi, translation, and the transmission of Holocaust testimony / Lina N. Insana.

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In Arduous Tasks , Lina N. Insana demonstrates how translation functions as a metaphor for the transmission of Holocaust testimony and broadens the parameters of survivor testimony.

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CHOICE Review

Insana (French and Italian, Univ. of Pittsburgh) argues that translation is central to understanding Levi's literary and testimonial corpus, but she equivocates between figurative and literal understandings of translation. Instances of the former, which reduce translation to interpretation, predominate and are not useful. Only in discussing the latter, as in her chapter on Levi's 1983 translation of Kafka's The Trial, does Insana's inquiry become meaningful. Here, and in a regrettably brief conclusion, the author points out the doubled nature of Levi's attitude toward translation: when it is practiced by him, it is an act of restitution, and thereby a way of witnessing or even healing; when practiced on him, it is an act of aggression that vitiates these possibilities. Insana mostly discounts this ambiguity, suggesting instead that translation functions always in the same way, namely, to foreground the very fact of translation. She concludes only that translation is important to Levi because it is central to the act of witnessing. She neglects, however, the moral and theoretical questions inherent in approaching the Holocaust as something that can be witnessed. Ultimately, Insana only gestures toward the difficult questions she ought to have considered all along. Summing Up: Not recommended. D. Stuber Hendrix College