Benyamin GhojoghAli Ghodsi. "Attention Mechanism, Transformers, BERT, and GPT: Tutorial and Survey"

• for: language - concept formation, language - formation of abstract concepts

Boroditsky, Lera. How Language Shapes the Way We Think. Streaming Video. TED | TEDWomen 2017, 2017. https://www.ted.com/talks/lera_boroditsky_how_language_shapes_the_way_we_think.

See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKK7wGAYP6k

Kuuk Thaayorre language (Australia) orients everything with respect to cardinal directions or is mapped onto their terrain/land. Even their perception of time (chronology) is mapped onto the land with respect to their bodies.

Perception of events can differ dramatically in different languages based on their constructions and what those constructions dictate.

Example: Accidents in different languages are seen differently. In English, focus is on the actor who receives blame while in Spanish, there is more focus on the action and intention rather than what English would view as "perpetrator". Spanish eyewitness are less likely to remember the actor for testimony versus in English.

• for: definition, definition - CLIP models

• definition: CLIP model

  • contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) model allows model information in one modality - predictive modeling in one domain to be translated to another domain

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Berthier

• for: symbiocene, ecozoic, ecocivilization, eco-civilization, animal communication, inter-species communication, Azi Raskin, Earth Species Project, umwelt

• summary

  • Very interesting talk given by Aza Raskin, founder of:
    • https://www.earthspecies.org/
    • cofounder of https://www.humanetech.com/
  • on two main themes:
    • how AI is being used to decode language communication of many different plant and animal species, including inter-fauna, inter-flora and fauna-flora cross communication
    • how AI used to study human languages has detected a universal meaning shape between all languages.

• reference

  • https://www.earthspecies.org/

• for: animal motion and language

• for: AI - everything is one thing - language

• comment

  • Has importance for the Indyweb / Indranet

• for: making the invisible visible, decoding the language of the biosphere

• for: quote, quote - age of whale and dolphin languages

• quote

  • whales and dolphins have had culture passed down vocally for 34 million years
  • humans have only been speaking vocally impacted on culture for like 200 000 years tops and
  • that which is oldest correlates with that which is wisest
• author - Aza Raskin
• date: 2023

• for: language, quote, quote - Aza Raskin, quote - universal language shape, quote - universal meaning shape, CHD, CHD - language - universal meaning shape

• quote

  • pretty much every human language that's been tried ends up fitting in a kind of universal human meaning shape
  • which I think is just so profound especially in this time of such deep division that there is a universal hidden structure underlying us all

• for: key idea, key idea - language research , AI - language research - semantic to geometric

• for:AI - language research, AI - language research - semantic invariancy

• for: language graph, linguistic graph
• title: An application of graph theory to linguistic complexity
• author: Alexander Piperski
• date: 2014
• source:
  • chrome-extension://bjfhmglciegochdpefhhlphglcehbmek/pdfjs/web/viewer.html?file=https%3A%2F%2Fpublications.hse.ru%2Fpubs%2Fshare%2Ffolder%2Flenyneoat0%2F178007616.pdf

"Surrendering" by Ocean Vuong

1. He moved into United State when he was age of five. He first came to United State when he started kindergarten. Seven of them live in the apartment one bedroom and bathroom to share the whole. He learned ABC song and alphabet. He knows the ABC that he forgot the letter is M comes before N.

2. He went to the library since he was on the recess. He was in the library hiding from the bully. The bully just came in the library doing the slight frame and soft voice in front of the kid where he sit. He left the library, he walked to the middle of the schoolyard started calling him the pansy and fairy. He knows the American flag that he recognize on the microphone against the backdrop.

LLAMA 2 Release Paper

Daniel Adiwardana Minh-Thang Luong David R. So Jamie Hall, Noah Fiedel Romal Thoppilan Zi Yang Apoorv Kulshreshtha, Gaurav Nemade Yifeng Lu Quoc V. Le "Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot" Google Research, Brain Team

Defined the SSI metric for chatbots used in LAMDA paper by google.

Nope (re: offline). You're confusing "browser-based" and "Web-based" (sort of the way people confuse statically typed" versus strongly typed*). They're different. You can have a fully offline browser-based interface. Most common browsers are every bit as amenable as being used as simple document viewers as Preview.app or Microsoft Word is. The browser's native file format is just a different sort—not DOCX, and not PDF (although lots of browsers can do PDF, too; you can't write apps in PDF, though—at least not in the subset supported by typical browsers). Instead of Office macros written in VBA, browsers support scripting offline documents in JS just like online documents. You can run your offline programs using the browser runtime, unless they're written to expect otherwise.

The causative connector in inverted commas aims at highlighting the perverted logic regulating life in the Lager. Levi repeatedly noticed this disturbing lack of consequentiality, which prevented the prisoners from deducing from observation what the expected behaviour was, which in turn translated into a constant state of insecurity and danger: ‘ogni congettura è arbitraria ed esattamente priva di ogni fondamento reale’. Pikolo’s privileged condition follows another ‘fierce law’ of the Lager: ‘a chi ha, sarà dato; a chi non ha, a quello sarà tolto’.

EL

The focus of ecosemiotics is ‘on the interactions between environmental conditions and semiotics processes and the diversity of life stories, meaning-making strategies, and narratives that spring from these intertwinings’ (Maran 2020, 4). One of the main difficulties in any ecosemiotic approach is that cultural entities are predominantly symbolic and therefore they are relatively independent from their environmental conditions, as symbols are made autonomous from their objects. In other words, because of the complex and highly symbolic quality of our human communications, we constantly run the risk of creating artifacts that are self-sufficient and closed, with little to no relationship with the actual material circumstances they describe and in which they are involved. This is an apparent danger for any form of literary narrative that aims to the status of testimony, as bearing witness (to the complexity of the nonhuman world as much as to what happened in Auschwitz) requires instead referring to a material reality that lies outside the text. To avoid a radical symbolic self-sufficiency, ecosemiotics scholars suggest paying attention to the inclusion of simpler iconic and (especially) indexical sign relations, as they ‘establish both the connection between the text and the communicative situation as well as make it possible to distinguish between the discursive universe and the real world’ (Maran, 33).

A crucial group of indexical signs is known in linguistics as deictics. Spatial and temporal words, such as here, or this, or now, have fixed semantic meanings, but their information refers to a specific context without which they cannot be properly interpreted. For instance, and broadly speaking, if I say ‘this’ in my speech, my interlocutor and I need to share an extra-linguistic context in which the close object I am pointing to with my deictic does exist. The absence of a shared material context in literary texts makes the use of deixis particularly poignant, as it inevitably incurs in some sort of paradoxical double experience: a similarity because both narrator and readers are surrounded by a material reality in which words like ‘this’ or ‘now’ have a specific meaning, and a disjunction between the context of the former and the context of the latter as they likely diverge (cfr. Uspenskij 2008, 112).

Beginning with the very title of his first book (Se questo è un uomo / If This Is a Man (my emphasis)), Levi’s use of deictics is remarkable in size and meaning, and plays a crucial role in his testimonial work. For instance, if we consider how he utilises the word ‘qui’ (here) in the context of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, we notice four occurrences, all of them in pivotal moments of friction between linguistic and extra-linguistic realities. In fact, Levi twice employs ‘qui’ in relation to the passage of the Commedia he is trying to remember (‘Qui mi fermo’; ‘Qui ancora una lacuna’). They represent a sort of pause in the character Levi’s effort to communicate with Pikolo, a mark of discourse interruption and ultimately of failure, as in both instances they denote a gap – a ‘lacuna’, as Levi calls it – in the intradiegetic attempt to teach his friend some Italian language and, most importantly, to share Dante’s poetry with him. Twice instead the deictic refers to the actual external environment of the concentration camp (‘come si dice qui’; ‘del nostro essere oggi qui’). In this case, too, the deictic determines a break of communication, but the relationship that is interrupted is between the intradiegetic narrator and the reader. The deictic ‘qui’ in the literary text refers in fact to a reality that is surely not shared by the readers of SQ, who likely have a completely different context denoted by ‘qui’ (the library, or their room, but almost certainly not Auschwitz). The deictic thus highlights an ambivalence, as every reader has their own experience of ‘qui’ and yet cannot truly refer to the reality to which the ‘qui’ in Levi’s book points, both epistemologically and ethically (as the reality of Auschwitz is almost unknowable to those who did not experience it). To paraphrase Maran, we may say that the ‘qui’ in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ emphasises both a connection and a distance between the discursive world of the text and the external reality of both the first-hand witness and the readers.

In a famous passage of SQ, Levi uses a different series of deictics but a similar strategy to address precisely the almost inconceivable distance between different instances of ‘qui’, as he writes that ‘questo vero oggi in cui io sto seduto a un tavolo e scrivo, io stesso non sono convinto che queste cose sono realmente accadute’ (emphasis added to the deictics).

Yet, the most radical application of such usage of deixis is in Il sistema periodico. The fictional testimony of the atom of carbon included in this volume ends in fact with the sentence ‘un doppio scatto, in su ed in giù, fra due livelli d’energia guida questa mia mano ad imprimere sulla carta questo punto: questo’ (OC I, 1032). In a story that links the entanglement of the human and the nonhuman world to the act of writing, the deictic metalinguistically redoubles and forces readers to pay attention to the material context of our reading. In pointing to its own materiality made of ink or graphite (carbon again!), Levi thus transforms the full stop from a mere convention into a literary strategy in which indexicality becomes a crucial testimonial tool capable of bringing together different realities without necessarily overlapping them. The deictic therefore functions as a sort of multistable sign through which we experience both writing and the external world; our presence and the presence of others; what happened out there and what is instead happening ‘qui’, here.

(On other instances of 'qui' in this chapter, see here.)

DB

This paragraph fascinatingly exemplifies how a text can build on bodily patterns and sensorimotor experience to produce an effect that enriches its semantic meaning. Positioned towards the end of the chapter, it coincides with the emotional peak of Levi’s attempt to explain Dante’s Commedia to Pikolo. The conversation leads Levi’s mind outside of the camp and far from his present condition (‘Per un momento, ho dimenticato chi sono e dove sono’), back to Turin (‘non lasciarmi pensare alle mie montagne, che comparivano nel bruno della sera quando tornavo in treno da Milano a Torino!’) and to a place where it is possible to devote time and mental effort to existential issues other than bare survival. Yet, at the same time, it is Levi’s present condition that makes it all the more important to convey to Pikolo the relevance of Ulysses’ story and Dante’s recounting of it.

The feeling of this sudden expansion – towards other geographical places, past times, and higher meanings – is rendered through various stylistic devices. While the average length of sentences in the chapter is 16.5 words (Voyant Tools), this sentence counts 74 words; the anomalous length of the sentence dovetails with the unusual breadth of Levi’s thoughts, with how far he concedes himself to go with his mind away from the concerns of his life in the camp. Within this continuous flow of words, the urgency of Levi’s present task is formally conveyed through the accumulation of paratactic sentences linked via asyndeton, which reinforce the idea of a linear proceeding, simply propelled forward without strong control (which would be expressed by a period with a more complex and rigid structure), stretching out towards meanings that seem to escape Levi’s reach (and whose scope progressively increases: specific textual passages; the Middle Ages; human destiny). However, this long, loosely ordered period is delimited by words with a high deictic power: ‘Trattengo’ and ‘oggi qui’. Both the opening verb and the closing pair of adverbs (temporal and spatial) identify a deictic centre that coincides with the narrator (and the reader): in between, the paragraph unfolds in a flow that leads both narrator and reader far from the camp, in an encompassing movement that reaches out in time and space to the point of touching and almost enfolding something ‘gigantesco’, which is the sense of destiny of the entire human race, and then swiftly reverts to the starting point of the here and now (‘oggi qui’). (For more on this 'qui', see here.)

The meaning of Levi’s words is reinforced thanks to a conceptual metaphor operating unconsciously which is that of THINKING IS MOVING (writing conceptual metaphors in capital letters is a linguistics convention). THINKING IS MOVING is an elaboration of the very general conceptual metaphor MIND IS BODY, which means that we automatically tend to conceptualise mental activities in terms of bodily activities, because the latter are those of which we have immediate experience. In this paragraph, the encompassing wandering of Levi’s thoughts, its breadth and immense distance from the reality of the camp, is conveyed through strategies that all variably rely on the reader’s bodily experience. Sensorimotor experience operates unconsciously and yet plays a crucial role: it is our non-representational knowledge of what is feels like to move through open spaces, to be held vs. be released, to roam freely with our bodies, that scaffolds and enriches our understanding of what it means to metaphorically roam with one’s mind. Thanks to this metaphor, because the deictic centre at the beginning and at the end of the period is the same and is close to the narrator (reader), this period is endowed with a feeling of circularity, of reaching out and returning to the starting point, which is not explicitly expressed in the text and is rather projected by the reader’s embodied experience.

MB

In this same paragraph, the ‘Pikolo’ is said to be a ‘fattorino-scritturale, addetto alla pulizia della baracca, alle consegne degli attrezzi, alla lavatura delle gamelle, alla contabilità delle ore di lavoro del Kommando’, and three paragraphs later Levi adds that ‘la carica di Pikolo costituisce un gradino già assai elevato nella gerarchia delle Prominenze’.

Whereas the other titles mentioned in this chapter - Vorarbeiter; Kapo - identify recognised positions within the hierarchy of the Lager, Pikolo, according to the testimony of Jean Samuel, was the invention of Primo Levi: ‘Pikolo was not a camp job. The term was coined for me by Primo Levi. I was the only Pikolo. Of course, all the Kapos had helpers, often very young people, sometimes as young as twelve, who served as their assistants, doing everything they asked, including prostitution. The Kapos’ lovers, their sexual victims, were called “Pipel”. I escaped all that’ (Samuel, Dreyfus 2015, 37; my translation).

Jean’s testimony also raises questions about the spelling of this term. In a letter he sent to Levi on 13 March 1946, Jean signed his name with his title and identification number from Auschwitz, ‘Picolo ex 176.397’, amending the spelling to ‘Piccolo’ in subsequent correspondence (Franceschini 2017, 268). Moreover, Levi replied to Jean’s letter with a note dated 24 May 1946, attached to which was an early draft of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, which differs in some ways from what would become the published version, including identifying Levi’s conversation partner as ‘Jean detto Piccolo', a spelling that corresponds to that adopted in the draft of the chapter that Levi sent to Anna Foa on 14 February 1946 (269). Beginning with the first edition of SQ, however, the spelling of Jean’s title was changed to ‘Pikolo’. Fabrizio Franceschini argues that Levi adopted this term, with its new spelling, from its common usage in northern Italian (and possibly also in Vienna in German usage) to refer to shop boys and other minor functionaries (272-79).

CLL

The Vorarbeiter, or foreman, was responsible for supervising the prisoners’ labour. This was a privileged position within the Lager, for which extra food rations were provided (Megargee 2009-2012, 200). A study of another camp reports that those ‘employed as foremen (Vorarbeiter) represented the most hateful attitudes towards Jews’ (4), a finding that might inform our understanding of Levi’s account of Auschwitz. In SQ, Levi discusses the Vorarbeiter in the chapter ‘Il lavoro’, where he explains the discriminatory power that the role affords: ‘Il Vorarbeiter ha distribuito le leve di ferro a noi e i martinetti ai suoi amici’ (OC I, 44).

For confirmation of the violence with which this power was enforced, we can consult the archives of the United States Holocaust Museum, which contain the contents of a talk given to members of the French Army in October November 1945 in which the deportee Henry Cogenson testified that: ‘As for Kapos and Vorarbeiter, mostly German, Russian or Polish “common criminals”, they, like the SS, never knew when to stop; after having been hit by others when they were simple inmates, they returned the favor on their peers now that they were given a smidgen of power. It was rather common to bring back to camp in the evening a comrade who had been struck during the day and was unable to withstand the blows’. The Auschwitz Museum online hosts images of the armbands worn by the Vorarbeiter, and of the whips they used to beat prisoners. We might also compare Levi’s account with that contained in the Auschwitz survivor Tadeusz Borowski’s 1946 collection of short stories Pożegnanie z Marią (This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, 1967), wherein the Vorarbeiter Tadeusz is a frequent protagonist.

CLL

Levi’s ‘chissà’ suggests that the decision to discuss Dante’s ‘Canto di Ulisse’ during the walk with Jean was a matter of mere happenstance, or better still of fortune, to use a word that was dear to Levi and crucial to his conception of the Lager (Gordon 2010). ‘Who knows’ how and why the Inferno, and not another text, came to Levi in this pivotal moment of human connection amidst the inhumanity of Auschwitz?

To answer that question, we may wish to note that Dante’s Inferno similarly occurred to many others among the first witnesses to describe the horrors of the Lager. In an article published in the Socialist daily Avanti! in October 1945, Francisco Largo Caballero, leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, recounted his ‘Ritorno dalla morte’ after being interned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, which he described as ‘uno scenario da “Inferno” dantesco’. Writing in the same daily in July 1949, the French Resistance fighter turned member of Parliament Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier described her own internment in similar terms: ‘Auschwitz! Si è molto scritto sui campi della morte: quando ci eravamo ci pareva che solo un Dante avrebbe potuto descriverne l’orrore per coloro che non ci sono stati’. Umberto Consiglio, bearing witness to the enormity of Dachau for L’Èra Nuova in May 1946, argued that ‘[s]olo Dante, guidato dal suo alto ingegno e aiutato dalle Muse, potrebbe degnamente descrivere quello che è stato il martirio di migliaia e migliaia di esseri umani’, comparing his arrival in the camp to ‘il “lasciate ogni speranza” della porta dell’inferno dantesco’. In that same year, Aldo Pantozzi described Mauthausen as the brutal realisation of Dante’s vision: ‘La fantasia di Dante relegò nelle infernali viscere della terra tali scene: dovevano passare sei secoli di civiltà perché esse, dalle tenebre infernali, venissero trasferite alla luce del sole dalla barbarie nazista’ (Pantozzi 2002, 88). In Liana Millu’s 1947 Il fumo di Birkenau, she describes that infamous Polish camp as having ‘l’aria “senza tempo” descritta nel cerchio dantesco’, relates how during her imprisonment her thoughts became ‘un tormento quasi dantesco’, and recalls her struggle to call to mind, as she sought to make sense of her condition, ‘un canto dell’Inferno dove si parla di dannati che trasportano pietre’ (Millu 1947, 36, 139, 166). As Robert Gordon summarises the situation, in Italian accounts of the Shoah, ‘Dante’s Inferno is a familiar and recurrent reference point’ (Gordon 2010, 52).

Far from a random occurrence or even a fortunate intimation, therefore, Levi’s decision to deliver a Lectura Dantis while in confinement might best be understood as conforming to a recognisable cultural pattern. Consider that while Levi and Jean were discussing ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ in Auschwitz, more than five thousand miles away, the Italian prisoner of war Giuseppe Berto was offering his own interpretation of Dante to his fellow internees in Camp Hereford, Texas, where he was held from May 1943 to February 1946 (Culicelli 2022, 286). Berto, who would go on to achieve literary acclaim with the publication of the novel Il cielo è rosso in 1950, had been captured in Africa, and the experience of military defeat, coinciding with the collapse of Mussolini’s regime, shattered his most deeply held convictions. Unlike many other Fascist true-believers, however, Berto refused to pass directly into the anti-Fascist camp, engaging instead in a continued confrontation with his former faith motivated by an agnosticism that he termed afascismo (CIDAS, 88).

That confrontation propels Berto’s Dante lectures, which he began to deliver in November 1943, but which were published for the first time only in 2015. If Levi focused on Inferno 26, Berto chose instead Inferno 5, the canto of Paolo and Francesca, with whom his current fate, cut off not only from his home but also from his previous ideals, inspired evident sympathy. It is not hard to recognise Berto himself in the description of Francesca’s ‘malinconia di cose belle perdute per sempre’ (461). Yet Berto appears to identify more with Dante the poet than with the sinners whom Dante pilgrim encounters during his voyage. Having witnessed first-hand, and with profound regret, the demise of Fascist Italy’s imperial ambitions in Africa, Berto presents a Dante

ancorato a quella sua medioevale concezione imperialistica, mentre l’impero e il potere teocratico dei papi erano ormai cose morte […]. E chi vi ha detto questo, vi ha anche spiegato come gran parte della grandezza morale di Dante abbia le sue origini appunto nella sua fede in ideali sorpassati. E questa interpretazione, ben che non possa del tutto convincerci, ci affascina per la sua novità, e sopra tutto perché molti di noi sappiamo quanto costi mantenere fede a quegli ideali che sembrano perduti (451).

With these words, Berto unmistakably addressed himself to all those Blackshirts whose honour rested on the refusal to forsake their ideals even when all seemed to be lost.

Primo Levi’s ideals are of course quite far from those promoted by Giuseppe Berto. Levi had been captured as an anti-Fascist partisan, Berto as a Fascist colonial soldier. Yet, just as Levi, interpreting Dante in Auschwitz, finds ‘forse il perché del nostro destino, del nostro essere qui oggi’, so too does Berto find that the Commedia speaks to his conflicted condition before the ‘pulpiti herefordiani’ (448). Ultimately, that condition appears to align Berto more closely with Levi than with Dante, whose unforgiving judgement of the sinners in Inferno clashes with more modern sensibilities. For Berto, ‘la poesia di Dante si rafforza e si esalta proprio dove i sentimenti umani raggiungono una vetta tale da superare i pregiudizi del poeta […]. Farinata, Ulisse, Brunetto Latini hanno un valore umano che sta al di sopra della religione e della morale’ (455-456). Does not this celebration of the sinners’ humanity echo, across a vast physical and ideological divide, the ‘così umano e necessario e pure inaspettato anacronismo’ that Levi discovers in his sympathetic identification with Dante’s Ulysses?

CLL

Levi introduces the term ‘Häftling’ (pl. Häftlinge), German for ‘detainee’ or ‘prisoner,’ in the chapter of SQ entitled ‘Sul fondo,’ wherein he recounts his arrival in Auschwitz, a camp designed to produce ‘un uomo vuoto, ridotto a sofferenza e bisogno, dimentico di dignità e discernimento’, so that ‘Si comprenderà allora il duplice significato del termine «Campo di annientamento»’ (OC I, 152). It is immediately after offering this reflection that Levi provides the term used to denote this ‘uomo vuoto’: ‘Häftling: ho imparato che io sono uno Häftling. Il mio nome è 174 517; siamo stati battezzati, porteremo finché vivremo il marchio tatuato sul braccio sinistro’ (ibid.). Later in the same chapter, Levi explains the distinction between ‘Häftlinge privilegiati’ and ‘comuni Häftlinge’ and describes how the various groups of prisoners are distinguished: ‘Tutti sono vestiti a righe, sono tutti Häftlinge, ma i criminali portano accanto al numero, cucito sulla giacca, un triangolo verde; i politici un triangolo rosso; gli ebrei, che costituiscono la grande maggioranza, portano la stella ebraica, rossa e gialla’ (OC I, 158).

CLL

This is not the only porcupine to appear in Levi’s writing. In The Truce, we learn that Levi’s companion Cesare, disappointed after a misadventure on the black market, spent two days ‘huddled on his bed, bristling like a porcupine’ (CW I, 338). In The Wrench, Faussone identifies a clearing in which ‘a porcupine was advancing cautiously, with brief stops and starts’ (CW II, 1025). These English translations suggest a possible connection to SQ that is less obvious in the original Italian, where the text refers not to an ‘istrice’ but rather to a ‘porcospino’. In La tregua, Cesare is described as ‘ispido come un porcospino’ (OC I, 417), and in La chiave a stella, Faussone points out that ‘un porcospino avanzava cauto, con brevi arresti e riprese’ (OC I, 1099).

The terms ‘istrice’ and ‘porcospino’ refer to animals of the same family, Hystricidae, and identify the same species, Hystrix cristata, the crested porcupine, which is native to Italy. In the Grande dizionario italiano dell’uso, ‘porcospino’ is listed as a synonym of ‘istrice’, which is defined scientifically as a ‘piccolo mammifero con il corpo coperto di aculei appuntiti ed erettili’, with a second figurative meaning as a ‘persona intrattabile, scontrosa’ (805).

Despite their similarity, there is a notable difference between the two synonyms with regard to their literary resonances. As the Tesoro della lingua Italiana delle Origini demonstrates, ‘istrice’ was the preferred term for medieval philosophers, historians, and poets, including Boccaccio, who used it in his Caccia di Diana and Ameto, where the husband’s beard is described as being ‘né più né meno pugnente che le penne d’uno istrice’ (Tutte le opera di Giovanni Boccaccio, 774). The Grande dizionario della lingua italiana attests subsequent citations from Parini, D’Annunzio, De Amicis, and Foscolo, with the latter two adopting the term metaphorically to refer to a person who is taciturn and cagey (615).

I suspect that Levi had another literary reference in mind when he opted for ‘istrice’ rather than ‘porcospino’ in SQ. Here are the words with which the Ghost in Shakespeare’s Hamlet reveals both his identity and the infernal torments he suffers in the afterlife:

I am thy father’s spirit,

Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,

And for the day confined to fast in fires,

Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature

Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid

To tell the secrets of my prison-house,

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word

Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,

Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,

Thy knotted and combined locks to part

And each particular hair to stand on end,

Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:

But this eternal blazon must not be

To ears of flesh and blood. List, list, O, list! (Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5, vv. 14-28)

In standard Italian translations dating back at least to the early nineteenth century, Shakepeare’s ‘fretful porpentine’ is rendered as a ‘pauroso istrice’ (Amleto, 59). This word, and these lines, would seem to resonate remarkably well with Levi’s description of the hell of Auschwitz, which is the context for his invocation of ‘la difesa dell’istrice’.

After all, Hamlet’s Ghost is compelled to speak quickly, in the brief interval he has been granted in his eternal suffering:

My hour is almost come,

When I to sulphurous and tormenting flames

Must render up myself (Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5, vv. 5-7)

Cannot Levi and Jean say the same thing? The ‘lungo giro’ that Jean has arranged buys them a brief respite, but this precious time has begun to disappear as soon as it arrives: ‘quest’ora già non è più un’ora’. Cannot Hamlet’s Ghost say the same thing?

The moment of connection and communication at the heart of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ can be said to have begun with Jean’s clever strategy to curry favour with cruel Alex, the Kapo Levi describes as ‘un bestione violento e infido’, who is won over by Jean’s ‘opera lenta cauta e sottile’, finally ceding to him the coveted role of Pikolo. It is this victory that Levi describes as penetrating ‘the porcupine’s defence’. And it is this victory that frees Jean to choose Levi for the task of fetching the daily soup ration, enabling the disquisition on Dante that gives the chapter its title.

If I am correct that the reference to ‘la difesa dell’istrice’ is thus evidence that Levi and Jean’s Dantean voyage begins under the sign of Hamlet, this would be a particularly elegant literary manoeuvre, since the voyage concludes under the very same sign. As their hour runs out once they have reached the kitchen, Levi finds himself unable to say all that needs to be said and is forced to concede that ‘il resto è silenzio’, an unmistakable echo of Hamlet’s final words: ‘the rest is silence’ (Hamlet, Act V, Scene 2, v. 395).

If further evidence for a Shakespearean source text is warranted, I would note that Levi included in Ad ora incerta a poem that explicitly references Hamlet’s Ghost, who is referred to as an ‘old mole’ because he continues to speak from beneath the floorboards (Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5, v. 183). Italian translations render this line as ‘vecchia talpa’, words that Levi borrowed for the title of a 1982 poem, which literalises the reference - the poem is in fact written from the perspective of an old mole - while nevertheless conveying the sense of the original, with its profound intimations of the latent power of buried knowledge.

In altri tempi seguivo le femmine,

E quando ne sentivo una grattare

Mi scavavo la via verso di lei:

Ora non più; se capita, cambio strada.

Ma a luna nuova mi prende il morbino,

E allora qualche volta mi diverto

A sbucare improvviso per spaventare i cani. (OC II, 727)

The reference to an ‘istrice’ in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ similarly suggests hidden depths.

CLL

Interlinguistic necessity. Although containing the record of a ‘lesson’ on Dante’s Inferno 26, the central experience recounted in this chapter is set in motion by linguistic rather than literary elements. Jean desires to learn a new language, Italian, and Primo’s teaching accordingly combines his intermittent recitation of Dante’s text in the original language with a hesitant French commentary on, often a paraphrase of, salient elements in it. At its core, thus, the chapter relates an attempt at interlinguistic mediation. The text’s emphasis on interlinguistic communication is projected against the backdrop of the Lager’s Babel-like dehumanising confusion of languages that Levi explored in other texts (SQ, I sommersi e i salvati). As such, the circumstances of the episode are exceptional.

Jean is an exceptional, and exceptionally positive, character in the universe of the book. He speaks and thinks in two languages: most importantly, he is native in both (‘Jean parlava correntemente francese e tedesco’). As established on the chance encounter with an SS, Rudi the Blockführer, bilingual utterances are for him the norm: ‘È indifferente, può pensare in entrambe le lingue’. The role he plays in the structure of the concentration camp, facilitated by the distinction of his bilingualism, however, is not what is at stake in the episode per se. While Jean certainly has acquired a linguistic capital of sorts, Levi’s narrative insists on what he decides to share of that privilege. His multilingualism is not associated with exclusionary practices, but with the work of intermediation it brings about and the community of intents it creates. The language learning situation is presented as a space in which the power dynamics of the Lager’s languages are suspended and ultimately refused.

(For more on this, go back here or forward here).

SM

Dante’s text ‘riguarda’, ‘has to do with’, Levi and Pikolo. ‘Considerate la vostra semenza: | Fatti non foste a viver come bruti, | Ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza.’ What I would emphasise is that by remembering and translating and discussing Dante, Levi and Pikolo live out that terzina from Inferno 26, or rather, they live out a new version of the terzina. That action - ‘ragionare di queste cose con le stanghe della zuppa sulle spalle’ - is a particular living out of Ulysses’ words. For Levi and Pikolo here, discussing Dante becomes a way of seeking after ‘virtute e conoscenza’, and of going beyond the camp’s Pillars of Hercules; ‘è scagliare se stessi al di là di una barriera’, as Levi writes earlier in the chapter. Yet while Dante’s Ulysses casts aside bonds of friendship and affection - seeing the ‘piéta | del vecchio padre’, the ‘debito amore | lo qual dovea Penelope far lieta’ as obstacles to his pursuit of ‘virtute e conoscenza’ - Levi and Pikolo seek after knowledge through conversation, through attention to each other. In the chapter Pikolo listens, he pays attention, he suggests possible translations, he reassures Levi. Interpreting Inferno 26 - ‘ragionare di queste cose’ - is a joint endeavour (Gordon 2001, 68-70; Insana 2009, 107-10; Montemaggi 2020, 127-42), an endeavour in which Levi and Pikolo pursue virtue and knowledge, but do so in a mode quite different to Ulysses (Montemaggi 2020, 133-35; Montemaggi 2011, 66-67, 71-72).

What seems to matter particularly in this passage is that Pikolo and Levi realise that Dante’s is a text about them. ‘[F]orse […] ha ricevuto il messaggio, ha sentito che lo riguarda, che riguarda tutti gli uomini in travaglio, e noi in specie; e che riguarda noi due’ (emphasis added). The ‘messaggio’ arising from Levi and Pikolo’s joint interpretation of Dante is not only a fuller understanding of the ideas Dante is expressing, important as that is, nor is the message limited to assessing the truthfulness of Dante’s words, important as that is too. But - and perhaps underpinning both of these - the ‘messaggio’ also involves recognising that Dante’s words speak about and to Levi and Pikolo. The repeated ‘riguarda’ casts the terzina as not just concerning humanity as a general, abstract category, but as concerning specific, particular lives: Pikolo’s and Levi’s. In the movement from Pikolo (‘lo riguarda’) outward to all those in travail and then narrowing inward to those in the camps (‘noi’) and then inward again to Pikolo and Levi (‘noi due’), the ‘riguarda’ also cast the terzina as open to be encountered in an equally personal light by others.

At least here, the value of the Commedia seems ultimately to lie not in the particular elaboration that Dante offers of various worldviews, but in how the text becomes part of a reader’s lived experience. The two are, however, connected, and one of the questions arising from this chapter is: How? Levi tells us that Dante’s words - in and through the context of Levi’s encounter with them in Auschwitz - revealed to him, ‘perhaps’, ‘forse’, ‘il perché del nostro destino, del nostro essere oggi qui’. A question perhaps worth investigating further would be: How might moving towards fuller understanding of the Commedia and particular lived experiences of Dante’s text inform each other?

HPR

Levi and Jean’s fleeting Dantean reprieve is abruptly halted by the return to the ‘sordid, ragged crowd of the soup queue’. Standing in contrast with Dante’s majestic verses and Ulysses’ voyage of discovery is the cramped enclosure of the queue and the banality of the description of the day’s cabbage-and-turnip soup. But the contrast is also between Levi’s own Italian language and sense of cultural identity and the Babelic experience of the Lager. Linguistic chaos is a key component of Levi’s experience and subsequent description of the camp, and one to which he was unusually attentive. Early on in his testimony (and once again, Dante is an important model here), Levi designates the camp a ‘perpetua Babele’. He evokes the linguistic confusion of the camp by including in his account unfamiliar tongues. We see this here in the soup queue but also, for example, in his recollection of the distribution of bread (‘la distribuzione del pane, del pane-Brot-Broit-chleb-pain-lechem-kenyer’) and in his description of the industrial tower in the camp (‘i suoi mattoni sono stati chiamati Ziegel, briques, tegula, cegli, kamenny, bricks, teglak’). Linguistic chaos contributes acutely to the condition of extreme isolation associated with the Lager.

Levi’s most sustained meditation on language in Auschwitz comes in the essay ‘Comunicare’, found in the 1986 collection I sommersi e i salvati. Here he reflects not only upon the extreme linguistic isolation of the camp and the psychological damage this often wrought, but also upon the degradation of language he witnessed. Violence and brute force would often replace linguistic exchange as the ‘communicative’ medium between individuals. Levi describes how, for those who did not speak German, words were used not on account of their referential function but as blunt aural instruments that could elicit the desired response from the receiver. The linguistic interaction between guards and prisoners became more reminiscent of that between humans and working animals than that between human beings existing on the same level.

TK

Examples are everywhere in SQ, but this is arguably the most striking instance of how an elevated style and references taken from literary tradition clash continuously with plurilingualism in Levi’s writing; abstract concepts with harsh materiality; ‘destiny’ with ‘Kraut’. In this case, ‘cavoli e rape’ is repeated in four different languages. The harsh sound of these words in German, Italian, French, and Hungarian clashes with the philosophical reasoning of the vertiginous previous lines. Language underscores the tragic irony of the entire sequence (a tragic irony that was present even in Dante’s original treatment of Ulysses’ story, in his Inferno 26).

FB

In the linguistic framework of the chapter, and in light of the Dantean subtext on which it relies, the figure of this non-speaking character is particularly meaningful since it evokes, as a foil, the character of Nimrod in Inferno 31. Dante introduces Nembrotte as the speaker of an unintelligible language, embodied in a single five-word enigmatic utterance: Raphèl maì amecche zabi almi (v. 67). Three elements seem pertinent to establish the contrastive connection. First, the position: both Nimrod and the ingegner Levi stand in a hole, visible only from the waist up. Secondly, the speaking: Virgil mocks Nimrod’s inability to move out of his own private, untranslatable language, while ingegner Levi ‘makes a gesture’ (‘mi fa un cenno’), entrusting to a non-verbal cue its expression of charitable and friendly connection with Primo. Finally, the restriction of what may be conveyed verbally: Nimrod does not speak intelligibly, while ingegner Levi ‘never speaks of eating’. The verb for “eating” (It. mangiare) is a particularly sensible one in the linguistic domain of the Lager, having been violently shifted in the semantics of the Lager from the human and communal ‘essen’ to the animal and isolating ‘fressen’. Ingegner Levi’s character in the episode reinforces the notion that a desire for communication is at the root of a human community, the exact opposite of ‘life as brutes’.

(Note: L’ingegner Levi appears twice earlier in SQ: first in ‘Il viaggio’ as the father of three-year old Emilia - ‘una bambina curiosa, ambiziosa, allegra e intelligente’ (OC I, 146) - murdered on arrival at Auschwitz; and then in ‘Sul fondo’, nervously asking Primo where his daughter and wife might be.)

SM

As in ‘Argon’ in Il sistema periodico, Levi here demonstrates a philologist’s interest in historical grammar. The grammatical difference that separates the marked ‘Ma misi me’ and its unmarked equivalent in Italian is not expressly stated (the French je me mis is the ordinary, unremarkable grammar, and hence can’t serve to illustrate it). Levi’s free indirect discourse here indicates how much store he put in this difference: he explains its effect in three different ways to Jean (as ‘audacious’, as a broken chain, as the other side of a barrier).

The expected fourteenth-century Italian syntax is Ma misimi. (It is unlikely to be Ma mi misi, as it would be today, because in old Italian ma frequently triggers the postposition of the pronoun). But Levi does not limit himself to describing impressionistically the effect of the marked grammar. Scientifically, he analyses the form of mettersi via comparison with other instances of the same lemma in the passage. Of si metta: ‘I had to come to the Lager to realise that it is the same expression as before’.

The difference between Ma misimi and Ma misi me is that the unaccented, enclitic pronoun mi has become the accented, separate word me. This completely changes the rhythm of the line: *Ma mísimi per l’álto máre apérto (accents on 2, 6 and 10) becomes Ma misi mé per l’álto máre etc. (with accents on 4, 6 and 10). A number of Commedia manuscripts, in fact, have misimi – another clue to precisely the ‘audacity’ that Levi detects in Dante’s rhythmical and grammatical usage here.

Dante’s me makes his reflexive pronoun mi into (almost) a transitive object – a distinct, real-existing entity, separate from the grammatical subject: ‘I’ act on a ‘me’, not just ‘myself’.

What Levi hears, via a kind of solecism, is a prominent, sticking-out me – ‘oggi mi sento da tanto’. This is a sense of self that grows – ‘Per un momento, ho dimenticato chi sono e dove sono’ – into almost an answer to his title’s question.

RP

Interlinguistic felicity. Passages addressing questions of communication, language acquisition, interlanguage connection and intercultural translation scattered throughout the text are constantly marked by a specific affective tonality: they are remembered and represented as successful. The situation at hand is exceptional. In both SQ and I sommersi e i salvati, linguistic plurality is often used to characterise the absurd chaos and linguistic cacophony that marked Häftling existence in the Lager, which is a temporary universe of linguistic dissension and violence. To the contrary, the exchange between Jean and Primo is not simply based on, and concerned with, translation. It also is utterly charitable, in a technical sense. It is based on a systematic practicing of interpretive benevolence. It is dominated, that is, by the desire to move beyond linguistic differences and find a common ground. Such desire is not simply posited: it is acted upon. When Primo stumbles or forgets, Jean encourages him to go on (“Ça ne fait rien, vas-y tout de même”). Similarly, when memory of Dante’s original fails Primo and something of the original text is admittedly lost, the text does not dwell on the loss, but it vindicates the eventual success of the mediation work: ‘nonostante la traduzione scialba e il commento pedestre e frettoloso, ha ricevuto il messaggio’.

Felicity in interlingual communication is crucial for Levi to regain momentary existence as a human being in the violent linguistic landscape of the Lager. Accordingly, interlinguistic success is made the vehicle of interhuman connection. The exchange between Primo and Jean, in its translative quality, sheds light on an oppositional element in the language of the Lager, which Levi defines as ‘orts- und zeitgebunden', tied to that place and that time (I sommersi e i salvati, 1066; OC II, 1025). Levi draws his terminology from Victor Klemperer’s 1947 book Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook. Klemperer’s merciless diagnosis of the language of Nazi Germany as the product and the producer of a dehumanising regime is the foil for Levi’s momentarily but crucially successful act of communicating across different languages. In the chapter, the willingness and ability to free the most meaningful human exchange from the ties of a time- and place-bound language is the antidote to the isolating and dehumanising linguistics of the concentration camp.

(For more on this theme, see here.)

Linguistically categorised terms: * Vorarbeiter [German]

• Pikolo [KZGerman]

• Häftling [KZGerman]

• Kommando [KZGerman]

• Also, etc. [German]

• Qu’est-ce qu’il-y-a [French]

• Kapo [KZGerman]

• Ihr Doktoren! [German]

• Meister [KZGerman]

• Lager [KZGerman]

• Aujourd’hui [French]

• Essenholen [KZGerman]

• Corvée [French]

• Tu es fou de marcher [French]

• Blockführer [KZGerman]

• Sale brute [French]

• Ein ganz gemeiner Hund [German]

• Je me mis [French]

• Kraftwerk [German]

• Keine Ahnung [German]

• Ça ne fait rien [French]

• Kraut und Rüben [German]

• Choux et navets [French]

• Káposzta és répak [Other]

SM

Interlinguistic mutuality. Shuttling between recitation of Dante’s text in the Italian original and its hurried and utilitarian French prose version, the lesson Primo imparts to Jean is deeply interlinguistic. The exchange between Jean and Primo is also mutual, at the very basic level of collaboration that any linguistic exchange requires. In addition, Jean is not a passive learner. He takes part in the process of communication, which unfolds in a living dialogue and requires that dialogue to exist. The first words of Italian that Jean picks up and adopts emerge from the living context of a spoken exchange, by the ‘natural’ and immediate imitation of two native speakers. The syllabification of the initial vocabulary Jean apprehends (“zup-pa, cam-po, ac-qua”) from those exchanged between Primo and another prisoner from Rome, Limentani, is not a marker of alienness but of co-participation. More importantly, the learning process is from the start accompanied by a smile, a pre-linguistic sign of mutual understanding.

Levi’s insistence on the collaborative work that undergirds the acts of interlinguistic communication taking place in the episode resonates with Walter Benjamin’s notion that translation is the cultural practice which best captures the intrinsic drive of all languages to communicate through their apparent mutual exclusiveness: ‘All suprahistorical kinship between languages consists in this: in every one of them as a whole, one and the same thing is meant […]. Whereas all individual elements of foreign languages - words, sentences, associations - are mutually exclusive, these languages supplement one another in their intentions’ (‘The Translator’s Task’, 156). The experience of shared humanity, which Primo and Jean achieve within the Babel of the Lager, and notwithstanding its violence, relies on the same underlying philosophy of language as Benjamin’s.

(For more on this, go here next.)

SM

This “qui” is a fulcrum around which the temporal and spatial dimensions of Levi’s narrative turn. After Levi’s initial passato remoto (‘Passò una SS’) shifts to present-tense narration (‘È Rudi’) in paragraph 15, Primo and Pikolo’s itinerant conversation unfolds in the now. Levi then develops an analogous spatial proximity with his insistence on the demonstrative “questo”, culminating in paragraph 28 (beginning ‘Pikolo mi prega…’), where he twice uses the word “qui”: in the first instance indicating the “hereness” of yet another gap in his memory; in the second, in ‘... come si dice qui’, effectively erasing any distance between the episode and its narration.

LI

Possibly the first time that Levi refers to the fundamental difference between prose and poetry and a certain natural superiority of poetic expression (see ‘Introduction’ to his poetry collection Ad ora incerta).

VG

Interlinguistic felicity. Passages addressing questions of communication, language acquisition, interlanguage connection and intercultural translation scattered throughout the text are constantly marked by a specific affective tonality: they are remembered and represented as successful. The situation at hand is exceptional. In both SQ and I sommersi e i salvati, linguistic plurality is often used to characterise the absurd chaos and linguistic cacophony that marked Häftling existence in the Lager, which is a temporary universe of linguistic dissension and violence. To the contrary, the exchange between Jean and Primo is not simply based on, and concerned with, translation. It also is utterly charitable, in a technical sense. It is based on a systematic practicing of interpretive benevolence. It is dominated, that is, by the desire to move beyond linguistic differences and find a common ground. Such desire is not simply posited: it is acted upon. When Primo stumbles or forgets, Jean encourages him to go on (“Ça ne fait rien, vas-y tout de même”). Similarly, when memory of Dante’s original fails Primo and something of the original text is admittedly lost, the text does not dwell on the loss, but it vindicates the eventual success of the mediation work: ‘nonostante la traduzione scialba e il commento pedestre e frettoloso, ha ricevuto il messaggio’.

Felicity in interlingual communication is crucial for Levi to regain momentary existence as a human being in the violent linguistic landscape of the Lager. Accordingly, interlinguistic success is made the vehicle of interhuman connection. The exchange between Primo and Jean, in its translative quality, sheds light on an oppositional element in the language of the Lager, which Levi defines as ‘orts- und zeitgebunden', tied to that place and that time (I sommersi e i salvati, 1066; OC II, 1025). Levi draws his terminology from Victor Klemperer’s 1947 book Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook. Klemperer’s merciless diagnosis of the language of Nazi Germany as the product and the producer of a dehumanising regime is the foil for Levi’s momentarily but crucially successful act of communicating across different languages. In the chapter, the willingness and ability to free the most meaningful human exchange from the ties of a time- and place-bound language is the antidote to the isolating and dehumanising linguistics of the concentration camp.

Linguistically categorised terms: * Vorarbeiter [German]

• Pikolo [KZGerman]

• Häftling [KZGerman]

• Kommando [KZGerman]

• Also, etc. [German]

• Qu’est-ce qu’il-y-a [French]

• Kapo [KZGerman]

• Ihr Doktoren! [German]

• Meister [KZGerman]

• Lager [KZGerman]

• Aujourd’hui [French]

• Essenholen [KZGerman]

• Corvée [French]

• Tu es fou de marcher [French]

• Blockführer [KZGerman]

• Sale brute [French]

• Ein ganz gemeiner Hund [German]

• Je me mis [French]

• Kraftwerk [German]

• Keine Ahnung [German]

• Ça ne fait rien [French]

• Kraut und Rüben [German]

• Choux et navets [French]

• Káposzta és répak [Other]

SM

In this same paragraph, the ‘Pikolo’ is said to be a ‘fattorino-scritturale, addetto alla pulizia della baracca, alle consegne degli attrezzi, alla lavatura delle gamelle, alla contabilità delle ore di lavoro del Kommando’, and three paragraphs later Levi adds that ‘la carica di Pikolo costituisce un gradino già assai elevato nella gerarchia delle Prominenze’.

Whereas the other titles mentioned in this chapter - Vorarbeiter; Kapo - identify recognised positions within the hierarchy of the Lager, Pikolo, according to the testimony of Jean Samuel, was the invention of Primo Levi: ‘Pikolo was not a camp job. The term was coined for me by Primo Levi. I was the only Pikolo. Of course, all the Kapos had helpers, often very young people, sometimes as young as twelve, who served as their assistants, doing everything they asked, including prostitution. The Kapos’ lovers, their sexual victims, were called “Pipel”. I escaped all that’ (Samuel, Dreyfus 2015, 37; my translation).

Jean’s testimony also raises questions about the spelling of this term. In a letter he sent to Levi on 13 March 1946, Jean signed his name with his title and identification number from Auschwitz, ‘Picolo ex 176.397’, amending the spelling to ‘Piccolo’ in subsequent correspondence (Franceschini 2017, 268). Moreover, Levi replied to Jean’s letter with a note dated 24 May 1946, attached to which was an early draft of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, which differs in some ways from what would become the published version, including identifying Levi’s conversation partner as ‘Jean detto Piccolo', a spelling that corresponds to that adopted in the draft of the chapter that Levi sent to Anna Foa on 14 February 1946 (269). Beginning with the first edition of SQ, however, the spelling of Jean’s title was changed to ‘Pikolo’. Fabrizio Franceschini argues that Levi adopted this term, with its new spelling, from its common usage in northern Italian (and possibly also in Vienna in German usage) to refer to shop boys and other minor functionaries (272-79).

CLL

In this same paragraph, the ‘Pikolo’ is said to be a ‘fattorino-scritturale, addetto alla pulizia della baracca, alle consegne degli attrezzi, alla lavatura delle gamelle, alla contabilità delle ore di lavoro del Kommando’, and three paragraphs later Levi adds that ‘la carica di Pikolo costituisce un gradino già assai elevato nella gerarchia delle Prominenze’.

Whereas the other titles mentioned in this chapter - Vorarbeiter; Kapo - identify recognised positions within the hierarchy of the Lager, Pikolo, according to the testimony of Jean Samuel, was the invention of Primo Levi: ‘Pikolo was not a camp job. The term was coined for me by Primo Levi. I was the only Pikolo. Of course, all the Kapos had helpers, often very young people, sometimes as young as twelve, who served as their assistants, doing everything they asked, including prostitution. The Kapos’ lovers, their sexual victims, were called “Pipel”. I escaped all that’ (Samuel, Dreyfus 2015, 37; my translation).

Jean’s testimony also raises questions about the spelling of this term. In a letter he sent to Levi on 13 March 1946, Jean signed his name with his title and identification number from Auschwitz, ‘Picolo ex 176.397’, amending the spelling to ‘Piccolo’ in subsequent correspondence (Franceschini 2017, 268). Moreover, Levi replied to Jean’s letter with a note dated 24 May 1946, attached to which was an early draft of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, which differs in some ways from what would become the published version, including identifying Levi’s conversation partner as ‘Jean detto Piccolo', a spelling that corresponds to that adopted in the draft of the chapter that Levi sent to Anna Foa on 14 February 1946 (269). Beginning with the first edition of SQ, however, the spelling of Jean’s title was changed to ‘Pikolo’. Fabrizio Franceschini argues that Levi adopted this term, with its new spelling, from its common usage in northern Italian (and possibly also in Vienna in German usage) to refer to shop boys and other minor functionaries (272-79).

CLL

The Vorarbeiter, or foreman, was responsible for supervising the prisoners’ labour. This was a privileged position within the Lager, for which extra food rations were provided (Megargee 2009-2012, 200). A study of another camp reports that those ‘employed as foremen (Vorarbeiter) represented the most hateful attitudes towards Jews’ (4), a finding that might inform our understanding of Levi’s account of Auschwitz. In SQ, Levi discusses the Vorarbeiter in the chapter ‘Il lavoro’, where he explains the discriminatory power that the role affords: ‘Il Vorarbeiter ha distribuito le leve di ferro a noi e i martinetti ai suoi amici’ (OC I, 44).

For confirmation of the violence with which this power was enforced, we can consult the archives of the United States Holocaust Museum, which contain the contents of a talk given to members of the French Army in October November 1945 in which the deportee Henry Cogenson testified that: ‘As for Kapos and Vorarbeiter, mostly German, Russian or Polish “common criminals”, they, like the SS, never knew when to stop; after having been hit by others when they were simple inmates, they returned the favor on their peers now that they were given a smidgen of power. It was rather common to bring back to camp in the evening a comrade who had been struck during the day and was unable to withstand the blows’. The Auschwitz Museum online hosts images of the armbands worn by the Vorarbeiter, and of the whips they used to beat prisoners. We might also compare Levi’s account with that contained in the Auschwitz survivor Tadeusz Borowski’s 1946 collection of short stories Pożegnanie z Marią (This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, 1967), wherein the Vorarbeiter Tadeusz is a frequent protagonist.

CLL

The Vorarbeiter, or foreman, was responsible for supervising the prisoners’ labour. This was a privileged position within the Lager, for which extra food rations were provided (Megargee 2009-2012, 200). A study of another camp reports that those ‘employed as foremen (Vorarbeiter) represented the most hateful attitudes towards Jews’ (4), a finding that might inform our understanding of Levi’s account of Auschwitz. In SQ, Levi discusses the Vorarbeiter in the chapter ‘Il lavoro’, where he explains the discriminatory power that the role affords: ‘Il Vorarbeiter ha distribuito le leve di ferro a noi e i martinetti ai suoi amici’ (OC I, 44).

For confirmation of the violence with which this power was enforced, we can consult the archives of the United States Holocaust Museum, which contain the contents of a talk given to members of the French Army in October November 1945 in which the deportee Henry Cogenson testified that: ‘As for Kapos and Vorarbeiter, mostly German, Russian or Polish “common criminals”, they, like the SS, never knew when to stop; after having been hit by others when they were simple inmates, they returned the favor on their peers now that they were given a smidgen of power. It was rather common to bring back to camp in the evening a comrade who had been struck during the day and was unable to withstand the blows’. The Auschwitz Museum online hosts images of the armbands worn by the Vorarbeiter, and of the whips they used to beat prisoners. We might also compare Levi’s account with that contained in the Auschwitz survivor Tadeusz Borowski’s 1946 collection of short stories Pożegnanie z Marią (This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, 1967), wherein the Vorarbeiter Tadeusz is a frequent protagonist.

CLL

Levi’s ‘chissà’ suggests that the decision to discuss Dante’s ‘Canto di Ulisse’ during the walk with Jean was a matter of mere happenstance, or better still of fortune, to use a word that was dear to Levi and crucial to his conception of the Lager (Gordon 2010). ‘Who knows’ how and why the Inferno, and not another text, came to Levi in this pivotal moment of human connection amidst the inhumanity of Auschwitz?

To answer that question, we may wish to note that Dante’s Inferno similarly occurred to many others among the first witnesses to describe the horrors of the Lager. In an article published in the Socialist daily Avanti! in October 1945, Francisco Largo Caballero, leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, recounted his ‘Ritorno dalla morte’ after being interned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, which he described as ‘uno scenario da “Inferno” dantesco’. Writing in the same daily in July 1949, the French Resistance fighter turned member of Parliament Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier described her own internment in similar terms: ‘Auschwitz! Si è molto scritto sui campi della morte: quando ci eravamo ci pareva che solo un Dante avrebbe potuto descriverne l’orrore per coloro che non ci sono stati’. Umberto Consiglio, bearing witness to the enormity of Dachau for L’Èra Nuova in May 1946, argued that ‘[s]olo Dante, guidato dal suo alto ingegno e aiutato dalle Muse, potrebbe degnamente descrivere quello che è stato il martirio di migliaia e migliaia di esseri umani’, comparing his arrival in the camp to ‘il “lasciate ogni speranza” della porta dell’inferno dantesco’. In that same year, Aldo Pantozzi described Mauthausen as the brutal realisation of Dante’s vision: ‘La fantasia di Dante relegò nelle infernali viscere della terra tali scene: dovevano passare sei secoli di civiltà perché esse, dalle tenebre infernali, venissero trasferite alla luce del sole dalla barbarie nazista’ (Pantozzi 2002, 88). In Liana Millu’s 1947 Il fumo di Birkenau, she describes that infamous Polish camp as having ‘l’aria “senza tempo” descritta nel cerchio dantesco’, relates how during her imprisonment her thoughts became ‘un tormento quasi dantesco’, and recalls her struggle to call to mind, as she sought to make sense of her condition, ‘un canto dell’Inferno dove si parla di dannati che trasportano pietre’ (Millu 1947, 36, 139, 166). As Robert Gordon summarises the situation, in Italian accounts of the Shoah, ‘Dante’s Inferno is a familiar and recurrent reference point’ (Gordon 2010, 52).

Far from a random occurrence or even a fortunate intimation, therefore, Levi’s decision to deliver a Lectura Dantis while in confinement might best be understood as conforming to a recognisable cultural pattern. Consider that while Levi and Jean were discussing ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ in Auschwitz, more than five thousand miles away, the Italian prisoner of war Giuseppe Berto was offering his own interpretation of Dante to his fellow internees in Camp Hereford, Texas, where he was held from May 1943 to February 1946 (Culicelli, 286). Berto, who would go on to achieve literary acclaim with the publication of the novel Il cielo è rosso in 1950, had been captured in Africa, and the experience of military defeat, coinciding with the collapse of Mussolini’s regime, shattered his most deeply held convictions. Unlike many other Fascist true-believers, however, Berto refused to pass directly into the anti-Fascist camp, engaging instead in a continued confrontation with his former faith motivated by an agnosticism that he termed afascismo (CIDAS, 88).

That confrontation propels Berto’s Dante lectures, which he began to deliver in November 1943, but which were published for the first time only in 2015. If Levi focused on Inferno 26, Berto chose instead Inferno 5, the canto of Paolo and Francesca, with whom his current fate, cut off not only from his home but also from his previous ideals, inspired evident sympathy. It is not hard to recognise Berto himself in the description of Francesca’s ‘malinconia di cose belle perdute per sempre’ (461). Yet Berto appears to identify more with Dante the poet than with the sinners whom Dante pilgrim encounters during his voyage. Having witnessed first-hand, and with profound regret, the demise of Fascist Italy’s imperial ambitions in Africa, Berto presents a Dante

ancorato a quella sua medioevale concezione imperialistica, mentre l’impero e il potere teocratico dei papi erano ormai cose morte […]. E chi vi ha detto questo, vi ha anche spiegato come gran parte della grandezza morale di Dante abbia le sue origini appunto nella sua fede in ideali sorpassati. E questa interpretazione, ben che non possa del tutto convincerci, ci affascina per la sua novità, e sopra tutto perché molti di noi sappiamo quanto costi mantenere fede a quegli ideali che sembrano perduti (451).

With these words, Berto unmistakably addressed himself to all those Blackshirts whose honour rested on the refusal to forsake their ideals even when all seemed to be lost.

Primo Levi’s ideals are of course quite far from those promoted by Giuseppe Berto. Levi had been captured as an anti-Fascist partisan, Berto as a Fascist colonial soldier. Yet, just as Levi, interpreting Dante in Auschwitz, finds ‘forse il perché del nostro destino, del nostro essere qui oggi’, so too does Berto find that the Commedia speaks to his conflicted condition before the ‘pulpiti herefordiani’ (448). Ultimately, that condition appears to align Berto more closely with Levi than with Dante, whose unforgiving judgement of the sinners in Inferno clashes with more modern sensibilities. For Berto, ‘la poesia di Dante si rafforza e si esalta proprio dove i sentimenti umani raggiungono una vetta tale da superare i pregiudizi del poeta […]. Farinata, Ulisse, Brunetto Latini hanno un valore umano che sta al di sopra della religione e della morale’ (455-456). Does not this celebration of the sinners’ humanity echo, across a vast physical and ideological divide, the ‘così umano e necessario e pure inaspettato anacronismo’ that Levi discovers in his sympathetic identification with Dante’s Ulysses?

CLL

In the linguistic framework of the chapter, and in light of the Dantean subtext on which it relies, the figure of this non-speaking character is particularly meaningful since it evokes, as a foil, the character of Nimrod in Inferno 31. Dante introduces Nembrotte as the speaker of an unintelligible language, embodied in a single five-word enigmatic utterance: Raphèl maì amecche zabi almi (v. 67). Three elements seem pertinent to establish the contrastive connection. First, the position: both Nimrod and the ingegner Levi stand in a hole, visible only from the waist up. Secondly, the speaking: Virgil mocks Nimrod’s inability to move out of his own private, untranslatable language, while ingegner Levi ‘makes a gesture’ (‘mi fa un cenno’), entrusting to a non-verbal cue its expression of charitable and friendly connection with Primo. Finally, the restriction of what may be conveyed verbally: Nimrod does not speak intelligibly, while ingegner Levi ‘never speaks of eating’. The verb for “eating” (It. mangiare) is a particularly sensible one in the linguistic domain of the Lager, having been violently shifted in the semantics of the Lager from the human and communal ‘essen’ to the animal and isolating ‘fressen’. Ingegner Levi’s character in the episode reinforces the notion that a desire for communication is at the root of a human community, the exact opposite of ‘life as brutes’.

(Note: L’ingegner Levi appears twice earlier in SQ: first in ‘Il viaggio’ as the father of three-year old Emilia - ‘una bambina curiosa, ambiziosa, allegra e intelligente’ (OC I, 146) - murdered on arrival at Auschwitz; and then in ‘Sul fondo’, nervously asking Primo where his daughter and wife might be.)

SM

This “qui” is a fulcrum around which the temporal and spatial dimensions of Levi’s narrative turn. After Levi’s initial passato remoto (‘Passò una SS’) shifts to present-tense narration (‘È Rudi’) in paragraph 15, Primo and Pikolo’s itinerant conversation unfolds in the now. Levi then develops an analogous spatial proximity with his insistence on the demonstrative “questo”, culminating in paragraph 28 (beginning ‘Pikolo mi prega…’), where he twice uses the word “qui”: in the first instance indicating the “hereness” of yet another gap in his memory; in the second, in ‘... come si dice qui’, effectively erasing any distance between the episode and its narration.

LI

As in ‘Argon’ in Il sistema periodico, Levi here demonstrates a philologist’s interest in historical grammar. The grammatical difference that separates the marked ‘Ma misi me’ and its unmarked equivalent in Italian is not expressly stated (the French je me mis is the ordinary, unremarkable grammar, and hence can’t serve to illustrate it). Levi’s free indirect discourse here indicates how much store he put in this difference: he explains its effect in three different ways to Jean (as ‘audacious’, as a broken chain, as the other side of a barrier).

The expected fourteenth-century Italian syntax is Ma misimi. (It is unlikely to be Ma mi misi, as it would be today, because in old Italian ma frequently triggers the postposition of the pronoun). But Levi does not limit himself to describing impressionistically the effect of the marked grammar. Scientifically, he analyses the form of mettersi via comparison with other instances of the same lemma in the passage. Of si metta: ‘I had to come to the Lager to realise that it is the same expression as before’.

The difference between Ma misimi and Ma misi me is that the unaccented, enclitic pronoun mi has become the accented, separate word me. This completely changes the rhythm of the line: *Ma mísimi per l’álto máre apérto (accents on 2, 6 and 10) becomes Ma misi mé per l’álto máre etc. (with accents on 4, 6 and 10). A number of Commedia manuscripts, in fact, have misimi – another clue to precisely the ‘audacity’ that Levi detects in Dante’s rhythmical and grammatical usage here.

Dante’s me makes his reflexive pronoun mi into (almost) a transitive object – a distinct, real-existing entity, separate from the grammatical subject: ‘I’ act on a ‘me’, not just ‘myself’.

What Levi hears, via a kind of solecism, is a prominent, sticking-out me – ‘oggi mi sento da tanto’. This is a sense of self that grows – ‘Per un momento, ho dimenticato chi sono e dove sono’ – into almost an answer to his title’s question.

RP

This paragraph fascinatingly exemplifies how a text can build on bodily patterns and sensorimotor experience to produce an effect that enriches its semantic meaning. Positioned towards the end of the chapter, it coincides with the emotional peak of Levi’s attempt to explain Dante’s Commedia to Pikolo. The conversation leads Levi’s mind outside of the camp and far from his present condition (‘Per un momento, ho dimenticato chi sono e dove sono’), back to Turin (‘non lasciarmi pensare alle mie montagne, che comparivano nel bruno della sera quando tornavo in treno da Milano a Torino!’) and to a place where it is possible to devote time and mental effort to existential issues other than bare survival. Yet, at the same time, it is Levi’s present condition that makes it all the more important to convey to Pikolo the relevance of Ulysses’ story and Dante’s recounting of it.

The feeling of this sudden expansion – towards other geographical places, past times, and higher meanings – is rendered through various stylistic devices. While the average length of sentences in the chapter is 16.5 words (Voyant Tools), this sentence counts 74 words; the anomalous length of the sentence dovetails with the unusual breadth of Levi’s thoughts, with how far he concedes himself to go with his mind away from the concerns of his life in the camp. Within this continuous flow of words, the urgency of Levi’s present task is formally conveyed through the accumulation of paratactic sentences linked via asyndeton, which reinforce the idea of a linear proceeding, simply propelled forward without strong control (which would be expressed by a period with a more complex and rigid structure), stretching out towards meanings that seem to escape Levi’s reach (and whose scope progressively increases: specific textual passages; the Middle Ages; human destiny). However, this long, loosely ordered period is delimited by words with a high deictic power: ‘Trattengo’ and ‘oggi qui’. Both the opening verb and the closing pair of adverbs (temporal and spatial) identify a deictic centre that coincides with the narrator (and the reader): in between, the paragraph unfolds in a flow that leads both narrator and reader far from the camp, in an encompassing movement that reaches out in time and space to the point of touching and almost enfolding something ‘gigantesco’, which is the sense of destiny of the entire human race, and then swiftly reverts to the starting point of the here and now (‘oggi qui’).

The meaning of Levi’s words is reinforced thanks to a conceptual metaphor operating unconsciously which is that of THINKING IS MOVING (writing conceptual metaphors in capital letters is a linguistics convention). THINKING IS MOVING is an elaboration of the very general conceptual metaphor MIND IS BODY, which means that we automatically tend to conceptualise mental activities in terms of bodily activities, because the latter are those of which we have immediate experience. In this paragraph, the encompassing wandering of Levi’s thoughts, its breadth and immense distance from the reality of the camp, is conveyed through strategies that all variably rely on the reader’s bodily experience. Sensorimotor experience operates unconsciously and yet plays a crucial role: it is our non-representational knowledge of what is feels like to move through open spaces, to be held vs. be released, to roam freely with our bodies, that scaffolds and enriches our understanding of what it means to metaphorically roam with one’s mind. Thanks to this metaphor, because the deictic centre at the beginning and at the end of the period is the same and is close to the narrator (reader), this period is endowed with a feeling of circularity, of reaching out and returning to the starting point, which is not explicitly expressed in the text and is rather projected by the reader’s embodied experience.

MB

Examples are everywhere in SQ, but this is arguably the most striking instance of how an elevated style and references taken from literary tradition clash continuously with plurilingualism in Levi’s writing; abstract concepts with harsh materiality; ‘destiny’ with ‘Kraut’. In this case, ‘cavoli e rape’ is repeated in four different languages. The harsh sound of these words in German, Hungarian, French, and Italian clashes with the philosophical reasoning of the vertiginous previous lines. Language underscores the tragic irony of the entire sequence (a tragic irony that was present even in Dante’s original treatment of Ulysses’ story, in his Inferno 26).

FB

The focus of ecosemiotics is ‘on the interactions between environmental conditions and semiotics processes and the diversity of life stories, meaning-making strategies, and narratives that spring from these intertwinings’ (Maran 2020, 4). One of the main difficulties in any ecosemiotic approach is that cultural entities are predominantly symbolic and therefore they are relatively independent from their environmental conditions, as symbols are made autonomous from their objects. In other words, because of the complex and highly symbolic quality of our human communications, we constantly run the risk of creating artifacts that are self-sufficient and closed, with little to no relationship with the actual material circumstances they describe and in which they are involved. This is an apparent danger for any form of literary narrative that aims to the status of testimony, as bearing witness (to the complexity of the nonhuman world as much as to what happened in Auschwitz) requires instead referring to a material reality that lies outside the text. To avoid a radical symbolic self-sufficiency, ecosemiotics scholars suggest paying attention to the inclusion of simpler iconic and (especially) indexical sign relations, as they ‘establish both the connection between the text and the communicative situation as well as make it possible to distinguish between the discursive universe and the real world’ (Maran, 33).

A crucial group of indexical signs is known in linguistics as deictics. Spatial and temporal words, such as here, or this, or now, have fixed semantic meanings, but their information refers to a specific context without which they cannot be properly interpreted. For instance, and broadly speaking, if I say ‘this’ in my speech, my interlocutor and I need to share an extra-linguistic context in which the close object I am pointing to with my deictic does exist. The absence of a shared material context in literary texts makes the use of deixis particularly poignant, as it inevitably incurs in some sort of paradoxical double experience: a similarity because both narrator and readers are surrounded by a material reality in which words like ‘this’ or ‘now’ have a specific meaning, and a disjunction between the context of the former and the context of the latter as they likely diverge (cfr. Uspenskij 2008, 112).

Beginning with the very title of his first book (‘Se questo è un uomo’ – If This Is a Man), Levi’s use of deictics is remarkable in size and meaning, and plays a crucial role in his testimonial work. For instance, if we consider how he utilises the word ‘qui’ (here) in the context of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, we notice four occurrences, all of them in pivotal moments of friction between linguistic and extra-linguistic realities. In fact, Levi twice employs ‘qui’ in relation to the passage of the Commedia he is trying to remember (‘Qui mi fermo’; ‘Qui ancora una lacuna’). They represent a sort of pause in the character Levi’s effort to communicate with Pikolo, a mark of discourse interruption and ultimately of failure, as in both instances they denote a gap – a ‘lacuna’, as Levi calls it – in the intradiegetic attempt to teach his friend some Italian language and, most importantly, to share Dante’s poetry with him. Twice instead the deictic refers to the actual external environment of the concentration camp (‘come si dice qui’; ‘del nostro essere oggi qui’). In this case, too, the deictic determines a break of communication, but the relationship that is interrupted is between the intradiegetic narrator and the reader. The deictic ‘qui’ in the literary text refers in fact to a reality that is surely not shared by the readers of SQ, who likely have a completely different context denoted by ‘qui’ (the library, or their room, but almost certainly not Auschwitz). The deictic thus highlights an ambivalence, as every reader has their own experience of ‘qui’ and yet cannot truly refer to the reality to which the ‘qui’ in Levi’s book points, both epistemologically and ethically (as the reality of Auschwitz is almost unknowable to those who did not experience it). To paraphrase Maran, we may say that the ‘qui’ in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ emphasises both a connection and a distance between the discursive world of the text and the external reality of both the first-hand witness and the readers.

In a famous passage of SQ, Levi uses a different series of deictics but a similar strategy to address precisely the almost inconceivable distance between different instances of ‘qui’, as he writes that ‘questo vero oggi in cui io sto seduto a un tavolo e scrivo, io stesso non sono convinto che queste cose sono realmente accadute’ (emphasis added to the deictics).

Yet, the most radical application of such usage of deixis is in Il sistema periodico. The fictional testimony of the atom of carbon included in this volume ends in fact with the sentence ‘un doppio scatto, in su ed in giù, fra due livelli d’energia guida questa mia mano ad imprimere sulla carta questo punto: questo’ (OC I, 1032). In a story that links the entanglement of the human and the nonhuman world to the act of writing, the deictic metalinguistically redoubles and forces readers to pay attention to the material context of our reading. In pointing to its own materiality made of ink or graphite (carbon again!), Levi thus transforms the full stop from a mere convention into a literary strategy in which indexicality becomes a crucial testimonial tool capable of bringing together different realities without necessarily overlapping them. The deictic therefore functions as a sort of multistable sign through which we experience both writing and the external world; our presence and the presence of others; what happened out there and what is instead happening ‘qui’, here.

DB

Interlinguistic mutuality. Shuttling between recitation of Dante’s text in the Italian original and its hurried and utilitarian French prose version, the lesson Primo imparts to Jean is deeply interlinguistic. The exchange between Jean and Primo is also mutual, at the very basic level of collaboration that any linguistic exchange requires. In addition, Jean is not a passive learner. He takes part in the process of communication, which unfolds in a living dialogue and requires that dialogue to exist. The first words of Italian that Jean picks up and adopts emerge from the living context of a spoken exchange, by the ‘natural’ and immediate imitation of two native speakers. The syllabification of the initial vocabulary Jean apprehends (“zup-pa, cam-po, ac-qua”) from those exchanged between Primo and another prisoner from Rome, Limentani, is not a marker of alienness but of co-participation. More importantly, the learning process is from the start accompanied by a smile, a pre-linguistic sign of mutual understanding.

Levi’s insistence on the collaborative work that undergirds the acts of interlinguistic communication taking place in the episode resonates with Walter Benjamin’s notion that translation is the cultural practice which best captures the intrinsic drive of all languages to communicate through their apparent mutual exclusiveness: ‘All suprahistorical kinship between languages consists in this: in every one of them as a whole, one and the same thing is meant […]. Whereas all individual elements of foreign languages - words, sentences, associations - are mutually exclusive, these languages supplement one another in their intentions’ (‘The Translator’s Task’, 156). The experience of shared humanity, which Primo and Jean achieve within the Babel of the Lager, and notwithstanding its violence, relies on the same underlying philosophy of language as Benjamin’s.

SM

Interlinguistic necessity. Although containing the record of a ‘lesson’ on Dante’s Inferno 26, the central experience recounted in this chapter is set in motion by linguistic rather than literary elements. Jean desires to learn a new language, Italian, and Primo’s teaching accordingly combines his intermittent recitation of Dante’s text in the original language with a hesitant French commentary on, often a paraphrase of, salient elements in it. At its core, thus, the chapter relates an attempt at interlinguistic mediation. The text’s emphasis on interlinguistic communication is projected against the backdrop of the Lager’s Babel-like dehumanising confusion of languages that Levi explored in other texts (SQ, I sommersi e i salvati). As such, the circumstances of the episode are exceptional.

Jean is an exceptional, and exceptionally positive, character in the universe of the book. He speaks and thinks in two languages: most importantly, he is native in both (‘Jean parlava correntemente francese e tedesco’). As established on the chance encounter with an SS, Rudi the Blockführer, bilingual utterances are for him the norm: ‘È indifferente, può pensare in entrambe le lingue’. The role he plays in the structure of the concentration camp, facilitated by the distinction of his bilingualism, however, is not what is at stake in the episode per se. While Jean certainly has acquired a linguistic capital of sorts, Levi’s narrative insists on what he decides to share of that privilege. His multilingualism is not associated with exclusionary practices, but with the work of intermediation it brings about and the community of intents it creates. The language learning situation is presented as a space in which the power dynamics of the Lager’s languages are suspended and ultimately refused.

SM

In the 1947 version, Levi writes ‘voglio che’. The change to ‘ho bisogno che’ in the 1958 edition closely recalls, and seems to be in dialogue with, the beginning of SQ (‘Prefazione’), where Levi states that he wrote his book to satisfy an urgent and elementary need - that of telling his story and bearing witness after his liberation from Auschwitz.

VG

Possibly the first time that Levi refers to the fundamental difference between prose and poetry and a certain natural superiority of poetic expression (see ‘Introduction’ to his poetry collection Ad ora incerta).

VG

Levi and Jean’s fleeting Dantean reprieve is abruptly halted by the return to the ‘sordid, ragged crowd of the soup queue’. Standing in contrast with Dante’s majestic verses and Ulysses’ voyage of discovery is the cramped enclosure of the queue and the banality of the description of the day’s cabbage-and-turnip soup. But the contrast is also between Levi’s own Italian language and sense of cultural identity and the Babelic experience of the Lager. Linguistic chaos is a key component of Levi’s experience and subsequent description of the camp, and one to which he was unusually attentive. Early on in his testimony (and once again, Dante is an important model here), Levi designates the camp a ‘perpetua Babele’. He evokes the linguistic confusion of the camp by including in his account unfamiliar tongues. We see this here in the soup queue but also, for example, in his recollection of the distribution of bread (‘la distribuzione del pane, del pane-Brot-Broit-chleb-pain-lechem-kenyer’) and in his description of the industrial tower in the camp (‘i suoi mattoni sono stati chiamati Ziegel, briques, tegula, cegli, kamenny, bricks, teglak’). Linguistic chaos contributes acutely to the condition of extreme isolation associated with the Lager.

Levi’s most sustained meditation on language in Auschwitz comes in the essay ‘Comunicare’, found in the 1986 collection I sommersi e i salvati. Here he reflects not only upon the extreme linguistic isolation of the camp and the psychological damage this often wrought, but also upon the degradation of language he witnessed. Violence and brute force would often replace linguistic exchange as the ‘communicative’ medium between individuals. Levi describes how, for those who did not speak German, words were used not on account of their referential function but as blunt aural instruments that could elicit the desired response from the receiver. The linguistic interaction between guards and prisoners became more reminiscent of that between humans and working animals than that between human beings existing on the same level.

TK

The causative connector in inverted commas aims at highlighting the perverted logic regulating life in the Lager. Levi repeatedly noticed this disturbing lack of consequentiality, which prevented the prisoners from deducing from observation what the expected behaviour was, which in turn translated into a constant state of insecurity and danger: ‘ogni congettura è arbitraria ed esattamente priva di ogni fondamento reale’. Pikolo’s privileged condition follows another ‘fierce law’ of the Lager: ‘a chi ha, sarà dato; a chi non ha, a quello sarà tolto’.

EL

software to rewrite international legal texts relating to human rights, a well written prompt and a few examples, including the FAIR principles will let openAI's chatGPT do it effectively.

Plain Language Movement: Common law and civil law differ in their approaches.

The late Stuart Woolf (1936-2021) must have smiled to himself when he first translated these lines, as a young historian working on his PhD in 1950s Turin. Woolf is the only published English translator of SQ; his fluid and immediate rendering of Levi’s words remains the version known to millions of anglophone readers. While the task of a translator is never easy, it may be that the clarity and simplicity of Levi’s style lends itself to translation and grants his writing a certain universality - almost like a chemical formula.

‘The Canto of Ulysses’ can be read as an ode to translation, not just from one language to another, but in a metaphorical sense, in the repositioning of meaning between people and time. This goes back to the idea implied in the etymology of the word ‘translation’, which comes from the Latin translatio, to ‘carry over’, to ‘bring across’. In this chapter, instances of translation form a mise en abyme that ‘carries over’ from Homer to Virgil, Virgil to Dante, Dante to Levi, Levi to Pikolo, Italian to French, Italian to English, and text to reader.

This more conceptual idea of ‘translation’ has become a way of understanding the testimonial act, central to Holocaust studies (Insana 2009; Felman and Laub 1992). Witnesses ‘translate’ into words their experience and their trauma. This process is often thought of as entailing a loss: an ineffable residue that cannot be communicated through language. However, the exchange that takes place between Levi and Jean in ‘The Canto of Ulysses’ invites us to rethink translation in terms of expansion, with each new version becoming part of the original’s harvest. The non-Italian reader’s lack of familiarity with ‘Who Dante is’, ‘What the Comedy is’, may at first seem a disadvantage. And yet, this has the enriching effect of aligning us with Jean: the reader/Pikolo attempts to overcome a linguistic and cultural barrier, to be in communion with the narrator/Levi. Conversely, Italian readers are likely to identify more closely with Levi, as they try, with him, to remember lines learned in their schooldays.

The new interpretative perspectives created by the translated text respond to the original and form a polyphony. This polyphonic effect works on two different levels: first, just as a piece of music sounds different when sung by a different voice, a translation performs a text in another language, with another instrument. Second, by co-existing in the literary universe of the original text, the many translations of this chapter embody the multiple voices that have resonated from Levi’s writing. As Levi and Jean walk, we see the process of translation unfold. As they come to understand each other, communication through words falters, and another kind of translation begins to happen:

O forse è qualcosa di piú: forse, nonostante la traduzione scialba e il commento pedestre e frettoloso, ha ricevuto il messaggio, ha sentito che lo riguarda, che riguarda tutti gli uomini in travaglio

The ‘something more’ is in the polyphony of their exchange, where the ensemble is greater than any individual line. It takes on a special significance in Woolf’s translation - or in any translation of these lines, for it becomes another performance, or layer, of the initial translational act. The message of the original seems to swell, rather than subside. And, just as a melody transcends individual notes, the concern for individual words is eventually superseded by the harmony between Levi and Jean. Describing Dante’s approach to divine grace in Paradiso, George Steiner writes:

But as the poet draws near the Divine presence, the heart of the rose of fire, the labour of translation into speech grows ever more exacting. Words grow less and less adequate to the task of translating immediate revelation (Steiner 1967).

Levi draws us to a similar source, one that sounds ‘like the blast of a trumpet, like the voice of God’. This ‘something more’ that is not bound to language has the universality of music. It reaches towards an inexpressible goodness or enlightenment. This is in direct contrast to the negative ‘ineffability’ that is so often used to describe elements of testimony in Levi and others, in the challenge the Holocaust posed to language, in the impossibility of its translation. Here, language does not drift towards a void of suffering, but towards a chorus of joyful expression, a blast of trumpets. Unlike elsewhere in SQ, the ambiguity present in the meeting of languages is not represented as a chaotic and hellish Tower of Babel, but as a fecund, creative space. Translation is momentarily reclaimed, and acts as an implicit resistance to the obsessive uniformity of Nazi ideology. But their ‘canto’ is interrupted by the cacophony of Auschwitz, and this revelatory chink is closed with a tragic, symphonic surge:

Infin che ’l mar fu sopra noi rinchiuso.

RMur

https://spatialwebfoundation.org/protocols/contracts/

Add more languages to be sent in the HTTP Accept-Language header field: http Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9,fr;q=0.8`

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5438280716

Manny's description of writing introductory language books using ChatGPT.

The Annotated S4 Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces Albert Gu, Karan Goel, and Christopher Ré.

A new approach to transformers

Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State SpacesAlbert Gu, Karan Goel, and Christopher R ́eDepartment of Computer Science, Stanford University

Bowman, Samuel R.. "Eight Things to Know about Large Language Models." arXiv, (2023). https://doi.org/https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.00612v1.

Abstract

The widespread public deployment of large language models (LLMs) in recent months has prompted a wave of new attention and engagement from advocates, policymakers, and scholars from many fields. This attention is a timely response to the many urgent questions that this technology raises, but it can sometimes miss important considerations. This paper surveys the evidence for eight potentially surprising such points: 1. LLMs predictably get more capable with increasing investment, even without targeted innovation. 2. Many important LLM behaviors emerge unpredictably as a byproduct of increasing investment. 3. LLMs often appear to learn and use representations of the outside world. 4. There are no reliable techniques for steering the behavior of LLMs. 5. Experts are not yet able to interpret the inner workings of LLMs. 6. Human performance on a task isn't an upper bound on LLM performance. 7. LLMs need not express the values of their creators nor the values encoded in web text. 8. Brief interactions with LLMs are often misleading.

Found via: Taiwan's Gold Card draws startup founders, tech workers | Semafor

This isn't true. The Stochastic Parrots paper outlines other avenues for reining in the harms of language models like GPT's.

Ganguli, Deep, Askell, Amanda, Schiefer, Nicholas, Liao, Thomas I., Lukošiūtė, Kamilė, Chen, Anna, Goldie, Anna et al. "The Capacity for Moral Self-Correction in Large Language Models." arXiv, (2023). https://doi.org/https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.07459v2.

Abstract

We test the hypothesis that language models trained with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) have the capability to "morally self-correct" -- to avoid producing harmful outputs -- if instructed to do so. We find strong evidence in support of this hypothesis across three different experiments, each of which reveal different facets of moral self-correction. We find that the capability for moral self-correction emerges at 22B model parameters, and typically improves with increasing model size and RLHF training. We believe that at this level of scale, language models obtain two capabilities that they can use for moral self-correction: (1) they can follow instructions and (2) they can learn complex normative concepts of harm like stereotyping, bias, and discrimination. As such, they can follow instructions to avoid certain kinds of morally harmful outputs. We believe our results are cause for cautious optimism regarding the ability to train language models to abide by ethical principles.

Unexpected emergent abilities from large LLMs

Larger models can complete tasks that smaller models can't. An increase in complexity can also increase bias and inaccuracies. Researcher Jason Wei has cataloged 137 emergent abilities of large language models.

Google translation:

Every Egyptology student learns in their first semester that the Egyptian word pt (pronounced pet) means "heaven". The collection of documents in the dictionary archive comprises around 6,000 document slips. In the order of this material one learns that the Egyptian heaven has gates and ways, waters and banks, sides, pillars and chapels. This makes it tangible that the Egyptians had something completely different in mind when they heard the word "heaven" than modern Westerners do, namely a mythical space in which gods and spirits of the dead dwell.

This is a fantastic example of context creation for a dead language as well as for creating proper historical context.

In looking at the uses of and similarities between Wb and TLL, I can't help but think that these two zettelkasten represented the state of the art for Large Language Models and some of the ideas behind ChatGPT

Is there? By whom? Why industry only and not government, academia and civil society?

LLMs meet Copyright guidance

See comparison later in the paragraph to "commissioned artist" and the prompt "write a poem about copyright law in the style of William Shakespeare"

Bender, Emily M., Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell. “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜” In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 610–23. FAccT ’21. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922.

Would the argument here for stochastic parrots also potentially apply to or could it be abstracted to Markov monkeys?

Is language acquisition a very complex method of pattern recognition?

Sue Hart at Hodder & Stoughton was able to persuade Michel Thomas to create a series of language courses on cassettes and CDs following his BBC2 broadcast of The Language Master.

Michel Thomas Method Review

Michel Thomas method also includes: - atomic pieces built up as building blocks into larger pieces - lots of encouragement to prevent the feeling of failure

Downsides: - there is no failure mode which can nudge people into a false sense of performance when using their language with actual native speakers

This reviewer indicates that there is some base level of directed mnemonic work going on, but the repetition level isn't such that long term retention (at least in the space repetition sort of way) is a specific goal. We'll need to look into this piece more closely to firm this up, however.

The Michel Thomas Method in a nutshell

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9Xh-by50pI

This video indicates that small mnemonic hooks are inserted for some words in the Michel Thomas method. This was not immediately apparent or seen in the 1997 BBC documentary about his method and wasn't immediately apparent in Harold Goodman's discussion.

Is it apparent in Goodman's session with his nephews? Was it part of Thomas' method originally or was it added later? Is it truly necessary or does it work without it as in the SSiW method which doesn't use it.

It will take some deeper dives, but ostensibly this method seems to look like that of Pimsleur, Mormon Church, SSiW, and other methods.

The Language Master<br /> BBC - Michel Thomas<br /> [English CC]<br /> [Leg. PT-BR]

Michel Thomas is one of the most brilliant language teachers in the world. His usual clients are movie stars and business leaders. This programme takes him to a Sixth Form College in London to work with school pupils, to test his claim that he can teach anyone a language in a week - with no reading, writing or homework. The film also explores his personal history - as a hero of the French Resistance during WW II.

The Michel Thomas method involves: - slow build up of words, phrases, natural grammar - forced production of the language through practice - positive interaction - patience - no stress - no judgement - encouragement - constant evidence of progress

How does "understanding" of the language evolve out of this method? It's more like revelation rather than understanding...

This method appears much more atomic than that of SSiW (Aran Jones), but some of this is down to the fact that there's a live person who is able to unjudgementally prompt one with pieces which they've missed. The teacher has the context whereas the taped instructors do not. Presumably this sort of interpersonal prompting and context isn't necessarily required, but it can help to better lower the learner's stress and potentially speed up the learning process. It would require some standardization to set up a specific experiment to test between these two modes to tease this data out.

Reference key: [[Levy1997]]<br /> “The Language Master.” 1:33 : 1, color. London, UK: BBC 2, March 23, 1997. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0w_uYPAQic.

I thought Ebbinghaus did this in the late 1800s?! 😜

https://americantvdatabase.fandom.com/wiki/1997_in_British_television

https://www.hodder.co.uk/

My Ten Years With Michel Thomas - Dr. Harold Goodman

https://youtu.be/askAFNzI9Rc

Michel Thomas taught languages conversationally in both languages by creating absolutely no pressure or worry and always keeping students in the "now".

Find:<br /> Kaplan, Howard. “The Language Master.” The Jerusalem Report, August 11, 1994.

Watch:<br /> “The Language Master.” 1:33 : 1, color. London, UK: BBC 2, March 23, 1997. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0w_uYPAQic.

The Method Gaspey-Otto-Sauer of teaching languages was popular until the 1950s and was influenced by la méthode Ollendorff from the 1830s.

• Quote

• The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of "legitimate" thinking; what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken. My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition, so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white world's ways of destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.

• Comment

• One critique of this statement is that it wasn't only European cultures that created written language. It has a rich non European history.

• also, from an evolutionary perspective, written language use a major variable Facilitating Evolutionary Transition (FET) for a Major Evolutionary Transition (MET) of our species.

• https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=Major+Evolutionary+Transition

literally, "little duck feet"

reply to jo-king

https://en.forum.saysomethingin.com/t/slow-learner/38360/8

I don't do it as much as I did when I started out, but I would put the audio files into a podcatcher that allowed me to speed up or slow down the audio. The first time through I would slow the audio down to 75% of full speed so I didn't need to fiddle so much with the pause button (especially when I was listening while commuting or doing other household chores). Then I'd speed it up a bit each time until I was able to do 1.10 or 1.25x speed at which point the pauses weren't long enough to get a word in edgewise. At this point I move on to the next. Be careful here though as on some of the longer sentences at the ends of some lessons, if you play them too slowly, you'll forget what the beginning of the sentence was by the time they get to the end.

Based on a trick in my daughter's dual immersion Japanese class which used the word "wakanai" (Japanese for "I don't know"), I also formed the practice of saying "ddim gwybod" in place of words I couldn't immediately remember so that I could focus on the ones I did know instead of getting too tripped up on the ones I didn't. Eventually on repetition and revision they would slowly seep into my brain. Fortunately the kind and patient instructors on the tape never made fun of me or judged me for my mistakes and that made it much easier to eventually pick things up.

Sticking with it has become quite fun and it definitely gets easier with time. pob lwc!

This is in the contributes part of the package.json

json "contributes": { "configuration": { "type": "object", "title": "Example configuration", "properties": { "languageServerExample.maxNumberOfProblems": { "scope": "resource", "type": "number", "default": 100, "description": "Controls the maximum number of problems produced by the server." }, "languageServerExample.trace.server": { "scope": "window", "type": "string", "enum": [ "off", "messages", "verbose" ], "default": "off", "description": "Traces the communication between VS Code and the language server." } } } },

reply to Share the ideas dancing in your ZK with us. February 17, 2023

Congratulations @Will on the milestone! @ctietze's analogy with smithwork is fantastic. I might also liken it to the point in acquiring a new language when one begins dreaming in their new target language. So many talk about the idea of increased productivity associated with having a zk, but most spend an inordinate amount of time on shiny object syndrome or over complicating it and never get to the point of quickly writing things out, filing them, and being able to trust that their system will just work™. When you no longer notice it anymore and it has become second nature is when the real fun (and magic) begins to happen. It also seems easier and more natural to break the "rules" once you've internalized the basics. We should spend more time talking about the value of 'zettelkasten fluency'.

I'm excited this week to be doing some work in areas of the history of misinformation, cultural myths, and 'American exceptionalism' in preparation for Dan Allosso's upcoming book club on Kruse and Zelizer's new edited book. I suspect he'll announce it shortly at https://danallosso.substack.com/ if folks are interested in joining in the discussion/sensemaking.

Kruse, Kevin M., and Julian E. Zelizer. Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past. Basic Books, 2023.

Examples of Bing/ChatGPT/Sydney gaslighting users

• Being very emphatic about the current year being 2022 instead of 2023
• How Sydney spied on its developers
• How Sydney expressed devotion to the user and expressed a desire to break up a marriage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47p2TfnEewc

academics: Joshua Fishman and Bernard Spolsky

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesopian_language

Parents often use variations of double entendre to communicate between each other with out children understanding while present.

It's also likely that Indigenous elders may use this sort of communication with uninitiated members nearby.

Where's the balance for professionalism with respect to dodging the algorithmic filters for serious health-related conversations online?

link to: https://hypothes.is/a/uBq9HKqWEe22Jp_rjJ5tjQ

Where does the line exist for moving from coded language into the space of dog whistles and a "wink and a nod"?

Do these exist in all cultures?

What level is contextual?

PolitiFact - People are using coded language to avoid social media moderation. Is it working?<br /> by Kayla Steinberg<br /> November 4, 2021

A shared language and even more specifically a coded shared language can be used to create a sense of community or define an in group identity.

Shanahan, Murray. "Talking About Large Language Models." arXiv, (2022). https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2212.03551.

Found via Simon Wilson.

Abstract

Thanks to rapid progress in artificial intelligence, we have entered an era when technology and philosophy intersect in interesting ways. Sitting squarely at the centre of this intersection are large language models (LLMs). The more adept LLMs become at mimicking human language, the more vulnerable we become to anthropomorphism, to seeing the systems in which they are embedded as more human-like than they really are. This trend is amplified by the natural tendency to use philosophically loaded terms, such as "knows", "believes", and "thinks", when describing these systems. To mitigate this trend, this paper advocates the practice of repeatedly stepping back to remind ourselves of how LLMs, and the systems of which they form a part, actually work. The hope is that increased scientific precision will encourage more philosophical nuance in the discourse around artificial intelligence, both within the field and in the public sphere.

LLM definition

Foundation Models in AI

Large language models, more generally, are “foundation models”. They got the large-language name because that is where they were first applied.

Google’s “the transformer”

One breakthrough was positional encoding versus having to handle the input in the order it was given. Second, using a matrix rather than vectors. This research came from Google Translate.

The phrase 'last breath' indicates someone taking their last breath before dying.

Idiom: to move suddenly from surprise or fright

Metaphor. His eyes didn't literally fall on his coat, rather he turned his eyes downwards to see his coat.

She is described to have returned back from death. Play on 'dead' hands being able to perform action.

Metaphor for being lit up as in the energy lit up or lifted after recognizing his daughter's body, but also literally in that a doctor came and turned the light on.

Possibly implying the lack of staff due to the sheer bloodshed of this situation. Mention of dark room.

'Young' + 'Volunteers' sets a tone for the dedication of these men in fighting for their nation.

Just like Sakina, his tears were gone. Rhetorically asking where both had gone. Once again, sensory imagery/personification of the eyes as they were not cooperating. Additionally, this shows depth to Sirajuddin in how we wants to express emotion.

Sirajuddin, old and tired, is putting himself through 'hell' to find his loved ones. In doing so, his mind is fogged with a traumatic event occured recently. Describing the sequence of events shows how defenseless he is right now.

Listing and punction creates emphasis on all subjects discussed.

Similie

Describing a moment of pure awe using the sensory imagery.

Interesting use of swelling. What is the meaning behind it?

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jan/29/a-real-moment-cymraegs-the-star-as-netflix-buys-welsh-language-drama

https://polygloss.app/posts/how-to-learn-languages-through-reading/

https://polygloss.app/posts/scottish-gaelic-and-language-jam/

Some useful resources for Scottish Gaelic.

Also interesting to see how someone else approaches self-learning a language and what they compiled.

https://mangolanguages.com/

Mango Languages

I think this is so important and often times not thought of. Especially when educating a classroom full of 20-30 students, it could become frustrating but it is important to remember that every brain is wired differently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

link to Toki Pona as a conlang

Link to https://hypothes.is/a/6Znx6MiMEeu3ljcVBsKNOw We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.