Levi’s encounter with Ulysses in Auschwitz centres around his painful yet exhilarating struggle to reconstruct Dante’s text from memory. But when Levi talks of his hope that, despite his inadequate rendering, Pikolo ‘got the message’, he is pointing at something other than pure philology. Uttered in the death camp, Dante’s words shine through the dust of school commentary. This estrangement effect triggers a kind of epiphany: ‘ha sentito che lo riguarda, che riguarda tutti gli uomini in travaglio, e noi in specie; e che riguarda noi due, che osiamo ragionare di queste cose con le stanghe della zuppa sulle spalle’. The momentary sense of liberation Levi derives from owning and sharing Dante’s sublime language has been interpreted as a celebration of humanist values that however fails to recognise the way in which these values are entangled with the very structures of domination that created the Lager (Druker 2004). Yet Levi never provides a univocal interpretation of ‘the message’ of Ulysses’ story. In fact, the episode has had a ‘bifurcated’ critical reception and its meaning has been contested since the Middle Ages (Barolini 2018). Moreover, the figure of Dante in general and his figuration of Ulysses in particular became central to Fascism’s nationalist cultural programme, something Levi could hardly have missed.

As with other protagonists of the Inferno, the issue has been how to reconcile Ulysses’ heroic stature as a character with the fact that he is ultimately condemned as an unrepentant sinner. While the prevalent opinion among early commentators of the Commedia was that Ulysses was a transgressor, there were some who presented him as an admirable figure. Cristoforo Landino calls Ulysses’ speech ‘honest and honourable’. Bernardino Daniello notes that the ancient myth of the ne plus ultra was ‘a false and futile belief’. On the other hand, not all modern critics praise Ulysses’ daring. John Ruskin warily observes that humans are yet to learn the ‘danger of this novelty of wisdom’. Still, it is in the modern period that a more positive view of Ulysses’ intellectual hubris starts to gain traction.

The frontispiece to Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) is often cited as the symbolic watershed between medieval deference to traditional beliefs and the modern project of exploration and innovation. This frontispiece depicts a ship which is about to pass through the pillars of Hercules, just like Dante imagined Ulysses and his crew dared to do. Another ship, near the horizon, is also approaching. Below the depiction of the ships, a Latin motto, taken from the Vulgate, recites: ‘Many shall pass through and knowledge shall be increased’. There is no indication of shipwreck; on the contrary, the ships move confidently ahead in full sail. The world has entered a new era and the ancient prohibition has become void: ‘these times may justly bear in their word […] plus ultra, in precedence of the ancient non ultra’ (Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605)).

To Horkheimer and Adorno, Bacon is the ‘herald’ of the modern belief that ‘knowledge, which is power, knows no limits’ – a principle that, taken to its extreme logical conclusion, leads to the gates of Auschwitz. Had Ulysses gone under, as Dante decreed, the world would have been a better place. However, the postmodern critique of rationalism disregards another, parallel line that connects Enlightenment conceptions of the human to emancipatory discourses in both politics and aesthetics. The revolutionary and Romantic era gave us many versions of the self-sacrificing heroes of knowledge, striving for the emancipation of humankind. Shelley’s Prometheus ‘gave men speech, and speech created thought | Which is the measure of the universe. | And Science struck the thrones of earth and heaven | […] for which he hangs | Withering in destined pain’ (Prometheus Unbound). As Dante does with the Homeric story, Shelley rewrites and extends a classical myth in a way that challenges the idea that knowledge is sinful or transgressive. In the preface to Prometheus Unbound, Shelley declares he would ‘rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon than go to Heaven with Paley [eighteenth-century theologian] and Malthus’. Shelley also names Dante as one of the stylistic predecessors to his own use of imagery ‘drawn from the operations of the human mind’. In his readings of the Commedia, Shelley was particularly attracted to similes that illuminate ways of seeing and knowing. But a shadow of Dante’s ambivalence lingers in Shelley’s suggestion that his Prometheus is similar to Milton’s Satan, minus the ‘taints of ambition […] and personal aggrandisement’.

From his long English exile, the Italian revolutionary and nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini contributed to making Dante into a national icon at the service of the Italian Risorgimento. In The Duties of Man, he defines humans as ‘creatures capable of rational, social, and intellectual progress’, warning his readers that ‘you descend to the level of brutes whenever you suppress, or allow to be suppressed any of the faculties that constitute human nature either in yourself or others’ (Mazzini 1892, 45). ‘Brutes’ (‘bruti’) is Dante’s term, and the passage as a whole reads like an extended paraphrase of Ulysses’ ‘orazion picciola’, whose rhetoric Mazzini puts to work here in support of ‘the emancipation of Woman [and] of the working man’ (146).

Mazzini’s duties of man were recast into the Fascist doctrine of the primacy of the state over the individual. The canto of Ulysses was similarly enlisted to the cult of Italian exceptionalism and imperial conquest. Responding to a survey to establish which was the most popular passage of the Commedia, Mussolini apparently nominated the line ‘de’ remi facemmo ali al folle volo’. The quotation struck some as scarily apposite. In the clandestine paper ‘Il Ribelle’ of 31 October 1944, the anti-fascist priest don Giacomo Vender, writing under the pseudonym Sancio Empörer, used the same verse to expose il Duce’s seductive lies: ‘Fascism’s great accomplishment has been to dress its sick [‘folle’] idea of life, humanity, nation and religion in seductive attitudes. [Everything] was made into a wing to hurl ourselves […] beyond the pillars of Hercules…de’ remi facemmo ali al folle volo’.

Levi leaves out the line altogether. His act of subversion is even more radical: as the Resistance fighters, he feels that Dante’s text is ‘about us’, but the role he chooses for himself is not that of the acquiescent victim, one of Ulysses’ anonymous crew. He writes himself and his fellow prisoner as the heroic, tragic protagonists of Ulysses’ ‘shipwreck with spectator’ (Blumberg). Far from being complicit with the master narrative of Fascism, Levi invokes Dante in the death camp to liberate and reclaim his words and restore to them all the force of their moral questioning.

RMuc

The chapter ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ in SQ ends with a shipwreck. Levi closes the chapter with the same line that Dante uses to conclude Inferno 26, ‘Infin che ’l mar fu sopra noi rinchiuso’. (As Alberto Cavaglion has pointed out, the citation contains a significative lapsus: ‘rinchiuso’ instead of ‘richiuso’.) How should we interpret this ending? I would like to offer a creative reading that plays on the metaphorical meaning of navigation and shipwreck in Western culture.

In Shipwreck with Spectator, Hans Blumenberg argues that humans have sought to grasp the movement of their existence above all through the metaphor of the perilous sea voyage. As the reverberations of the Greek idea of the κυβερνήτης (governor) show, navigation is a widespread metaphor for politics, philosophy, and life itself. Among these reverberations we find an ancient motto that is particularly interesting for its ambivalence and paradoxical structure: naufragium feci, bene navigavi. This motto was first mentioned by Diogenes Laertius, but we find multiple versions of it throughout European culture. To cite a couple of examples from the Italian context, I would recall Leopardi’s ‘naufragar [...] dolce’ (‘L’infinito’) and Ungaretti’s Allegria di naufragi.

How can we interpret the seeming contradictoriness of this motto? The motto calls into question the idea that shipwreck is the sign of bad navigation. On the contrary, there is a mutual implication between good navigation and shipwrecking. This is made explicit by Erasmus in the Adagium 1878:

Nunc bene navigavi, cum naufragium feci (Now that I am shipwrecked, my navigation has gone well/I’ve learnt how to navigate)

Here shipwreck is not in contrast with navigation, but is rather a necessary passage, something without which we cannot have a full and proper ‘navigation’. To put it a different way, only when we have experienced shipwreck can we claim to have navigated well. On the one hand, ‘shipwreck’ is an enriching experience, a possibility that gives meaning to every metaphorical ‘navigation’. On the other hand, in our human existence, it is impossible to navigate without ever experiencing shipwreck. In our finite, imperfect world, shipwreck is ultimately unavoidable.

With this in mind, I would like to suggest that we could read ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ in SQ through the prism of the motto naufragium feci, bene navigavi. I am not arguing that this is what Levi intended to say, but simply that this is one of the ways of reading the text. If we see ‘texts and readers as co-creators of meaning […], [whereby] interpretation becomes a co-production between actors that brings new things to light rather than an endless rumination on a text’s hidden meaning or representational failures’ (Felski 2015, 173-74), ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ could be read as a (metaphorical) navigation on three levels. First, Levi and Pikolo’s journey to get the soup is a navigation through the camp that provides a ‘moment of reprieve’. Second, Levi’s translation of Dante is a metaphorical navigation in the labyrinth of memory, an attempt to trace a route through a sea of oblivion. Finally, Levi’s translation is also a ‘metanavigation’, for it concerns another navigation and shipwreck, that of Ulysses. By overlapping his navigation with that of Ulysses, Levi raises crucial questions regarding the human condition and the fate of the Häftlinge in the Lager.

As in the case of Ulysses, each of the three levels of navigation ends with a shipwreck. But is Levi’s translation of Dante really a failure, or could it be read as the sign of a good navigation? In the Preface to SQ, Levi argues that when the idea that ‘every stranger is an enemy’ becomes the ‘major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager’. The whole Lager could indeed be read through the curse of the Tower of Babel (see ‘Una buona giornata’). Translation is therefore a way of countering this course, a way of reining in the effects of Babel by restoring the humanity of the stranger and building a bridge through language, as Levi argues in ‘Tradurre ed essere tradotti’. By translating Dante to Pikolo, then, Levi is not just recovering fragments of memory. He is countering the logic that lies at the root of the Lager and restoring – if temporarily – his and Pikolo’s humanity. The translation ends with a shipwreck, yes, but that experience – the attempt of ‘enacting’ the human through a navigation – is a good shipwreck: naufragium feci, bene navigavi.

SB

The chapter ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ in SQ ends with a shipwreck. Levi closes the chapter with the same line that Dante uses to conclude Inferno 26, ‘Infin che ’l mar fu sopra noi rinchiuso’. (As Alberto Cavaglion has pointed out, the citation contains a significative lapsus: ‘rinchiuso’ instead of ‘richiuso’.) How should we interpret this ending? I would like to offer a creative reading that plays on the metaphorical meaning of navigation and shipwreck in Western culture.

In Shipwreck with Spectator, Hans Blumenberg argues that humans have sought to grasp the movement of their existence above all through the metaphor of the perilous sea voyage. As the reverberations of the Greek idea of the κυβερνήτης (governor) show, navigation is a widespread metaphor for politics, philosophy, and life itself. Among these reverberations we find an ancient motto that is particularly interesting for its ambivalence and paradoxical structure: naufragium feci, bene navigavi. This motto was first mentioned by Diogenes Laertius, but we find multiple versions of it throughout European culture. To cite a couple of examples from the Italian context, I would recall Leopardi’s ‘naufragar [...] dolce’ (‘L’infinito’) and Ungaretti’s Allegria di naufragi.

How can we interpret the seeming contradictoriness of this motto? The motto calls into question the idea that shipwreck is the sign of bad navigation. On the contrary, there is a mutual implication between good navigation and shipwrecking. This is made explicit by Erasmus in the Adagium 1878:

Nunc bene navigavi, cum naufragium feci (Now that I am shipwrecked, my navigation has gone well/I’ve learnt how to navigate)

Here shipwreck is not in contrast with navigation, but is rather a necessary passage, something without which we cannot have a full and proper ‘navigation’. To put it a different way, only when we have experienced shipwreck can we claim to have navigated well. On the one hand, ‘shipwreck’ is an enriching experience, a possibility that gives meaning to every metaphorical ‘navigation’. On the other hand, in our human existence, it is impossible to navigate without ever experiencing shipwreck. In our finite, imperfect world, shipwreck is ultimately unavoidable.

With this in mind, I would like to suggest that we could read ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ in SQ through the prism of the motto naufragium feci, bene navigavi. I am not arguing that this is what Levi intended to say, but simply that this is one of the ways of reading the text. If we see ‘texts and readers as co-creators of meaning […], [whereby] interpretation becomes a co-production between actors that brings new things to light rather than an endless rumination on a text’s hidden meaning or representational failures’ (Felski 2015, 173-74), ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ could be read as a (metaphorical) navigation on three levels. First, Levi and Pikolo’s journey to get the soup is a navigation through the camp that provides a ‘moment of reprieve’. Second, Levi’s translation of Dante is a metaphorical navigation in the labyrinth of memory, an attempt to trace a route through a sea of oblivion. Finally, Levi’s translation is also a ‘metanavigation’, for it concerns another navigation and shipwreck, that of Ulysses. By overlapping his navigation with that of Ulysses, Levi raises crucial questions regarding the human condition and the fate of the Häftlinge in the Lager.

As in the case of Ulysses, each of the three levels of navigation ends with a shipwreck. But is Levi’s translation of Dante really a failure, or could it be read as the sign of a good navigation? In the Preface to SQ, Levi argues that when the idea that ‘every stranger is an enemy’ becomes the ‘major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager’. The whole Lager could indeed be read through the curse of the Tower of Babel (see ‘Una buona giornata’). Translation is therefore a way of countering this course, a way of reining in the effects of Babel by restoring the humanity of the stranger and building a bridge through language, as Levi argues in ‘Tradurre ed essere tradotti’. By translating Dante to Pikolo, then, Levi is not just recovering fragments of memory. He is countering the logic that lies at the root of the Lager and restoring – if temporarily – his and Pikolo’s humanity. The translation ends with a shipwreck, yes, but that experience – the attempt of ‘enacting’ the human through a navigation – is a good shipwreck: naufragium feci, bene navigavi.

SB

Levi’s encounter with Ulysses in Auschwitz centres around his painful yet exhilarating struggle to reconstruct Dante’s text from memory. But when Levi talks of his hope that, despite his inadequate rendering, Pikolo ‘got the message’, he is pointing at something other than pure philology. Uttered in the death camp, Dante’s words shine through the dust of school commentary. This estrangement effect triggers a kind of epiphany: ‘ha sentito che lo riguarda, che riguarda tutti gli uomini in travaglio, e noi in specie; e che riguarda noi due, che osiamo ragionare di queste cose con le stanghe della zuppa sulle spalle’. The momentary sense of liberation Levi derives from owning and sharing Dante’s sublime language has been interpreted as a celebration of humanist values that however fails to recognise the way in which these values are entangled with the very structures of domination that created the Lager (Druker 2004). Yet Levi never provides a univocal interpretation of ‘the message’ of Ulysses’ story. In fact, the episode has had a ‘bifurcated’ critical reception and its meaning has been contested since the Middle Ages (Barolini 2018). Moreover, the figure of Dante in general and his figuration of Ulysses in particular became central to Fascism’s nationalist cultural programme, something Levi could hardly have missed.

As with other protagonists of the Inferno, the issue has been how to reconcile Ulysses’ heroic stature as a character with the fact that he is ultimately condemned as an unrepentant sinner. While the prevalent opinion among early commentators of the Commedia was that Ulysses was a transgressor, there were some who presented him as an admirable figure. Cristoforo Landino calls Ulysses’ speech ‘honest and honourable’. Bernardino Daniello notes that the ancient myth of the ne plus ultra was ‘a false and futile belief’. On the other hand, not all modern critics praise Ulysses’ daring. John Ruskin warily observes that humans are yet to learn the ‘danger of this novelty of wisdom’. Still, it is in the modern period that a more positive view of Ulysses’ intellectual hubris starts to gain traction.

The frontispiece to Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) is often cited as the symbolic watershed between medieval deference to traditional beliefs and the modern project of exploration and innovation. This frontispiece depicts a ship which is about to pass through the pillars of Hercules, just like Dante imagined Ulysses and his crew dared to do. Another ship, near the horizon, is also approaching. Below the depiction of the ships, a Latin motto, taken from the Vulgate, recites: ‘Many shall pass through and knowledge shall be increased’. There is no indication of shipwreck; on the contrary, the ships move confidently ahead in full sail. The world has entered a new era and the ancient prohibition has become void: ‘these times may justly bear in their word […] plus ultra, in precedence of the ancient non ultra’ (Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605)).

To Horkheimer and Adorno, Bacon is the ‘herald’ of the modern belief that ‘knowledge, which is power, knows no limits’ – a principle that, taken to its extreme logical conclusion, leads to the gates of Auschwitz. Had Ulysses gone under, as Dante decreed, the world would have been a better place. However, the postmodern critique of rationalism disregards another, parallel line that connects Enlightenment conceptions of the human to emancipatory discourses in both politics and aesthetics. The revolutionary and Romantic era gave us many versions of the self-sacrificing heroes of knowledge, striving for the emancipation of humankind. Shelley’s Prometheus ‘gave men speech, and speech created thought | Which is the measure of the universe. | And Science struck the thrones of earth and heaven | […] for which he hangs | Withering in destined pain’ (Prometheus Unbound). As Dante does with the Homeric story, Shelley rewrites and extends a classical myth in a way that challenges the idea that knowledge is sinful or transgressive. In the preface to Prometheus Unbound, Shelley declares he would ‘rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon than go to Heaven with Paley [eighteenth-century theologian] and Malthus’. Shelley also names Dante as one of the stylistic predecessors to his own use of imagery ‘drawn from the operations of the human mind’. In his readings of the Commedia, Shelley was particularly attracted to similes that illuminate ways of seeing and knowing. But a shadow of Dante’s ambivalence lingers in Shelley’s suggestion that his Prometheus is similar to Milton’s Satan, minus the ‘taints of ambition […] and personal aggrandisement’.

From his long English exile, the Italian revolutionary and nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini contributed to making Dante into a national icon at the service of the Italian Risorgimento. In The Duties of Man, he defines humans as ‘creatures capable of rational, social, and intellectual progress’, warning his readers that ‘you descend to the level of brutes whenever you suppress, or allow to be suppressed any of the faculties that constitute human nature either in yourself or others’ (Mazzini 1892, 45). ‘Brutes’ (‘bruti’) is Dante’s term, and the passage as a whole reads like an extended paraphrase of Ulysses’ ‘orazion picciola’, whose rhetoric Mazzini puts to work here in support of ‘the emancipation of Woman [and] of the working man’ (146).

Mazzini’s duties of man were recast into the Fascist doctrine of the primacy of the state over the individual. The canto of Ulysses was similarly enlisted to the cult of Italian exceptionalism and imperial conquest. Responding to a survey to establish which was the most popular passage of the Commedia, Mussolini apparently nominated the line ‘de’ remi facemmo ali al folle volo’. The quotation struck some as scarily apposite. In the clandestine paper ‘Il Ribelle’ of 31 October 1944, the anti-fascist priest don Giacomo Vender, writing under the pseudonym Sancio Empörer, used the same verse to expose il Duce’s seductive lies: ‘Fascism’s great accomplishment has been to dress its sick [‘folle’] idea of life, humanity, nation and religion in seductive attitudes. [Everything] was made into a wing to hurl ourselves […] beyond the pillars of Hercules…de’ remi facemmo ali al folle volo’.

Levi leaves out the line altogether. His act of subversion is even more radical: as the Resistance fighters, he feels that Dante’s text is ‘about us’, but the role he chooses for himself is not that of the acquiescent victim, one of Ulysses’ anonymous crew. He writes himself and his fellow prisoner as the heroic, tragic protagonists of Ulysses’ ‘shipwreck with spectator’ (Blumberg). Far from being complicit with the master narrative of Fascism, Levi invokes Dante in the death camp to liberate and reclaim his words and restore to them all the force of their moral questioning.

RMuc