Surviving Truth (Measure for Measure)

Abstract

In a short but luminous piece written for an Italian newspaper in 1983, ‘Translating Kafka’, Primo Levi considers the famous final sentences in Kafka’s The Trial, which he had recently translated. The novel’s last words are like ‘una pietra tombale’, a tombstone, he says (Levi, 1986, p. 142). The English translation of the novel concludes with: ‘it was as if the shame of it must outlive him’. Kafka’s German reads: ‘es war, als sollte die Scham ihn überleben’ (Kafka, 2002, p. 312). What does this sense of überleben, to outlive, to survive, to live on or live beyond, mean here? For Levi, who translates this as ‘e fu come se la vergogna gli dovesse sopravvivere’ (Levi, 1986, p. 142), there is nothing enigmatic in the phrase, even if there are many possible and contradictory elements and events in the narrative that might be thought to prompt K.’s shame. There is no mystery because Levi recognizes something in K. that he feels he knows, and this knowledge is to do with the nature of the tribunal that passes judgement on K. rather than that of the judgement itself. As Levi expresses it at the end of his piece: ‘È finalmente un tribunale umano, non divino: è fatto di uomini e dagli uomini, e Josef, col coltello già piantato nel cuore, prova vergogna di essere un uomo’ (p. 143) [‘It is in the end a human, not a divine, tribunal: it is made up of men and by men, and Joseph, with the knife already planted in his heart, feels ashamed of being a man’] (Levi, 1991, p. 109; translation modified).