Survival in Auschwitz

Publication

Primo Levi

In January 1947, the manuscript was initially rejected by Einaudi, with the writers Cesare Pavese and Natalia Ginzburg thinking it too early after the war for such an account.[3] However Levi managed to find a smaller publisher, De Silva,[7] who printed 2,500 copies of the book, 1,500 of which were sold, mostly in Levi's hometown of Turin. In 1955, Levi signed a contract with Einaudi for a new edition, which was published in 1958. The initial printing of 2000 copies was followed by a second of the same size.[8]

An English translation by Stuart Woolf was published in 1959. A German translation by Heinz Reidt appeared in 1961 (titled Ist das ein Mensch?) and a French edition in the same year.[7]

All translations were completed under Levi's close supervision. He was particularly careful to oversee the German translation, writing in The Drowned and the Saved: "I did not trust my German publisher. I wrote him an almost insolent letter: I warned him not to remove or change a single word in the text, and I insisted that he send me the manuscript of the translation in batches ... I wanted to check on not merely its lexical but also its inner faithfulness."[9] Robert S. C. Gordon writes that Levi went on to develop a close relationship with Reidt.[10] The German edition contains a special preface addressed to the German people, which Levi said he wrote out of passionate necessity to remind them what they had done.[11]

If This Is a Man is often published alongside Levi's second work of witness, The Truce (Italian title: La Tregua). The English translation of that book was published in 1965, again by Stuart Woolf, and was awarded the John Florio Prize for Italian translation in 1966.


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