October 27 | FILMS
1:30 pm - 4:00 pm - FREECUNY Graduate Center In collaboration with RAI Teche and RAI Corporation CPL presents a session of film from the archives of the Italian television. The session, featuring interviews with Primo Levi, opens with Sleeping Beauty in the Fridge, one of three television plays based on Levi's science fiction short stories. A breathtaking reflection on time, memory, history, and power the piece sheds new light on Levi as writer and socio-political commentator.
Italian w/English Subtitles. more |
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OCT 27 | Primo Levi in Translation:
German, Arabic, and Farsi
CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue | FREE
All programs are in English
5:00 pm | Quest and Judgment: Reading Primo Levi
Franco Baldasso (New York University), Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg (Brown University), Ernestine Bradley (The New School), Ernesto Ferrero
In a letter to his German translator, Primo Levi claimed that he wrote If This Is a Man with the Germans in mind as his audience. His first testimonial book is only the initial step in Levi's relationship vis-�-vis the Germans and their culture-a relationship strongly linked to his personal experiences at and beyond Auschwitz. Understanding them, both bystanders and Nazi perpetrators, is one of Levi's main themes. This roundtable will explore that relationship as seen in his works, from If This Is a Man to the final chapter of The Drowned and the Saved, which not by chance he titled "Letters from Germans." It will address such issues as the problem of judgment in Levi's works; his personal connections with German intellectuals and survivors, from Jean Am�ry to Hety Schmitt-Maas, and their contributions to the development of his thought; and his books' reception in the context of the country's efforts to confront their past.
8:00 pm | In Arabic and Farsi: The Universality of Suffering
Boualem Sansal (author, The German Mujahid, Algeria); Abraham Radkin (Aladdin Project, France); Clifford Chanin (The Legacy Project, co-editor of Blooming through the Ashes); Moderator: Talal Asad (CUNY Graduate Center); Respondent: Ammiel Alcalay (CUNY Graduate Center)
The recently published Arabic and Farsi translations of If This Is a Man open a new world of references and possible readings of Primo Levi's books and pose a new challenge to the appreciation of Levi's humanism. In which ways is his voice relevant to an Arabic- and Farsi- speaking readership And does this new world of readers test the universality of Levi's understanding of suffering and of human nature? As translations of his other works are planned in the same languages, a panel of scholars, editors, and writers will discuss the circumstances in which the book was published and the responses in the Arab and Persian worlds to Levi's writings as a testimony of history and a reflection on the possibility of evil. Inevitably destined to enter the broader discourse on the Middle East, this new life of a book whose publishing history has not been easy in any language, has a strong potential to shed new light on its author and open untapped perspectives of dialogue and exchange. more
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Links of Interest
The newly published translations of If This Is a Man into Arabic and Farsi raises a complex spectrum of issues and debates.
Here are some related items of interest.
Books:
Meir Litvak, Esther Webman. From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009 | H-Net Review
Boualem Sansal, The German Mujahid. Europa Editions, 2009 Book | Review | Join Boualem Sansal at the French Institute in New York on October 28th
Talks and conferences:
Confronting anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. An exploration of their socio-historic and theological roots and similarities | November 10th - University of London | Info
Thinking of Religion, Secularism, and Politics. Berkeley's Conversations with History, Talal Asad | Video
The Jew, the Arab: An Interview with Gil Anidjar
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Follow our Fall 2009 program through I-Italy.org
The outreach for the program is made possible through the generous support of Regione Piemonte
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