This poem stands at the front of the Italian writer Primo Levi’s first book, ‘Se questo è un uomo’ (If this is a man), first published in 1947. The book recounts Levi’s arrest as a member of the Italian anti-fascist resistance during the Second World War, and his incarceration in the Auschwitz concentration camp from February 1944 until the camp was liberated on 27 January 1945.

Knowing its background, I find it difficult to apply the normal tools of poetic appraisal to a poem like this. It is rhetorical, exhortatory, of a kind I would normally be suspicious of, a poetry of bare statement, shorn of poetic device, and with only a single image, that of the frog in the third stanza. It is not rich, it is not complex, so if it is powerful, as I feel it to be, wherein lies that power? The poetry is in the pity, said Wilfred Owen, which may be partly true, but the poetry must also be in the poetry, or how do we distinguish the genuinely inspired from the mere assemblage of well-intentioned, fashionable sentiments which has always, and perhaps never more so than today, served to counterfeit the genuine? I have no answer, unless it comes down in some part to what one has the right to say. I am reminded somewhat of Siegfried Sassoon, who can be similarly excoriating in his wrath and urgency: ‘Swear by the green of spring that you’ll never forget’. Sassoon had the right. Levi had the right.

The translation that follows is my own.

Se questo è un uomo

Voi che vivete sicuri
nelle vostre tiepide case,
voi che trovate tornando a sera
il cibo caldo e visi amici:

Considerate se questo è un uomo
che lavora nel fango
che non conosce pace
che lotta per mezzo pane
che muore per un si o per un no.

Considerate se questa è una donna,
senza capelli e senza nome
senza più forza di ricordare
vuoti gli occhi e freddo il grembo
come una rana d’inverno.

Meditate che questo è stato:
vi comando queste parole.
Scolpitele nel vostro cuore
stando in casa andando per via,
coricandovi, alzandovi.
Ripetetele ai vostri figli.

O vi si sfaccia la casa,
la malattia vi impedisca,
i vostri nati torcano il viso da voi.

Primo Levi

If this is a man

You who live secure in your warm houses,
Who find, when you return at evening,
Hot food and the faces of friends:

Consider if this is a man
Who labours in the mud,
Who knows no peace,
Who fights for a piece of bread,
Who dies by a yes or a no.

Consider if this is a woman
Without hair, without a name,
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb
Cold as a frog in winter.

Brood upon it, that this came to pass:
I command to you these words.
Engrave them on your heart
At home, walking the street,
Going to bed, on rising;
Repeat them to your children.

Or may your house fall to ruin,
May maladies beset you,
And may your children turn their faces from you.