Two unpublished letters from Primo Levi to Roland Stragliati

How to rethink «La chiave a stella» in French

Abstract

This contribution presents two unpublished letters by Primo Levi, sent in June 1980 to Roland Stragliati, the translator then working on the French version of La chiave a stella (1978). These are letters in which Levi systematically reviews drafts of Stragliati's version and tries to improve its solutions, offering him dense lists of pointed observations and alternative formulations. This is a privileged document of Levi's stylistic self-awareness, showing with what sensitivity as a linguist he could comment on his own writing choices and rethink them in French. This corpus is analyzed here from two different angles: on the one hand, highlighting the peculiar translation problems posed by the technical-dialectal mixture of La chiave a stella; on the other hand, trying to assess the modalities and outcomes of this particular author-translator collaboration