Published 2025-06-25
Keywords
- extreme violence,
- trauma,
- translation theory,
- Primo Levi
How to Cite
Copyright (c) 2025 Tiphaine Samoyault
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Abstract
To be able to express a traumatic experience implies to translate it. Translating trauma means being able to say it. Thus, the translation of texts bearing witness to trauma is ultimately presented as the translation of a translation. This is why Primo Levi’s If This is a Man is an ongoing reflection on translation. By associating translation with survival, as Walter Benjamin and, even more precisely, Janine Altounian did in La Survivance: traduire le trauma collectif (Dunod, 2000), this essay aims to explore the different ways in which translation is linked to survival.