Primo Levi Translation Of The Holocaust Poem 'shema' Poem by Michael Burch

Shema ('Listen')
by Primo Levi
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

You who live secure
in your comfortable homes,
who return each evening to find
warm food and a hearty welcome...

Consider: is this a 'man'
who slogs through the mud,
who knows no peace,
who fights for scraps of bread,
who lives at another man's whim,
who at his 'yes' or his 'no' lies dead?

Consider: is this is a 'woman'
shorn bald and bereft of a name
because she lacks the strength to remember,
her eyes as void and her womb as frigid
as a winter frog's?

Consider that such horrors have indeed been!

I commend these words to you.
Engrave them in your hearts
when you lounge in your beds
and again when you rise,
when you venture outside.

Repeat them to your children,
or may your houses softly crumble
and disease render you equally as humble
so that even your offspring avert their eyes.

Primo Michele Levi [1919-1987] was an Italian Jewish chemist, scientist, Holocaust survivor, writer, journalist and poet. He was the author of two novels and several collections of short stories, essays, and poems. He is best known for If This Is a Man, his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. His unique work The Periodic Table was shortlisted as one of the greatest scientific books ever written, by the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Levi's autobiographical book about his liberation from Auschwitz, The Truce, became a movie with the same name in 1997. Keywords/Tags: Holocaust, poem, Italian, translation, man, mud, woman, bald, nameless, houses, homes, bread, eyes, womb, empty, void, frigid, lifeless, horror, horrors, hearts, write, etch, engrave, inscribe, children, offspring, disease, avert, reject, race, racist, racism, man, woman, house, home