A new translation of If This is a Man into Swahili is available on the site of the International Center of Primo Levi Studies in Turin and can be downloaded freely
Download If This Is a Man in Swahili.
Primo Levi’s If This is a Man is one of the most read and most appreciated books written about the Nazi extermination of people during World War II. As time has gone by, it has become a classic of contemporary literature. The book’s translations have extended first into English and then into German, the language of the persecutors, and then eventually into the languages of various European countries, of North and South America, and, more recently, of Asia. By now, the book has been translated into almost fifty different languages.
A new translation into Arabic was published a few months ago. This makes the book available to the Middle East, to a great area in Africa, but also to the extensive Arabic-speaking communities in various areas of the world, including, first of all, Europe, where the great migratory movements of our times have pushed more and more numerous populations to settle in.
In this way, a narrative of a crucial event in the history of the twentieth century has become available to a very broad section of the public through its memorable sequences that can speak to people of different origins and cultures. This has happened thanks, in the first place, to Levi’s ability to place value upon the human and universal dimension of a boundless tragedy.
Eighty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, it was still impossible to make this extraordinary opportunity for knowledge and reflection available to people in a large part of Africa, which has by now powerfully entered the network of cultural exchanges that are bringing together the world we live in.
It is exactly for this reason that the International Center for Primo Levi Studies, thanks to the availability of Einaudi publishers in collaboration with Silvio Zamorani publishers and with the contribution of the Committee for the Celebration of the Centenary of Primo Levi’s Birth, has decided to sponsor a translation of If This is a Man into Swahili, a language spoken in a great part of eastern, central, and southern Africa.
How Swahili became Africa’s most spoken language
Harvard University) for The Conversation, 2022
Once just an obscure island dialect of an African Bantu tongue, Swahili has evolved into Africa’s most internationally recognised language. It is peer to the few languages of the world that boast over 200 million users.
Over the two millennia of Swahili’s growth and adaptation, the moulders of this story – immigrants from inland Africa, traders from Asia, Arab and European occupiers, European and Indian settlers, colonial rulers, and individuals from various postcolonial nations – have used Swahili and adapted it to their own purposes. They have taken it wherever they have gone to the west.
Africa’s Swahili-speaking zone now extends across a full third of the continent from south to north and touches on the opposite coast, encompassing the heart of Africa. Read
