2019-10-02
1 小时 0 分钟This is the New Yorker fiction podcast from the New Yorker magazine.
I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker.
Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.
This month, we're going to hear Quaestio de Centauris by Primo Levi, translated from the Italian by Jenny McPhee, which was published in the New Yorker in June of 2015.
The Centaur's origins are legendary, but legends that they pass down among themselves are very different from the classical tales we know.
The story was chosen by Jumpa Lahiri, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her debut story collection, interpreter of maladies, in 2000 and recently edited the Penguin Book of italian short stories.
Hi, Jumpa.
Hi, Deborah.
As I just mentioned, you recently edited and published the Penguin Book of italian short stories, which includes 40 italian stories that were written over the course of the 20th century.
And you included this story by Primo Levi.
What was it about this story that.
Made you want to have it in there?
Well, as with many of my selections, they grow out of conversations I've had with people I've met over the past seven years as I've been living in Italy.
So when I was considering a story by Levi, I immediately turned to my friend, a man named Marco Belpoliti, who has written a lot about Primo Levi and has edited his completed works in Italian for Einaudi and is really, I would say, Italy's leading critical authority voice on Levi.
And I mentioned the project to him.
And I said, what do you think about Levy?
And I already wanted to choose a story from the natural histories because its a collection that Levy writes after sort of establishing himself as a writer who talks about his experiences in surviving the Holocaust, surviving a year in a concentration camp.
And, and the collection that he publishes after that represents another side of Levi.
And it was Marco that suggested this story because it is possibly the most representative, and I agree, of Levys identity.
Levy himself saw himself as a centaur, and he, I think, regarded the centaur as a creature on so many levels that reflected his hybrid essence, right, as both an italian and a jew, both as a writer and a chemist.