“‘... but of these it is better that there remains no memory.’ The Connotation(s) of memory in the English translations of Se questo è un uomo”.

The one and only English translation of Se questo è un uomo (1947) by Primo Levi was published for the first time in 1959, and made by Stuart Woolf, in close collaboration with the author himself. Despite the attempts by Primo Levi to have new translations of both Se questo è un uomo and La tregua over the years, Woolf’s translation is the only English translation available to this day, with the partial exception of the adaptation made by George Whalley for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, aired in 1965. The translation by Woolf and the adaptation by Whalley will be analysed following a corpus-assisted comparative approach. In particular, the results of the quantitative analysis of both target texts will be presented, while a qualitative analysis of the theme word memory and its related forms will be performed. The word memory was chosen in view of its broader semantic area, that encompasses the meanings related to both memoria and ricordo. The analysis of the extended co-textual referents of the word memory aims at providing further insights into its related non-obvious meanings as well as into its evaluative connotations.