SOURCE: “Taking Time,” in Parnassus, Vol. 16, No. 1, 1990, pp. 7-15.

In the following review of Collected Poems, Feld gives an unfavorable assessment of Levi's poetry, maintaining that his “poems still feel to me like a personal indignity he suffered—or at least a dubiety, an unnatural struggle.”

The heart falls a little to read, in a small essay entitled “On Obscure Writing,” this dismissal by Primo Levi:

The effable is preferable to the ineffable, the human word to the animal whine. It is not by chance that the two least decipherable poets writing in German, Trakl and Celan, both died as suicides. It is evident that (Celan's) song is tragic and noble, but confusedly so: to penetrate it is a desperate enterprise for the common reader but also for the critic. Celan's obscurity is neither contempt for the reader, nor expressive inadequacy, nor lazy abandonment to the flow of...