Dante in Auschwitz, Ulysses in Hell
“The world is going to hell.” “Going?”
—overheard in a café
Within the flames are spirits, each one here / Enfolds himself in what burns him…
—Dante, INFERNO, xxvi, 50-51
Making your way through hell, you come upon flames
that, like flickering tongues, begin to speak.
You being Primo Levi, an Italian Jew in Auschwitz,
and you being me, yesterday, at home in my comfortable chair,
asking, why did poet Dante place Homer’s Ulysses in hell?
I’m reading If This Is a Man, Levi’s account of his year
in Auschwitz, the chapter, “The Canto of Ulysses,”
in which, on a sunny day, crossing the death camp’s plain,
lugging a pot of what was called soup, Levi recites
his schoolboy Dante to Frenchman Jean, who’d said,
“Help me, please, to feel human again.” And so,
that sunny day in Auschwitz, me in my comfortable chair,
the Inferno. “Why that passage came to mind,”
Levi writes, “I cannot say. Who is in that fire?
I wanted Jean to know, to become, the two of us,
if for a moment, men again.” I am Ulysses,
says the flame, that complicated man. Why am I
in hell? Because, says Dante (to Levi to Jean
to me in my Oakland chair), I altered my course,
did not return to Ithaca and Penelope, no,
the Odyssey’s a lie. I sailed instead into unknown seas.
Seeking to know what cannot be known
and still be a living man, I arrived at . . . .
Auschwitz. A word he didn’t yet know.
Whispers in the boxcar, “Where are we going?”
No one knew. No one yet knew how to know.
The storm that swirls in God’s dark heart,
our poor boat tossed, and sank, my crew & I all lost.
Why this passage came to mind a sunny day
in the death camp, reader, you tell me. What I know
reading it, trembling in my American chair:
Where are we going? Whispers; no one knows.
No one now knows how to know—retributions
without end, system collapse, the insects, the seas,
this master race of clowns…words can embody
but cannot say—Dante in Auschwitz, Ulysses
in hell—only that, making our way through hell
we come upon flames, and, to be human, try to speak.
Oakland, 2025
Red Studio (2024) is Murray Silverstein’s third book of poems from Sixteen Rivers Press. A practicing architect for forty years and coauthor of four books on architecture, including A Pattern Language (Oxford University Press) and Patterns of Home (The Taunton Press), Silverstein lives in Oakland, California. (This poem appeared originally at Vox Populi.)