A Tranquil Star (17 page)

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The only other new work to appear in the United States since 1990 is entitled
Auschwitz Report
, a book about the conditions in Auschwitz, which was written by Levi with Leonardo De Benedetti in 1946, and published here by Verso in 2006.

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In English in original.

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In English in the original.

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Max and Moritz
(A Story of Seven Boyish Pranks)
, by Wilhelm Busch, is a German children's tale in verse, published in 1865.

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The hero of several stories in Boccaccio's
Decameron
.

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Hero of a poem by Carlo Porta (1775–1821), “Desgressi de Giovannin Bongee” (“The Misadventures of Giovannino Bongeri”), written in the Milanese dialect. (
Vottcentvott
is dialect for “eight hundred and eight.”)

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Valentino is the little boy in the poem “Valentino,” by Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912), from the collection
Canti di Castel Vecchio
; Pin di Carrugio Lungo is the hero of Italo Calvino's
The Path to the Spiders' Nest
.

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A reference to the novel
Le Cronache di Poveri Amanti
(
Chronicle of Poor Lovers
) by Vasco Pratolini (1913–91).

†
Dante's great-great-grandfather, who appears in Paradiso XV, XVI, and XVIII.

‡
A reference to the poem “Il Soldato Somacal Luigi” (“The Soldier Luigi Somacal”) by Piero Jahier (1884–1966).

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Characters in poems by Villon.

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Ettore Fieramosca is the hero of the eponymous novel of 1833 by Massimo d'Azeglio; Tommasino Puzzilli is the hero of Pasolini's
A Violent Life
(1959); Commissioner Ingravallo is a character in Carlo Emilio Gadda's
That Awful Mess on Via Merulana
(1957); Sergeant Grisha is from Arnold Zweig's
Sergeant Grisha
(1928) and Lilian Aldwinkle is from Huxley's
Those Barren Leaves
(1925); Bel Ami refers to Maupassant's novel; Alberto da Giussano was a legendary Lombard fighter of the twelfth century and the Roman martyr Camilla appears in the Aeneid; Mordo Nahum is a character in Levi's
The Truce
; Baldus is the hero of a sixteenth-century poem; Hot-Blooded Paolo is the eponymous hero of the novel
Paolo il Caldo
(1964) by Vitaliano Brancati.

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Semiramis is the Queen of Assyria who had her husband executed in order to become the sole ruler.

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Chief magistrate.

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Volunteer Militia for National Security.

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Fra Diavolo (lit. Brother Devil; 1771–1806) was the popular name given to Michele Pezza, a famous Italian outlaw who resisted the French occupation of Naples and is remembered in folk legends and in the novels of Alexandre Dumas as a guerrilla leader. Popular superstition invested him with the character of both monk and demon.

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In English in the text.

†
Schifús
is a distorted version of
schifo
, which means disgusting;
Struns
is a distortion of
stronzo
, which literally means turd and is used vulgarly to indicate someone who is mean.

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The Siriono are an Indian people who live in the tropical forests of eastern Bolivia.

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Actually, Stanevicius lived from 1799 to 1848.

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Editor-in-chief of the newspaper
La Stampa
, author of numerous popular science books, and creator and director of a science program on Italian TV.

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In English in the original.

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In Italian, the word contraceptive is
anticoncezionale
.

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De Rerum Natura I: 615: “[the smallest] bodies will be composed of infinite particles.”