In Ulysses in Auschwitz (The Auschwitz Foundation Prize 2005), Francois Rastier reinterprets the whole of Primo Levi's work, taking into account his activities as a translator and his poems, too much neglected by the critics.

(...) For Levi, man of the Enlightenment after Auschwitz, the easy subjects of the untranslatable and the unspeakable certainly do not have the hieratic relief which they have for the French intelligentsia haunted by Blanchot and Bataille. On the contrary, his project of communication and education wants to confront the speakable and therefore also the translatable. To not be able to communicate is death: in the camp, the one who doesn't understand the order is killed. 

In the stage adaptation of Survival in Auschwitz, Levi insisted that everyone speaks his language, as they did in the camp, in order for the spectator to be confronted with what he called the "stormy seas of non-comprehension," which swallows up the "drowned." In The Drowned and the Saved, his last essays, the crucial chapter is called "Communicate."

Levi thinks that his survival was due to his already professional knowledge of German, the language of chemistry. In the camp, he learns yiddish from a pious jew whom he calls "my guide" after the way Dante's narrator refers to Virgil. But Levi also teaches and everyone recognizes  as the enigmatic and revealing center of this work the Dante-esque Italian lesson which the narrator gives in the chapter "The Song of Ulysses."

Extract from "To testify and translate: on Ulysses in Auschwitz" (conversation between Francois Rastier and Gaetan Pegny, in La mer gelée n°6, juin 2009, p. 77 — http://www.lamergelee.com).