Primo Levi alternated his profession as a chemist – for almost thirty years at Siva in Settimo Torinese – with writing.
His foray into science fiction was neither accidental nor impromptu: when he made his debut in 1947 with If This Is a Man, he already had a fantasy story, The Mnemagogues, in his drawer. From that moment on, his literary production in the science fiction genre never ceased, constituting over half of his work.
One of the 15 stories that make up the collection Le storie naturali (Natural Stories) is entitled Il Versificatore (The Versifier): it is about a state-of-the-art machine that a poet, overwhelmed with minor jobs such as marriage announcements, funeral rhymes and advertising slogans, buys in order to produce the compositions his clients ask for more quickly.
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