Felix Stefanile

Some Italian Futurist Poets - The Blue Moustache
(translated by Felix Stefanile)
reviewed by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - September 25, 2012

I probably started learning about the Italian Futurists when I was in my mid 20s. I probably learned about the Dadaists 1st. For me, the Futurists were the 1st of the 20th century revolutionary cultural movements &, as such, very exciting. Despite this, I think I always identified w/ the Dadaists the most. Ultimately, it was the Michael Kirby edited bk, Futurist Performance that kept my excitement high. This was some very inspired work. &, of course, there was Luigi Russolo's pioneering "The Art of Noise" Futurist manifesto from 1913.

Alas, Italian Futurism's leading theorist, F. T. Marinetti, embraced war & early Fascism. Consider this quote from Lesley Chamberlain's 1989 introduction to the English translation of Marinetti's The Futurist Cookbook:

"At the height of Futurism Marinetti became embroiled with Mussolini and Fascism [..] Throughout 1919 Marinetti lent his skills as an orator to the young Fascist cause. He also took part, for the only time in his life, in the first Fascist activist success, which ended in the destruction of the office and printing works of the socialist newspaper Avanti! in Milan. Moreover it was this action by arditi - ex-servicemen who had banded together against socialism - which actually taught Mussolini that armed intimidation was a useful political tactic against the opposition. By May 1920 however Marinetti was accusing even the Fascists of being reactionary and passéist and he resigned from the Party. There was a rapprochement in 1923-24 but, now married, he never became so deeply engaged again. It was true that in 1926 Mussolini personally selected him as a founder member of his nationalistic Italian Academy. But Marinetti's original, energetic personality and the vitality and intellectual spark of Futurism never fitted with the Duce's abysmal artistic ideal - of something close to Societ socialist realism. In 1938 Marinetti also strongly condemned anti-semitism in Fascist politics and art." (p 17)

All of this is even more complex than that paragraph explains. For one thing, Mussolini started off as a Socialist. For another, the early days of Fascism were probably not as cut & dry as they seem in retrospect. Nonetheless, the Dadaists were clearly anti-nationalistic & anti-war &, as such, much more my kind of folks. Destroy a newspaper office? No thank you.

As for the work? Some of it was incredible, some of it.. not so incredible. The painting, for the most part, never did much for me. I saw some of them in the Cone Collection at the Baltimore Museum of Art. It might've been a dynamic Gino Severini painting w/ exceptionally thick impasto technique that I liked the most. But things like Boccioni's 1913 sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space had already lost their novelty for me by the time I discovered them. In retrospect, I might like such work more now - but in the 1970s things pictorial didn't generally do much for me.

More recently, the ETCglobal department at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University revived & realized Fortunato Depero's visionary theater piece "Balli Plastici" in computer animated movie form. The genius of this rearoused my enthusiasm. Interested parties are directed to their "Toybox Futuristi Puppeteering toolkit" software @: http://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/balli-plastici/toybox/

& the poetry? This, I'd have to say, was Italian Futurism's least imaginative medium. In Felix Stefanile's forward to the blue moustache he states: "Futurism's greatest poet was not an Italian, but a Russian, Maiakovski" (p 14) & I'm inclined to agree. Stefanile continues w/ "As enthusiasts, they wrote a poetry of challenge. Here are some titles of their books - Bayonets, City of Speed, Aeroplane, The Arsonist, Riding The Sun. They delighted in the new glossary of the twentieth century, and used with abandon such words as gasoline, electric, turbine, wires, dynamo. There are many poems about automobiles and airplanes." (p 15) No doubt being able to fly in airplanes was beyond exhilarating - but, these days, w/ car culture dehumanizing life & wars being constantly fought over the natural resources that fuel these luxuries, I personally prefer less exhilaration along these lines.

Not being an Italian speaker, I can't really comment on the translations. I will say that the translator's admission that "The aviator's comment about Etna's blue moustache is a neat touch, I think, and I chose to stop my translation there, although the poem goes on for another five or six lines" strikes me as inexcusable!! Cf, eg, Amy Catanzano's review of the translation of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream @: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/413995300

Regardless, I enjoyed some of the poems enuf. Here's the translation of one in full:

"LET THE MOON BE DAMNED

"You also know, my love, the gray disease
of our century, that makes us go on dying
day by day, as though from the blue heights
we'd loosed the ballast of our joy,
and now the lightness sears the heart of us.

"Mild sentiment of a benumbed bourgeois
wrapped in furs that never can be paid for:
yearning for what cannot be, thirsting for infinity,
the fever of tomorrow.
Obsessions hammer at our delicate craniums
as thin as the skulls of kittens.

"And politics comes begging our support
with her treacherous tongue, ardent and malicious,
and lying religion closes our wicked eyes -
if you want to live, go get a mechanical heart,
inhale the red-hot blast of furnaces
and powder your lovely face with chimney soot;
then shoot a million volts into your system!
You must make of life a computed dream
triggered by levers, the contact of wires.

"And when your heart has become an electrostat,
and your tenacious hands are mean as iron,
and you can puff your breast up like a sea,
then may you vaunt your definitive victory.
If, now, the cold machine surpasses man,
in its perfection brutal and precise,
that day will come we rule the brute machine,
lords of the finite and the infinite,

"and the moon be damned!

"ENRICO CAVACCHIOLI from Riding The Sun, 1914" (p 29)

In the end, tho, it was really only the pre-Dadaist 1910 sound poetry of Aldo Palazzeschi's "So Let Me Have My Fun" that earned my respect. Here's an excerpt:

"Cucu ruru,
ruru cucu,
cucucucurucu!

"What are these obscenities?
These stanzas, who can read them?
Freedom, freedom,
poetic freedom!
They're my passion.

"Farafarafarafa,
tarataratarata,
paraparaparapa,
laralaralarala!

"Do you know what they are?
Avant-garde stuff:
not mere grotesqueries
but the finishing off
of other poetries.

"Bubububu,
fufufufu,
Friu!
Friu!

"It hasn't a shred
of wit -
so why does he write it,
the block-head?" (pp 50-51)… (mais)