Journal of Italian Translation - Brooklyn College - Academic Home ...

wireless imagination, ubiquity, laconicism and simultaneity coming
from tourism, business and journalism; the passion for success,
the new instinct for setting records, the enthusiastic imitation of
electricity and machines; the essential brevity and synthesis; the
apt precision of gears and well-oiled thoughts [...].”
Here we find the usual mention of “power,” “speed,” and
“electricity,” with the curious addition of “hygienic oblivion,” “aggressive
optimism” of a sporty kind, and finally “the apt precision
of gears and well-oiled thoughts.”
We would like to spend a few words on this last element, and
the implications of its mechanic imagery. As we understand it,
modern poetry is born from Rimbaud’s determination to practice
“poésie objective:” enough with the poet, let’s listen to everything
else (street lamps, chairs, umbrellas, etc.). It’s not an easy task to
remove oneself from the equation. Rimbaud struggled with it his
whole life. The Futurists, however, used it as a launching pad for
their “assault on the stars.”
Building on the efforts of the veristi, Marinetti and Co. created
a deranged brand of realism able to mimic modernity’s simultaneity
(to put it in their terms).
With the author removed from the poem, they built a selfpropelling
machine of words (and numbers), a rhetorical device
capable of generating objective poems from a quick series of
subjective impressions. The poet provides the raw materials, the
machine does the rest. A paratactic chain of images, the verse, like
a conveyor belt, indifferently displays things vile and sublime. See,
for example, Mauro D’Alba’s Z Lamps:
miasmas
of all the houses in the world up through
the deep nostrils arpeggio of tendons
jerk of muscles shivering of
nerves contraction of epidermis
the entire orchestra of the vibrating body in
the light in the vast concert of the world
The Futurists provided a perfect blueprint for an endless
production. Hence why so many soldiers on the front and boys