Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) was the founder of Futurism, an early 20th-century revolution that began in Italy as a literary movement and expanded to influence painters, musicians, dramatists, architects, and graphic artists everywhere.
F. T. Marinetti: Selected Poems and Related Prose Translated by Elizabeth R. Napier (Yale University Press, 2002)
by Valery Oisteanu
This volume is a translation of more than 40 poems and prose pieces by Marinetti, many for the first time published in English. The collection has been selected by his daughter, Luce Marinetti, who lives in Rome, and represents the entire span of her father’s life; it includes also works originally written in either French or Italian, Marinetti’s two primary languages.
The volume begins with Marinetti’s early Symbolist poems that exemplify styles and themes that he later rejected in his own manifestos. It continues with poems of war, in which Marinetti used the language of machines and explosions to express his view of poetry as reportage: "At Night, lying in bed She rereads the letter from her gunner at the front: scrABrrRrrAANNG. I received your book while bombarding mount KuK. Futurist." The poem is from the book" Words in Freedom", in which Marinetti declared war on poetry by destroying syntax and spelling and by experimenting with typography; and then there are the love poems to his wife, Benedetta, in which he returned in part to subjects and lyrical forms that he had previously rejected.
The book also starts with a biography of Marinetti written by his daughter Luce, as well as a critical review by Prof. Paolo Valesio (Yale University) of Marinetti’s accomplishments as a poet, calling him "the inventor of an advance form of verbal photography." Language, concludes Valesio, becomes a form of ammunition bombarding the reader with unexpected combinations of images and mechanical sounds.
Marinetti’s. poems are incomparable and are the beginning of a lyrical-absurd theater with sound effects and devices that dynamize and radicalize his writing. The themes are aggressiveness, heroism, audacity and violence similar to vorticism His poetry is at once aestheticized and brutal, sophisticated and politically naïve, but always challenging and new, in the process pioneering the performance genre and manifestoes. "We shell sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and boldness…Literature had hitherto glorified thoughtful immobility…we shall extol aggressive movement…we wish to destroy the museums, the libraries."
Without achieving his credo, Marrinetti died on December 2,1944, in Bellagio, Italy. But his legacy lives in the "revolutions" of Dada, bruitism, surrealism, situationist-internationals and many other radical art and theater groups.
