from “In search of sweet simultaneity”
. . .
Studentaccio immobile stiff as an old blown-out headlight of broken glass
He remembers that he’ll have to light up again in a month maybe less to catch up with his university battalion though the wound in his thigh burns like the sirocco wind
The name of Venezianella is so geyserlike and pealing in his heart as to lash out
—Venezianella Venezianella Venezianella where why do you flee from me and why vanish in midair amidst so many of your starlets and stars
Abruptly he stumbles nearly slides with a furtive movement of the pavement that fleshy and slimy escapes from beneath his feet
Omen of the gloom to keep an eye on and Studentaccio sticks his elbows out over the quaggy water that scatters coils and clots all around him along the wood piles the low walls the prows the rudders in wrigglings of the farthest constellations like a licorice cream a boiling siege of Venetian rats swimming on the march by dives bounds clambering
They storm the wall of the opposite bank and the waxy muzzle of a rat generaless commands them like the little headlight of a car
To figure this out Studentaccio hurriedly cases the place and scrambling up bridges finds himself behind the parapet totally quilted by now with the heavy velvet of transfixed rats for fifty meters down
Curled up into a ball and spied upon by thousands and thousands and thousands of tiny golden eyes he espies their imperceptible preparations to attack
With the density of the dark wilting and tenderizing a bit Studentaccio discovers a bluish glittering in a ground-level window and it is crystal flowers
They are of an ideal grace and Studentaccio abducts them in dream
Returning to his daily creative labor on the promenade of the Riva degli Schiavoni he casts off would cast off to cast off without end the droves of technical artistic problems that assail
Languid singsong of Futurists Ciliberti and Menin who undulating arm in arm from right to left and even more slowly from left to right lavish the stink of wine and advice advice advice
—It’s essential to fluctuate and through a fluctuating shade-giving series of hanging gardens to crown the heights of the immense gown of New Venice that the critics accuse of cacophony
Ciliberti anatomizes the much-discussed suture between the style of St. Mark’s and the style of the Ducal Palace detailing how to transfigure it
—In the manner of indulgent and hygienic philosophical systems we advise you o inventive Studentaccio to plant many tropical thickets along the dominant hems of the numerous St. Mark’s Basilicas each one composed of date-palm camerus-palm bamboo-palm and banana trees and then the strident conjunction of the two architectures will be corrected and the belt will be soft caressable African most sensual and we’ll be able to stroll along it erotically and mystically overhanging the swaggering opulence of the great skirt and looking up from below admire the rising slenderness of the marvelous edifice fitted tight with the cloak of an immeasurable Ducal Palace juste-au-corps
Studentaccio pensive approves calculates in the setting sun of long red pencils
—Ciliberti Menin I agree and so will interject 50-meter-high hanging gardens
Regurgitant with this exalted solution he then returns to rummage in the underworlds of the city lit with oil and fringes of reflections in the water
Cosmically empathetic the weights of eternity and of the continuous flux of space collapse all the more upon the little courtyard become the synthesis of the most miserable pitchblack desperations in the march of rats
So much that there is no longer anything there but the drawn-out shadows of distant corpses of beggars turned to dust who didn’t dare even hope for a mattress of straw and in this pain vanished before being born . . .
from Venezianella the Futurist
F. T. Marinetti
translated from the Italian by Jennifer Scappettone
The last major work of Futurism’s founder, composed just months before his death, Venezianella e Studentaccio is a rare example of experimental narrative in modern Italian literature, and one that cannot be insulated from political analysis. A self-proclaimed “aeronovel or aeropoem” of 125 pages, F. T. Marinetti’s virtually unpunctuated epic of parole in libertà (“words in freedom”) revises the aesthetic and ideological foundations of Futurism, while offering up a final allegory of the movement’s repressions and flawed compromise with Fascism. Dictated to his wife Benedetta, daughters, and colleagues from exile in a Venice ruled by the puppet Republic of Salò in 1943–44, and left unpublished until 2013, the text envisions rebuilding that outmoded, feminized, and culturally heterogeneous cosmopolis the movement once proposed to destroy—in the form of an inhabitable female colossus of Murano glass. The protagonist, a Studentaccio (“Rottenstudent”) lapsed from his studies to volunteer in the throes of a world and civil war, models this “New Venice” on his beloved, the nurse Venezianella—directing fabrication of her vestments as a pastiche of historical styles and citations of decorative vegetation from Italy’s would-be colonial empire. Constituting vignette after sinking vignette of implausible scenarios, the text has the quality of a fever dream: it reflects the “artificial optimism”1 of Marinetti’s approach to both aesthetics and politics—positing Venice, and its craft traditions, as a medium of social healing. And yet it cannot help but collapse fitfully, in glimpses like the one at the end of this excerpt, into the realism of a present moment characterized by the author’s failing health and the disintegration of any viable synthesis of Futurism and Fascism. What remains, instead, is the ailing puppet state’s omnidirectional battle against the Allies, the Italian Co-Belligerent Army, and the partisan fighters of the Resistance, and its deference to a Nazi occupation that cost over two hundred Venetian Jews their lives.
1 See Christine Poggi, Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
1 See Christine Poggi, Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
F. T. Marinetti (Alexandria, 1876–1944) was a poet, prose writer, dramatist, aesthetic theorist, editor, artist, curator, political agitator and impresario. He is most widely acknowledged as the founder of Futurism and thus as an architect of the concept of the avant-garde. Previous translations of his work into English include Critical Writings, edited by Günter Berghaus and translated by Doug Thompson (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006), Selected Poems and Related Prose, translated from the French by Elizabeth R. Napier and Barbara R. Studholme (Yale University Press, 2002), Mafarka the Futurist: An African Novel, translated by Carol Diethe and Steve Cox (Middlesex University Press, 1998), The Untameables, translated by Jeremy Parzen (Sun and Moon Press, 1994), The Futurist Cookbook, edited by Lesley Chamberlain and translated by Suzanne Brill (Bedford Arts, 1989), Stung by Salt and War, edited and translated by Richard J. Pioli (P. Lang, 1987), Marinetti: Selected Writings, translated by R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), and various sections of Futurism: An Anthology, edited and translated by Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman (Yale University Press, 2009).
Jennifer Scappettone is a poet, translator, and scholar working to erode the fallible intellectual segregation of these practices. She edited and translated Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli, winner of the Academy of American Poets’s biennial Raiziss/De Palchi Prize, and curates PennSound Italiana. Her poetry collections include From Dame Quickly and Exit 43, an archaeology of the dump and opera of pop-up pastorals forthcoming from Atelos Press. Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice, her study of the outmoded city of lagoons as a crucible for experiments across literature, politics, the visual arts, and urbanism, received Honorable Mention in the Modernist Studies Association’s annual book award competition. She is currently sharing a Mellon Fellowship with Caroline Bergvall and Judd Morrissey at the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry to work on a project called The Data That We Breathe. She teaches across disciplines at the University of Chicago. You can visit her website here and read her recent interview for Asymptote’s experimental translation feature here.
