Outlining his Principles of a Futurist Aesthetics in 1920, artist and poet Ardengo Soffici marveled at how the innovations of the modern age radically reshaped the sensory measures by which humans comprehended the world. As scientific advances revealed ever more of the invisible, Soffici wrote, and automobiles and airplanes shortened once-unbridgeable distances, “weakening our sense of what is immense and unknown,” an odd new feeling of “simultaneity” would arise: “the everywhere-ness and always-ness of the sensing, creative body.”[1]
This quintessentially modern condition animates Soffici’s Simultaneities and Lyric Chemisms, recently published by World Poetry Books in a shimmering, timely translation by Olivia E. Sears. Through this immersive facsimile edition of the 1915 original, Sears illuminates Soffici’s contributions to the Italian avant-garde in a moment of radical cultural and technological transition.
Shuttling between Florence and Paris, where he spent formative years in the orbit of Picasso, Braque, and Apollinaire, Soffici (1879–1964) introduced Cubism and Impressionism to Italy in an effort to revitalize the nation’s stagnant artistic traditions. As co-founder of the influential journal Lacerba, he developed a polemical yet productive rapport with the Futurist movement and its bombastic ringleader F. T. Marinetti, whose groundbreaking “words-in-freedom” inspired the propulsive poetry of Simultaneities. By the 1920s, however, Soffici would reject such freewheeling experimentation in favor of fascism and its reactionary ideology, an about-face that ended up relegating this masterwork to the margins of literary history, as Sears explains in the essays that accompany the collection. Her translation is not meant to rehabilitate Soffici’s legacy, nor is it just a nostalgic throwback. Rather, it brings into fresh focus the contradictions and complexities of “simultaneity” in ways that resonate with our digital world now.
Simultaneities is about pulsing currents, unifying forces, transmissions, and traffic—the throughlines of a text that otherwise defies categorization. A mash-up of free verse and experimental typography—filled with songs and slogans, advertisements, intercepted telegrams, conversations overheard—Soffici’s eclectic collage embraces what fellow Futurists called the “wireless imagination,” a creative sensibility inspired by the then-nascent technology of telecommunications. Part human, part antenna, the poet-artist channels “interplanetary signals of object and spirit” and delights in being an “electric dynamo in the midst of history / Taller than the Eiffel Tower jet of flame” (30, 33), his atelier a “radiotelephantastic booth open to all messages” (26). Electromagnetic energies converge in a cosmopolitan cityscape where “Today marries always” and “Space / Is a twilight worm coiled in a drop of phosphorous,” as the speaker swerves from Tuscan hillsides to billboard-strewn Parisian boulevards, to the glittering ruins of Rome (11, 8). Often, the quotidian approaches the cosmic, as in the jubilant ascent of “Airplane” (36). Elsewhere, the poet’s gaze magnifies microscopic vibrations, transforming ordinary objects like a glass of water or an iridescent mirror into a “miracle of molecules sentinels facing the surrounding infinity a world” (51).
Sears’s crisp, contemporary rendering of Soffici’s polyphonic Italian breathes new life into the source text while hewing closely to its varied rhythms and shifting registers. Meticulously researched and recreated to match the original, the inventive typography and graphics of this edition further enhance our encounter with the avant-garde, especially in the visually rich “lyric chemisms” that showcase Soffici’s zeal for the transformative power of print (“Typefaces transubstantiation of infinite mysteries,” in his words (69)).
Holding the kaleidoscopic collection together is a “lyrical consciousness in motion, pulsing, fast, flying,” which sounds out the “brand-new reciprocal relationship between things and events” that Soffici saw in modern life.[2] In “Currents,” we read:
Eternities intersect in this word sitio I thirst
Body desire pain
Love
All you need is the formula x = ∞ to see it all clearly
Life full and sonorous richer than a beehive
No phenomenon fails to reach this crucible
Through an ineffable transfiguration
Memories names hopes
Like an amalgam of light strong and bright
Where our faces are always reflected anew (31)
With their unexpected breaks in syntax and tone—at turns irreverent and contemplative, mystical and melancholy—these emblematic lines enact the dizzying state of simultaneity on the page. The slippages from concrete images to abstract phenomena mirror the poet’s attempts to pin down and make sense of the ceaseless, cacophonous churn of the metropolis. Sitio—the first person of the Latin verb “thirst,” but also “place” or “I besiege” in Spanish—fuses in a single word the generative dynamism of Soffici’s art. Each poem is precisely the site of an ever-desiring pursuit of meaning under a barrage of myriad sensations.
Amplifying the dissonant buzz, the poet sometimes succeeds in finding moments of transcendence amid the turbulence. As he declares in “Rainbow”: “I know the symbol the code the electrical / Connection / The attraction of faraway things” (11). Yet Soffici does not harness the aggressive mechanistic forces often associated with Futurism. While Marinetti’s manifestos glorify roaring engines and whirring propellers, melding man with metal to reach an idealized state of annihilation and regeneration, Soffici tells us less about the technologies of modernity than about their effects on the body. Simultaneity, here, is a diffuse yet deeply corporeal experience—not only a mode of expression but, above all, a mode of perception, made of competing sensory and affective responses to the industrialized world.
The thrilling disorientation of these verses in many ways evokes the feeling of “wirelessness” that structures our networked existence today—not so much seamless connectivity as a vertiginous awareness of constant change.[3] Simultaneities offers a lyrical vocabulary through which to explore both the lure of the digitally saturated environment we inhabit and our resistance and vulnerability to it. In the din of “Café”—“the flux of things and thoughts prostituted to the moment”—we might recognize the hum of our social media feeds, where instantaneous communication overwhelms deep connection (54). Lost in the novel sameness of the infinite scroll, we could echo the jaded wanderer’s lament in “Boredom” that “Life is nothing more than a news item” where “The prism of the times and our sensibilities / Dies in the details stranded like the syphilitic sun” (19, 17). As the metaverse troubles our sense of what’s real, so the flaneur of “Walking Tour” straddles the virtual and the physical: “Disappearing as an organism a body an intellect and dissolving our sovereign sensibility in the dispassion of the phenomenon sheer music and light” (42). And yet we also share his exhilaration, swimming “like a lovesick fish drinking emeralds / Through this net of perfume and fireworks” (25). In this fraught state, we lose our bearings. “It’s all chemistry,” Soffici sighs, “and the drunken world staggers / between the tracks” (30).
Oscillating between elation and bewilderment, the subject of Simultaneities betrays an angst sparked as much by the immaterial threat of information overload as by the specter of the First World War. In this context, the motif of the “crucible” takes on new meaning: both an exhilarating crux and a trial to be overcome, signaling a moment of rupture for the avant-garde from optimism to disillusionment and, ultimately, to the repressive violence of fascism. Soffici survived the trenches, unlike so many of his generation, yet emerged a shell of his experimental self, finally turning his conservative pen against the avanguardia he’d helped launch. (Sears’s afterword gives an instructive account of the book’s postwar history and reception). His Simultaneities, thus, can be read as a casualty of the war and its aftermath: a testament to the avant-garde’s creative exuberance and artistic freedom, stifled and silenced by cataclysmic political forces.
Sears’s translation appeared with apt timing in late 2022: almost exactly a century since the March on Rome, marking Benito Mussolini’s ascent to power, and within weeks of the election of a populist party with neofascist roots to lead Italy’s parliament. If the first was arguably the culmination of the techno-militaristic fantasies that defined much of Futurism, the latter has also found ripe terrain for authoritarian impulses in today’s technologies. But Simultaneities and Lyric Chemisms holds onto something beyond an algorithmic stream of data, even as it heralds our current digital landscape. Soffici’s vibrant “amalgam” stirs the senses and revels in the chaotic, colorful effervescence that makes us human. It challenges us to reflect on our sensory entanglements with the innovations we encounter every day, and on the perils and possibilities of connecting with art, media, technology, and each other.
Notes:
[1] Ardengo Soffici, Primi Principi di una estetica futurista (Florence, Italy: Vallecchi Editore, 1920), 81, 85. Translation mine.
[2] Soffici, Primi Principi, 84.
[3] The term comes from media theorist Adrian Mackenzie, who examines the felt sensations associated with wireless technologies; see his Wirelessness: Radical Empiricism in Network Cultures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).