Filippo Marinetti - The Charm of Egypt

The Charm of Egypt

A N T E L O P E ii H I L L ii P U B L I S H I N G

Copyright 2021 Antelope Hill Publishing

First printing 2021

Originally published in Italian by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1933

Translated into English 2021 by Lance LApollon

Illustrated by Branka Ryan

Cover art by sswifty

Edited by Rollo of Gaunt

Interior formatting by Margaret Bauer

Antelope Hill Publishing

Antelopehillpublishing.com

Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-953730-52-7

EPUB ISBN-13: 978-1-953730-53-4

Dedicato alla mia musa focosa, Etna

Contents

During the length of my imprisonment in this modern world, and it feels like it has been a lifetime, I often dreamed of beautiful images of battle, power, and action. In our era, with no great struggle, we are robbed of our call to superhuman beauty and strength, deprived of heroes, of violence, and of will. In the same way, I assume you too have shared my cell, constricted and deprived of vitality.

A righteous spirit has been entrapped in these pages without having been discovered by the Anglophone world for almost a century. Therefore, I felt duty bound to do my best to translate these powerful words for you, so that you may rekindle that great spew of fire that your heart, as a lion cub, once knew.

Filippo Marinetti was the founder of Futurism. He too longed to break away from a world that threatened to snuff out all great spirits with its suffocating sclerosis. This is one of those shreds of will left over to us.

To capture his sentiment, my English translation is accompanied by the original Italian text on the adjacent page so that you may appreciate the poetry of the language in its original form. I have spent some time in southern Italy and have studied the language, but I am little more than a dilettante translator. My efforts however, to my estimate, accomplish their goal: to reveal this sprite of furious life to those few warriors who are worthy.

I dream one day there will be magnificent fighters mounted on steel Valkyries who will cleanse the world of its decadence and feminine softness. I will it to return to a world of great power and manly deeds.

Young warriors, take this book and let these lines of action run through you like electric light. Become that which we could only dream of.

Lance LApollon

After many dynamic and creative years I returned to a fixed point of contemplation: Egypt, the land of my birth.

For a long time its skies filled with placid gold dust, the motionless waves of the yellow dunes, the high imposing triangles of the Pyramids, and the serene palm trees that bless the fat father Nile, stretched out in his bed of black earth and green grass, have been calling me.

The name and the roll of the ship Helouan already evoked the languid sailing rhythm of the sands and the large canvas wings of the windmills that had protected my childhood games from the sun. The temperature of the sea and the air softens as if the heated cheeks of my pupae were palpitating inside. My sensi-tivity tore apart, and I became its thinking open wound, charged across the arch of the marine horizon with my living shreds.

Gently, so as not to tear them, I grabbed from time to time those vibrant undulating strips of my flesh. A strange desire to escape drives them mad. Most of all, the long rosy memory of the French Jesuit college is stirred, with its immense courtyard guarded by palm trees, the clamoring tangle of fast bare legs, seafaring necks, parabolas of balls plunging into a dense green paradise of sycamores, magnolias and bamboo.

Here the fragrant and sonorous feast of the Sacred Heart is reborn. The altar full of jasmine was nestled in the foliage of a baobab tree, whose trunk dripped with rose petals. In the hot May afternoon the flames of candles, the flashing tinkling of the censers and the quick vermilion cassocks so intoxicated the turtledoves perched on the high regimes of the date-trees that the sensual gliding of their talons over the water stirred our childrens senses to the point of agony.

That very long ribbon of flesh also bore, embroidered with memories, our furibund game of war with two armies of schoolchildren all armed with a crusader cast-iron shield; the bloody machine-gunning of padded leather balls, and the cheerful thirty-year-old Jesuits who, wet with sweat, with rolled up sleeves and black cassocks raised on their free legs, make running attacks, counterattacks, pursuits and whirling fights.

Meanwhile, another nostalgic thread of my flesh was twisting in front of my dreamy eyes; my brother Leones line plunging into the already dark water of the port of Alexandria under the sinking white sunburst of the already set sun. My brother was fishing, I was dreaming of hating fishing, the Sudanese servant in white galabieh prepared the bait. From time to time our little boat struck the gray and gloomy keel of the floating sailors chapel-boat, whose lowered lids never revealed to us, in so many afternoons, the shadow of a crew or devotees.

Another shred of my flesh had the sour honeydew and pungent smell of gaggie flowers, spraying out of the angles of the Antoniadis garden, to provoke the chaste and blind water of the Mahmudieh canal to crest its black buffalo to the hut of cattle and camel dung.

Ten miles from Alexandria, with the slow rolling of the ship, the undulating bluish mercury of the sea rose and fell in the thermometer of the window. Magically, the sea horizon was crested with palm trees. Our bow lowered, adorning itself with water. Every now and then the sea on the right offered to the cut of the bow its edge of gray dunes, so that the projector-beam of the sun, shining down from the slits of the clouds, bleached and sugar-coated its peaks.

An hour later, in the dark garden of Villa Ambron, I fused my soul with a large ficus elastica, whose weeping leaves replant green memories in the earth, eager to revive new salient green memories.

With the same calm and sure pace, the next day, in the palace of Cairo, King Fuad illustrated to me the systematic and rapid progress of Egypt.

As I listen to him, I think of the Muslim affinity for the fez, abolished by Kemal Pasha in Turkey because it generates passive moods.

Of all the headdresses, the fez is the least likely to assume a warrior or royal character. That of King Fuad blends its sloping lines with the sensual curves of a perfect oval.

A sinuous mouth smiles under a hooked mustache that still reminds one of the sultans on horse-back under the double arc of the scimitar and the moon.