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experts and of beginners. When the Logbook appeared as a volume, it proved to have lost nothing in interest or in freshness. Its last sections foretokened the complicated structure of the later "lyric compounds."

The Logbook was not his only contribution to Lacerba. As in the Voce he had been the champion and the theorist of impressionism, so in Lacerba he was the apostle and the exponent of cubism. His limpid, axiomatic articles, now published in book form, are the best European treatment of the most daring experimental schools of painting.

In Lacerba too, from 1914 on, and in the Voce, he published the greater part of those "lyric compounds" and "lyric simultaneities" which have recently come out, under the strange title Bif§zf+18, in a strange sort of album which has for its cover a medley of posters colored by Soffici in the brightest blues, greens, yellows, and reds that are to be found in Italy now that the importation of German dyes has ceased.

IV

The book is limited to three hundred copies, costs five lire, and is published in war-time: consequently few will read it. And yet this bizarre volume, which even in the extravagances of its

typography expresses the modernist and mechanistic will of Soffici at play with the most sumptuous poetic counterpoint, will remain one of the most significant and vitally important works of our literature.

This poetry of Soffici, which seeks to bind with the invisible silk of an intense and nervous Pindarism the impressions which from all the universe converge to a brain as luminous and as fiery as a lens of Archimedes-this poetry did not come into being all at once. It had been prepared for slowly and gradually by Soffici himself and by others. But it is only in this book that Soffici reaches full self-consciousness and affirms himself in clear and definitive utterances which give him the right to be listened to, discussed, and recognized. Like all the true poets of this blasé and exacting age, Soffici demands and seeks the pure lyric, the lyric freed from anecdote, from narrative, from external motives, from eloquence, from description. Baudelaire and Rimbaud are the starting point, but the terminus is Soffici. No longer the proud and dolorous Parnassianism of the Fleurs du mal, no longer the psychological and fantastic mythology of the Saison en enfer. Here at last poetry is sound, color, form, word, a complex reflected image, an immense net of suggestions and reminiscences-freedom within an infinite wealth of forms and shadows. Soffici, with the sensitive

spirit of the liberated lyrist, sets himself in the centre of the world, and so manipulates rays and gems and lights as to construct a super-universe more spiritual, more compact, more subtle, and more gorgeous than the real universe. From one single point issue rays which on numberless paths meet memories and beauties, and imprison and illumine them with a sense of totality deeply realized and enjoyed: just as a ray of sunlight turns the base dust of the street into a whirl of golden points. Without recourse to isolated words, without availing himself, save rarely, of typographical trickery, Soffici succeeds in rendering the transparent and tremendous enigma of the visible world with expressions and suggestions which are absolutely novel to Italian poetry.

To understand these "lyric compounds" one must read and reread them; to realize their importance we must wait for years, perhaps for decades. I am not a literary critic by profession, and no interpretation of mine could take the place of direct examination. I have been a friend and comrade of Soffici for a dozen years; and I am glad to have borne witness for him here as a man who admires him because he understands him.

XVI

SWIFT 1

JONATHAN SWIFT is one of the four greatest writers of England (Shakespeare and Carlyle are of the same company: the reader may choose the fourth to suit himself).

Gulliver's Travels is one of those few books, pleasant or unpleasant, light or profound, which may be read and reread at all ages, even when other books have been exhausted and laid aside.

Upon the basis of these axiomatic premises, we must necessarily thank the translator and the publisher who have brought out a new Italian edition of Swift's masterpiece. The volume is none too elegant, but it is not repulsive; the translation is by no means perfect (I suspect that it is not based directly on the English text), but it is at least complete, or nearly complete. Italian publishers have usually printed only the first two of the four parts of the Travels, since the first two are the parts that are popular among children, amusement seekers, and super

Written à propos of A. Valori's version of Gulliver's Travels: I viaggi di Gulliver, Genoa, 1913.

ficial readers. Of the lands to which Gulliver journeyed, the only one that is popular and famous among us is Lilliput. Brobdingnag is a close second. But we have only the vaguest notions of Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, and Glubbdubdrib, and we are quite willing to leave unvisited the land of the terrible Yahoos. But the last two parts are really more characteristic than the first two: their omission in previous Italian editions is then another instance of the fact that excisions are usually ill-judged.

The translator expresses his regret that the work "has always been so slightly and so inaccurately known and so grotesquely interpreted in Italy. Thanks to the absurdity of publishers and of the public Gulliver's Travels has been regarded as a book for children, a harmless fantastic romance founded upon an idea that is clever but superficial." The translator is right so far as modern Italy is concerned, but for the sake of justice he should have recalled the fact that in the eighteenth century, even before the death of Swift, Italian men of letters knew him and admired him as a satirist and moralist, and not by any means as an author of extravaganzas for children. Algarotti, for example, cited him often, and called him the modern Lucian. Baretti paid him due esteem, though he once wrote in the Frusta that "half of Swift's fancy was always covered with filth." Albergati and

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