In the painful light of big electric factory-lamps
I have a fever and I write.
I write grinding my teeth, a beast for the beauty of this,
For the beauty of this thing wholly unknown to the ancients.

O wheels, O gears, eternal r-r-r-r-r-r!
Strong restrained spasm of furious mechanism!
In fury within and without myself,
Through all my nerves dissected, outside,
My nipples distended with everything I feel!
I have dry lips, O great modern noises,
From listening to you much too closely,
And my head burns, wanting to sing you
With an excessive expression of all my feelings,
An excess contemporaneous with you, O machines!

In fever, looking at motors as if at tropical Nature —
Vast human tropics of iron and fire and force —
I sing, and I sing the present, and also the past and the future,
Because the present is all the past and all the future
And Plato and Virgil are in machines and electric lights
Because the human Virgil and Plato had existed in other times,
And pieces of Alexander The Great from say the fiftieth century,
Molecules making the mind of Aeschylus feverish in the 100th century,
Moving through these transmission-belts and pistons and fliers,
Howling, grinding, whispering, clattering, clanking,
Becoming an excess of bodily caresses in a single caress in my soul.

Ah, to be able to express myself wholly the way a motor expresses itself!
Without completion, like a machine!
To go through life triumphantly like a late-model auto!
To at least be physically penetrated by all this,
Rend myself totally, open myself completely, make myself permeable
To the perfume of oil and heat and coal
Given off by this stupendous, black, artificial, insatiable flora!

Fraternity with every dynamic!
Promiscuous fury of being part-agent
Of the ferric, cosmopolite wheeling
Of strenuous railways,
Of the cargo-transport drudgery of boats,
Of the slow lubricious turning of derricks,
Of the disciplined tumult of factories,
And of the whispering near-silence and monotony of transmission belts!

European hours, producers, squeezed
Between mechanisms and useful tasks!
Great cities motionless in the cafes —
In the cafes — oases of noisy uselessness
Wherein are crystallized and precipitated
The gossip and gestures of The Useful,
And the wheels, the toothed wheels and the bearings of The Progressive!
New Soulless Minerva of quays and train-stations!
New enthusiasms of the Moment’s stature!
Plated keels of rippled steel lean smiling against dock
Or dry-dock, raised up, on the inclined planes of the ports!
Activity international, transatlantic, Canadian-Pacific!
Lights and feverish wasting of time in bars, in hotels,
In Longchamps and the Derbies and the Ascots,
And Piccadillies and Avenues de l’Opera
Entering the foundation of my soul!

Hé-la the streets, Hé-la the squares, Hé-la-ho la foule!
All the passersby stopping at the display-windows!
Businessmen, vagrants, exaggeratedly well-dressed crooks;
Evident members of aristocratic clubs;
Squalid dubious figures; paterfamilias, vaguely happy
And paternal down to the gold chain crossing their vests
From pocket to pocket!
Everything going by, everything unendingly going by!
Overly accentuated presence of coquettes;
Interesting banality (who knows if there’s something inside?)
Of the petit-bourgeois women, generally mother and daughter,
Walking in the street with some destination in mind,
The grace, feminine and false, of the pederasts going by, slowly;
And all the simply elegant people who promenade to be seen
And have a soul inside them, after all!
(Oh, I’d just love to pimp all this!)

Marvelous beauty of political corruption,
Delicious financial and diplomatic scandals,
Political aggression in the streets,
And now and then regicide’s comet
Illuminating with Prodigy and Fanfare
The ordinarily clear skies of quotidian Civilization!

Contradictory notices in the journals,
Political articles insincerely sincere,
News passez á-la-caisse, inordinate crimes —
Two columns of it continued on page two!
Fresh smell of typographic ink!
Newly hung posters, wet!

Yellow journalism in its white wrapper!
How I love you all, all, all,
How I love you in every way,
With my eyes and with my ears and with my smell
And with my touch (what palpating you represents to me!)
And with my intelligence like an antenna you make vibrate!
Ah, how all my senses are in heat for you!
Fertilizers, steam-threshers, agricultural advances!
Agronomochemistry! Commerce nearly a science!
O cases of traveling salesmen,
Traveling salesmen, Industry’s knights-errant,
Human extensions of factories and calm offices!

O merchandise in showcases! O mannequins! O latest models!
O useless articles everyone wants to buy!
Olá great department stores!
O neon advertisements appearing one after another, only to disappear!
Olá everything with which today constructs itself, with which today becomes different from yesterday!
Eh, reinforced concrete, cement mixer, new processes!
Progress of gloriously deadly armaments!
Armor, cannons, machine-guns, submarines, airplanes!
I love you, all and everything, like a beast.

I love you carnivorously,
Pervertedly twisting my vision
In you, O great, banal, useful, useless things,
O utterly modern things,
O my contemporaries, actual and proximate form
Of the immediate system of the Universe!
New Revelation, metallic and dynamic, of God!

O factories, O laboratories, O music halls, O Luna-Parks,
O battleships, O bridges, O floating docks,
In my turbulent and incandescing mind
I possess you like a beautiful woman,
I possess you completely like a beautiful woman one doesn’t love,
Whom one meets randomly and finds very attractive.

Hé-la-ho façades of great stores!
Hé-la-ho elevators of great edifices!
Hé-la-ho ministerial reappointments!
Parliament, politics, relators of budgets,
Falsified budgets!
(A budget is as natural as a tree
And a parliament is as beautiful as a butterfly.)

Hé-la-ho the fascination with all of life,
Because everything is life, from the bright things in showcases
To the mysterious bridge of night between the stars
And the ancient solemn sea bathing the coasts
Just as compassionately
As when Plato was really Plato
In his real presence, in his flesh, with his soul inside,
Speaking with Aristotle who was not to be his disciple.

I could die ground up by a motor
With the delicious surrender felt by a woman possessed.
Hurl me into furnaces!
Shove me under trains!
Bludgeon me aboard ships!
Masochism through mechanism!
Sadism of whatever’s modern and me and the clamor!

Hoopla-ho jockey who’s just won the Derby,
Biting your bi-colored cap!
(To be so tall I couldn’t fit through any door!
Ah, for me, seeing is a sexual perversion!)

Hé-la, hé-la, hé-la, cathedrals!
Let me break my head against your corners
And be carried bloody through the streets
By people who have no idea who I am!

O tramways, funiculars, metropolitans,
Rub yourselves against me until I come!
Hilla! hilla! hilla-ho!
Guffaw full in my face,
O you automobiles crowded with roisters and whores,
O streets’ quotidian multitudes neither happy nor sad,
Anonymous multicolor river where I can’t bathe myself like I want to!
Ah, what complex lives, what things there are in every house!
Ah, to know all those lives in full, the difficulties with money,
Domestic squabbles, unsuspected debaucheries,
The thoughts you have all alone in your room,
The gestures you make when nobody’s watching!
Not knowing all this is not knowing anything, O rage,
O rage wasting my thin face
Like fever and lust and hunger,
Sometimes agitating my hands
In absurd crispations right in the middle of the rabble
In the streets full of encounters!

Ah, and the people, ordinary and dirty, who seem always the same,
Who use foul words as a matter of course,
Whose sons steal at the doors of groceries,
And whose daughters of eight — and I find this beautiful and I love it! —
Masturbate men of decent aspect in the stairwells.
The riffraff who walk the scaffolding and go home
Through alleyways almost unreal in their narrow putrefaction.
Marvelous human people living like dogs,
Beneath every moral system,
For whom no religion at all was made,
Nor art created,
Nor politics destined for them!
How I love you all, because you’re the way you are,
Neither immoral for all your lowness, nor bad, nor good,
Untouched by progress,
Marvelous fauna on the bed of the sea of life!

(At the pump in the yard of my house
The donkey walks at the wheel, walks at the wheel,
And the mystery of the world is just that size.
Wipe your sweat with your arm, discontented worker.
The sunlight smothers the silence of the spheres
And we all must die,
O somber crepuscular pine-groves,
Pine-groves where my childhood was something other
Than what I am today...)
But, ah, again, constant mechanical rage!
Again, mobile obsession of omnibuses.
Again the fury of being on every train at the same exact time
In every part of the world,
Of saying farewell aboard every ship
At this very instant loading iron or detaching from docks.
O iron, O steel, O aluminum, O burnished plates of steel!
O quays, O ports, O railways, O derricks, O tugboats!

Hé-la great rail disasters!
Hé-la collapsing mine-shafts!
Hé-la delicious shipwrecks of the great transatlantics!
Hé-la-ho revolutions here, there, all over everywhere,
Alterations to constitutions, wars, treaties, invasions,
Noise, injustice, violence, and maybe soon to come,
A great invasion of yellow barbarians into Europe,
And another Sun on a new Horizon!

What does it matter, but what does all this matter
In the fulgent blood-red contemporaneous noise,
The cruel and delicious noise of today’s civilization?
Everything obliterated except the Moment,
The Moment with the hot nude torso and a stoker,
The stridently noisy and mechanical Moment,
The dynamic Moment passing through every bacchant
Of iron and bronze in a drunken spree of metals.

Eia trains, eia bridges, eia hotels at dinnertime,
Eia apparata of every kind, ferrous, brute, and minimal,
Precision instruments, machines for grinding, for digging,
Motors, drillers, rotary engines!

Eia! eia! eia!
Eia electricity, the aching nerves of Matter!
Eia wireless telegraph, metallic affinity with the Unconscious!
Eia tunnels, canals, Panama, Kiel, Suez!
Eia all the past in the present!
Eia the whole future already in us! eia!
Eia! eia! eia!
Useful ferric fruits of the cosmopolitan factory-tree!
Eia! eia! eia, eia-ho-o-o!
I don’t even know if I exist inside. I whirl, I wheel, I engineer myself.
Couple me with every train.
Hoist me on every quay.
I whirl in every ship’s propellor.
Eia! eia-ho eia!
Eia! I am mechanical heat and electricity!
Eia! the rails, the machine-housings — Europe!
Eia and hurrah for me-all and everything, machines working, eia!

To leap with everything above everything! Hoopla!

Hoopla, hoopla, hoopla-ho, hoopla!
Hé-la! hé-ho! Ho-o-o-o-o!
Z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z!

If only I could be everybody everywhere!

— London, June 1914 (from a forthcoming book entitled Arch of Triumph)



•—•—•—•—•

First posted by Berkeley Neo-Baroque Gang of One, 3.23.2006
Under continual revision
Translation based on the critical edition by Teresa Rita Lopes
Reproduction rights granted upon request
Many, many thanks to Dana Stevens