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With fanfare both ceremonious and critical, 2009 witnessed the exhumation of an incendiary tract that had demanded to be buried like a dead letter: the "Founding and Manifesto of Futurism" (1909), which, now a noble manuscript in its own right, has found itself prodded back into the limelight over the past year like a reluctant Lazarus.1 The first in a long series of raucous interventions penned by F. T. Marinetti-poet, publisher, and tireless promoter-the manifesto appeared on the front page of Paris's Le Figaro on February 20, 1909. Seeking to liberate Italy from its role as Europe's cultural cemetery-a storehouse of relics, an open-air museum for the ages-Marinetti proposed a ruthless purge of his country's aesthetic and poetic sentimentalisms. He launched his venture from the most modern of European capitals, in a widely distributed daily; the hurly burly of the manifesto's reception duly catapulted his ambitious program onto the world stage. For all of Marinetti's famous condemnations of passéisme, however, the shibboleth of his own movement was, by 1909, already a bit old hat.
We might think of 2010, in fact, as marking the incidental anniversary of a slightly older, less strident, Futurism. On June 18, 1904, the Mallorcan poet and journalist Gabriel Alomar (1873-1941; Fig. 1) delivered his lengthy lecture, El Futurisme, to a small audience at Barcelona's Ateneu (a private literary society). The redacted version of his address appeared the following year in the journal l'Avenç ("advance," "progress")-an outlet, as its name would suggest, of Catalan political vanguardism- before being translated into Castilian and published as a slim volume. Reviews in the Parisian Mercure de France and other publications further circulated the basic tenets of El Futurisme, as well as the importunate ambition of its name, throughout some prominent literary circles.2
Marinetti likely first caught wind of Alomar's essay through Marcel Robin's substantial 1908 review in the Mercure, a journal that Marinetti-like the better part of forward-thinking individuals in turn-of-the-century Paris-read avidly, and to which he occasionally contributed. This fact was not lost on Alomar, who reacted vehemently against the expropriation of his title, accusing Marinetti, in March 1909, of plagiarism.3 At the latter's professed ignorance of Alomar's essay, the Spanish poet Ruben Darío insisted, already in 1909, that the Italian impresario recognize...