Tristan Tzara

Tristan Tzara
Portrait of Tristan Tzara, by Robert Delaunay (1923)
Born	Samuel (Samy) Rosenstock 28 April 1896 Moinești, Romania
Died	25 December 1963(1963-12-25) (aged 67) Paris, France
Pen name	S. Samyro, Tristan, Tristan Ruia, Tristan Țara, Tr. Tzara
Occupation	Poet, essayist, journalist, playwright, performance artist, composer, film director, politician, diplomat
Nationality	Romanian
Period	1912–1963
Genre	Lyric poetry, epic poetry, free verse, prose poetry, parody, satire, utopian fiction
Subject	Art criticism, literary criticism, social criticism
Literary movement	Symbolism Avant-garde Dada Surrealism
Signature

Tristan Tzara (French: [tʁistɑ̃ dzaʁa]; Romanian: [trisˈtan ˈt͡sara]; born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock, also known as S. Samyro; 28 April [O.S. 16 April] 1896^[1] – 25 December 1963) was a Romanian avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement. Under the influence of Adrian Maniu, the adolescent Tzara became interested in Symbolism and co-founded the magazine Simbolul with Ion Vinea (with whom he also wrote experimental poetry) and painter Marcel Janco.

During World War I, after briefly collaborating on Vinea's Chemarea, he joined Janco in Switzerland. There, Tzara's shows at the Cabaret Voltaire and Zunfthaus zur Waag, as well as his poetry and art manifestos, became a main feature of early Dadaism. His work represented Dada's nihilistic side, in contrast with the more moderate approach favored by Hugo Ball.

After moving to Paris in 1919, Tzara, by then one of the "presidents of Dada", joined the staff of Littérature magazine, which marked the first step in the movement's evolution toward Surrealism. He was involved in the major polemics which led to Dada's split, defending his principles against André Breton and Francis Picabia, and, in Romania, against the eclectic modernism of Vinea and Janco. This personal vision on art defined his Dadaist plays The Gas Heart (1921) and Handkerchief of Clouds (1924). A forerunner of automatist techniques, Tzara eventually aligned himself with Breton's Surrealism, and under its influence wrote his celebrated utopian poem "The Approximate Man".

During the final part of his career, Tzara combined his

Tristan Tzara was an influential author and performer, whose contribution is credited with having created a connection from Cubism and Futurism to the Beat Generation, Situationism and various currents in rock music. The friend and collaborator of many modernist figures, he was the lover of dancer Maja Kruscek in his early youth and was later married to Swedish artist and poet Greta Knutson.

Name

S. Samyro, a partial anagram of Samy Rosenstock, was used by Tzara from his debut and throughout the early 1910s.^[2] A number of undated writings, which he probably authored as early as 1913, bear the signature Tristan Ruia, and, in summer of 1915, he was signing his pieces with the name Tristan.^[3][4]

In the 1960s, Rosenstock's collaborator and later rival Ion Vinea claimed that he was responsible for coining the Tzara part of his pseudonym in 1915.^[3] Vinea also stated that Tzara wanted to keep Tristan as his adopted first name, and that this choice had later attracted him the "infamous pun" Triste Âne Tzara (French for "Sad Donkey Tzara").^[3] This version of events is uncertain, as manuscripts show that the writer may have already been using the full name, as well as the variations Tristan Țara and Tr. Tzara, in 1913–1914 (although there is a possibility that he was signing his texts long after committing them to paper).^[5]

In 1972, art historian

He moved to Bucharest at the age of eleven, and attended the Schemitz-Tierin boarding school.^[9] It is believed that the young Tzara completed his secondary education at a state-run high school, which is identified as the Saint Sava National College^[9] or as the Sfântul Gheorghe High School.^[11] In October 1912, when Tzara was aged sixteen, he joined his friends Vinea and Marcel Janco in editing Simbolul. Reputedly, Janco and Vinea provided the funds.^[12] Like Vinea, Tzara was also close to their young colleague Jacques G. Costin, who was later his self-declared promoter and admirer.^[13]

Despite their young age, the three editors were able to attract collaborations from established

Tzara had enrolled at the University of Bucharest in 1914, studying mathematics and philosophy, but did not graduate.^[9][23] In autumn 1915, he left Romania for Zürich, in neutral Switzerland. Janco, together with his brother Jules Janco, had settled there a few months before, and was later joined by his other brother, Georges Janco.^[24] Tzara, who may have applied to the Faculty of Philosophy at the local university,^[9][25] shared lodging with Marcel Janco, who was a student at the Technische Hochschule, in the Altinger Guest House^[26] (by 1918, Tzara had moved to the Limmatquai Hotel).^[27] His departure from Romania, like that of the Janco brothers, may have been in part a pacifist political statement.^[28] After settling in Switzerland, the young poet almost completely discarded Romanian as his language of expression, writing most of his subsequent works in French.^[23][29] The poems he had written before, which were the result of poetic dialogues between him and his friend, were left in Vinea's care.^[30] Most of these pieces were first printed only in the interwar period.^[23][31]

It was in Zürich that the Romanian group met with the

It was in this milieu that Dada was born, at some point before May 1916, when a publication of the same name first saw print. The story of its establishment was the subject of a disagreement between Tzara and his fellow writers. Cernat believes that the first Dadaist performance took place as early as February, when the nineteen-year-old Tzara, wearing a monocle, entered the Cabaret Voltaire stage singing sentimental melodies and handing paper wads to his "scandalized spectators", leaving the stage to allow room for masked actors on stilts, and returning in clown attire.^[36] The same type of performances took place at the Zunfthaus zur Waag beginning in summer 1916, after the Cabaret Voltaire was forced to close down.^[37]

According to music historian Bernard Gendron, for as long as it lasted, "the Cabaret Voltaire was dada. There was no alternative institution or site that could disentangle 'pure' dada from its mere accompaniment [...] nor was any such site desired."^[38] Other opinions link Dada's beginnings with much earlier events, including the experiments of Alfred Jarry, André Gide, Christian Morgenstern, Jean-Pierre Brisset, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jacques Vaché, Marcel Duchamp, and Francis Picabia.^[39]

In the first of the movement's manifestos, Ball wrote: "[The booklet] is intended to present to the Public the activities and interests of the Cabaret Voltaire, which has as its sole purpose to draw attention, across the barriers of war and nationalism, to the few independent spirits who live for other ideals. The next objective of the artists who are assembled here is to publish a revue internationale [French for 'international magazine']."^[40] Ball completed his message in French, and the paragraph translates as: "The magazine shall be published in Zürich and shall carry the name 'Dada' ('Dada'). Dada Dada Dada Dada."^[40] The view according to which Ball had created the movement was notably supported by writer Walter Serner, who directly accused Tzara of having abused Ball's initiative.^[41]

A secondary point of contention between the founders of Dada regarded the paternity for the movement's name, which, according to visual artist and essayist Hans Richter, was first adopted in print in June 1916.^[42] Ball, who claimed authorship and stated that he picked the word randomly from a dictionary, indicated that it stood for both the French-language equivalent of "hobby horse" and a German-language term reflecting the joy of children being rocked to sleep.^[43] Tzara himself declined interest in the matter, but Marcel Janco credited him with having coined the term.^[44] Dada manifestos, written or co-authored by Tzara, record that the name shares its form with various other terms, including a word used in the Kru languages of West Africa to designate the tail of a sacred cow; a toy and the name for "mother" in an unspecified Italian dialect; and the double affirmative in Romanian and in various Slavic languages.^[45]

Dadaist promoter

Before the end of the war, Tzara had assumed a position as Dada's main promoter and manager, helping the Swiss group establish branches in other European countries.^[25][46] This period also saw the first conflict within the group: citing irreconcilable differences with Tzara, Ball left the group.^[47] With his departure, Gendron argues, Tzara was able to move Dada vaudeville-like performances into more of "an incendiary and yet jocularly provocative theater."^[48]

He is often credited with having inspired many young modernist authors from outside Switzerland to affiliate with the group, in particular the Frenchmen

As early as 1916, Tristan Tzara took distance from the Italian Futurists, rejecting the militarist and proto-fascist stance of their leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.^[52] Richter notes that, by then, Dada had replaced Futurism as the leader of modernism, while continuing to build on its influence: "we had swallowed Futurism—bones, feathers and all. It is true that in the process of digestion all sorts of bones and feathers had been regurgitated."^[49] Despite this and the fact that Dada did not make any gains in Italy, Tzara could count poets Giuseppe Ungaretti and Alberto Savinio, painters Gino Cantarelli and Aldo Fiozzi, as well as a few other Italian Futurists, among the Dadaists.^[53] Among the Italian authors supporting Dadaist manifestos and rallying with the Dada group was the poet, painter and in the future a fascist racial theorist Julius Evola, who became a personal friend of Tzara.^[54]

The next year, Tzara and Ball opened the Galerie Dada permanent exhibit, through which they set contacts with the independent Italian visual artist

As a result of his campaigning, Tzara created a list of so-called "Dada presidents", who represented various regions of Europe. According to Hans Richter, it included, alongside Tzara, figures ranging from Ernst, Arp, Baader, Breton and Aragon to Kruscek, Evola, Rafael Lasso de la Vega, Igor Stravinsky, Vicente Huidobro, Francesco Meriano and Théodore Fraenkel.^[61] Richter notes: "I'm not sure if all the names who appear here would agree with the description."^[62]

End of World War I

The shows Tzara staged in Zürich often turned into scandals or riots, and he was in permanent conflict with the Swiss law enforcers.^[63] Hans Richter speaks of a "pleasure of letting fly at the bourgeois, which in Tristan Tzara took the form of coldly (or hotly) calculated insolence" (see Épater la bourgeoisie).^[64] In one instance, as part of a series of events in which Dadaists mocked established authors, Tzara and Arp falsely publicized that they were going to fight a duel in Rehalp, near Zürich, and that they were going to have the popular novelist Jakob Christoph Heer for their witness.^[65] Richter also reports that his Romanian colleague profited from Swiss neutrality to play the Allies and Central Powers against each other, obtaining art works and funds from both, making use of their need to stimulate their respective propaganda efforts.^[66] While active as a promoter, Tzara also published his first volume of collected poetry, the 1918 Vingt-cinq poèmes ("Twenty-five Poems").^[67]

A major event took place in autumn 1918, when

Arp and Janco drifted away from the movement ca. 1919, when they created the Constructivist-inspired workshop Das Neue Leben.^[75] In Romania, Dada was awarded an ambiguous reception from Tzara's former associate Vinea. Although he was sympathetic to its goals, treasured Hugo Ball and Hennings and promised to adapt his own writings to its requirements, Vinea cautioned Tzara and the Jancos in favor of lucidity.^[76] When Vinea submitted his poem Doleanțe ("Grievances") to be published by Tzara and his associates, he was turned down, an incident which critics attribute to a contrast between the reserved tone of the piece and the revolutionary tenets of Dada.^[77]

Paris Dada

In late 1919, Tristan Tzara left Switzerland to join Breton, Soupault and Claude Rivière in editing the Paris-based magazine Littérature.^[25][78] Already a mentor for the French avant-garde, he was, according to Hans Richter, perceived as an "Anti-Messiah" and a "prophet".^[79] Reportedly, Dada mythology had it that he entered the French capital in a snow-white or lilac-colored car, passing down Boulevard Raspail through a triumphal arch made from his own pamphlets, being greeted by cheering crowds and a fireworks display.^[79] Richter dismisses this account, indicating that Tzara actually walked from Gare de l'Est to Picabia's home, without anyone expecting him to arrive.^[79]

He is often described as the main figure in the Littérature circle, and credited with having more firmly set its artistic principles in the line of Dada.^[25][80] When Picabia began publishing a new series of 391 in Paris, Tzara seconded him and, Richter says, produced issues of the magazine "decked out [...] in all the colors of Dada."^[57] He was also issuing his Dada magazine, printed in Paris but using the same format, renaming it Bulletin Dada and later Dadaphone.^[81] At around that time, he met American author Gertrude Stein, who wrote about him in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,^[82] and the artist couple Robert and Sonia Delaunay (with whom he worked in tandem for "poem-dresses" and other simultaneist literary pieces).^[83]

Tzara became involved in a number of Dada experiments, on which he collaborated with Breton, Aragon, Soupault, Picabia or

Dada activities in Paris culminated in the March 1920 variety show at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre, which featured readings from Breton, Picabia, Dermée and Tzara's earlier work, La Première aventure céleste de M. Antipyrine ("The First Heavenly Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine").^[89] Tzara's melody, Vaseline symphonique ("Symphonic Vaseline"), which required ten or twenty people to shout "cra" and "cri" on a rising scale, was also performed.^[90] A scandal erupted when Breton read Picabia's Manifeste cannibale ("Cannibal Manifesto"), lashing out at the audience and mocking them, to which they answered by aiming rotten fruit at the stage.^[91]

The Dada phenomenon was only noticed in Romania beginning in 1920, and its overall reception was negative. Traditionalist historian Nicolae Iorga, Symbolist promoter Ovid Densusianu, the more reserved modernists Camil Petrescu and Benjamin Fondane all refused to accept it as a valid artistic manifestation.^[92] Although he rallied with tradition, Vinea defended the subversive current in front of more serious criticism, and rejected the widespread rumor that Tzara had acted as an agent of influence for the Central Powers during the war.^[93] Eugen Lovinescu, editor of Sburătorul and one of Vinea's rivals on the modernist scene, acknowledged the influence exercised by Tzara on the younger avant-garde authors, but analyzed his work only briefly, using as an example one of his pre-Dada poems, and depicting him as an advocate of literary "extremism".^[94]

Dada stagnation

By 1921, Tzara had become involved in conflicts with other figures in the movement, whom he claimed had parted with the spirit of Dada.^[95] He was targeted by the Berlin-based Dadaists, in particular by Huelsenbeck and Serner, the former of whom was also involved in a conflict with Raoul Hausmann over leadership status.^[41] According to Richter, tensions between Breton and Tzara had surfaced in 1920, when Breton first made known his wish to do away with musical performances altogether and alleged that the Romanian was merely repeating himself.^[96] The Dada shows themselves were by then such common occurrences that audiences expected to be insulted by the performers.^[67]

A more serious crisis occurred in May, when Dada organized a mock trial of Maurice Barrès, whose early affiliation with the Symbolists had been shadowed by his antisemitism and reactionary stance: Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes was the prosecutor, Aragon and Soupault the defense attorneys, with Tzara, Ungaretti, Benjamin Péret and others as witnesses (a mannequin stood in for Barrès).^[97] Péret immediately upset Picabia and Tzara by refusing to make the trial an absurd one, and by introducing a political subtext with which Breton nevertheless agreed.^[98] In June, Tzara and Picabia clashed with each other, after Tzara expressed an opinion that his former mentor was becoming too radical.^[99] During the same season, Breton, Arp, Ernst, Maja Kruschek and Tzara were in Austria, at Imst, where they published their last manifesto as a group, Dada au grand air ("Dada in the Open Air") or Der Sängerkrieg in Tirol ("The Battle of the Singers in Tyrol").^[100] Tzara also visited Czechoslovakia, where he reportedly hoped to gain adherents to his cause.^[101]

Also in 1921, Ion Vinea wrote an article for the Romanian newspaper

Evening of the Bearded Heart

Tzara was openly attacked by Breton in a February 1922 article for Le Journal de Peuple, where the Romanian writer was denounced as "an impostor" avid for "publicity".^[106] In March, Breton initiated the Congress for the Determination and Defense of the Modern Spirit. The French writer used the occasion to strike out Tzara's name from among the Dadaists, citing in his support Dada's Huelsenbeck, Serner, and Christian Schad.^[107] Basing his statement on a note supposedly authored by Huelsenbeck, Breton also accused Tzara of opportunism, claiming that he had planned wartime editions of Dada works in such a manner as not to upset actors on the political stage, making sure that German Dadaists were not made available to the public in countries subject to the Supreme War Council.^[107] Tzara, who attended the Congress only as a means to subvert it,^[108] responded to the accusations the same month, arguing that Huelsenbeck's note was fabricated and that Schad had not been one of the original Dadaists.^[107] Rumors reported much later by American writer Brion Gysin had it that Breton's claims also depicted Tzara as an informer for the Prefecture of Police.^[109]

In May 1922, Dada staged its own funeral.^[110] According to Hans Richter, the main part of this took place in Weimar, where the Dadaists attended a festival of the Bauhaus art school, during which Tzara proclaimed the elusive nature of his art: "Dada is useless, like everything else in life. [...] Dada is a virgin microbe which penetrates with the insistence of air into all those spaces that reason has failed to fill with words and conventions."^[111]

In "The Bearded Heart" manifesto a number of artists backed the marginalization of Breton in support of Tzara. Alongside Cocteau, Arp, Ribemont-Dessaignes, and Éluard, the pro-Tzara faction included Erik Satie, Theo van Doesburg, Serge Charchoune, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Marcel Duchamp, Ossip Zadkine, Jean Metzinger, Ilia Zdanevich, and Man Ray.^[112] During an associated soirée, Evening of the Bearded Heart, which began on 6 July 1923, Tzara presented a re-staging of his play The Gas Heart (which had been first performed two years earlier to howls of derision from its audience), for which Sonia Delaunay designed the costumes.^[83] Breton interrupted its performance and reportedly fought with several of his former associates and broke furniture, prompting a theatre riot that only the intervention of the police halted.^[113] Dada's vaudeville declined in importance and disappeared altogether after that date.^[114]

Picabia took Breton's side against Tzara,^[115] and replaced the staff of his 391, enlisting collaborations from Clément Pansaers and Ezra Pound.^[116] Breton marked the end of Dada in 1924, when he issued the first Surrealist Manifesto. Richter suggests that "Surrealism devoured and digested Dada."^[110] Tzara distanced himself from the new trend, disagreeing with its methods and, increasingly, with its politics.^{[25][67][84][117]} In 1923, he and a few other former Dadaists collaborated with Richter and the Constructivist artist El Lissitzky on the magazine G,^[118] and, the following year, he wrote pieces for the Yugoslav-Slovenian magazine Tank (edited by Ferdinand Delak).^[119]

Transition to Surrealism

Tzara continued to write, becoming more seriously interested in the theater. In 1924, he published and staged the play

Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.^[120] He also collected his earlier Dada texts as the Seven Dada Manifestos. Marxist thinker Henri Lefebvre reviewed them enthusiastically; he later became one of the author's friends.^[121]

In Romania, Tzara's work was partly recuperated by Contimporanul, which notably staged public readings of his works during the international art exhibit it organized in 1924, and again during the "new art demonstration" of 1925.[122] In parallel, the short-lived magazine Integral, where Ilarie Voronca and Ion Călugăru were the main animators, took significant interest in Tzara's work.^[123] In a 1927 interview with the publication, he voiced his opposition to the Surrealist group's adoption of communism, indicating that such politics could only result in a "new bourgeoisie" being created, and explaining that he had opted for a personal "permanent revolution", which would preserve "the holiness of the ego".^[124]

In 1925, Tristan Tzara was in Stockholm, where he married Greta Knutson, with whom he had a son, Christophe (born 1927).^[4] A former student of painter André Lhote, she was known for her interest in phenomenology and abstract art.^[125] Around the same period, with funds from Knutson's inheritance, Tzara commissioned Austrian architect Adolf Loos, a former representative of the Vienna Secession whom he had met in Zürich, to build him a house in Paris.^[4] The rigidly functionalist Maison Tristan Tzara, built in Montmartre, was designed following Tzara's specific requirements and decorated with samples of African art.^[4] It was Loos' only major contribution in his Parisian years.^[4]

In 1929, he reconciled with Breton, and sporadically attended the Surrealists' meetings in Paris.

transition in reply to Stein's memoir The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which he accused his former friend of being a megalomaniac.^[128]

The poet became involved in further developing Surrealist techniques, and, together with Breton and Valentine Hugo, drew one of the better-known examples of "exquisite corpses".^[129] Tzara also prefaced a 1934 collection of Surrealist poems by his friend René Char, and the following year he and Greta Knutson visited Char in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue.^[130] Tzara's wife was also affiliated with the Surrealist group at around the same time.^[4][125] This association ended when she parted with Tzara late in the 1930s.^[4][125]

At home, Tzara's works were collected and edited by the Surrealist promoter Sașa Pană, who corresponded with him over several years.^[131] The first such edition saw print in 1934, and featured the 1913–1915 poems Tzara had left in Vinea's care.^[30] In 1928–1929, Tzara exchanged letters with his friend Jacques G. Costin, a Contimporanul affiliate who did not share all of Vinea's views on literature, who offered to organize his visit to Romania and asked him to translate his work into French.^[132]

Affiliation with communism and Spanish Civil War

Alarmed by the establishment of

Nationalists (see Siege of Madrid).^[135] Upon his return, he published the collection of poems Midis gagnés ("Conquered Southern Regions").^[84] Some of them had previously been printed in the brochure Les poètes du monde défendent le peuple espagnol ("The Poets of the World Defend the Spanish People", 1937), which was edited by two prominent authors and activists, Nancy Cunard and the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.^[136] Tzara had also signed Cunard's June 1937 call to intervention against Francisco Franco.^[137] Reportedly, he and Nancy Cunard were romantically involved.^[138]

Although the poet was moving away from Surrealism,

Marxism-Leninism was reportedly questioned by both the PCF and the Soviet Union.^[139] Semiotician Philip Beitchman places their attitude in connection with Tzara's own vision of Utopia, which combined communist messages with Freudo-Marxist psychoanalysis and made use of particularly violent imagery.^[140] Reportedly, Tzara refused to be enlisted in supporting the party line, maintaining his independence and refusing to take the forefront at public rallies.^[141]

However, others note that the former Dadaist leader would often show himself a follower of political guidelines. As early as 1934, Tzara, together with Breton, Éluard and communist writer

Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin.^[142] Historian Irina Livezeanu notes that Tzara, who agreed with Stalinism and shunned Trotskyism, submitted to the PCF cultural demands during the writers' congress of 1935, even when his friend Crevel committed suicide to protest the adoption of socialist realism.^[143] At a later stage, Livezeanu remarks, Tzara reinterpreted Dada and Surrealism as revolutionary currents, and presented them as such to the public.^[144] This stance she contrasts with that of Breton, who was more reserved in his attitudes.^[143]

World War II and Resistance

During

In December 1944, five months after the Liberation of Paris, he was contributing to L'Éternelle Revue, a pro-communist newspaper edited by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, through which Sartre was publicizing the heroic image of a France united in resistance, as opposed to the perception that it had passively accepted German control.^[149] Other contributors included writers Aragon, Char, Éluard, Elsa Triolet, Eugène Guillevic, Raymond Queneau, Francis Ponge, Jacques Prévert and painter Pablo Picasso.^[149]

Upon the end of the war and the restoration of French independence, Tzara was

His works of the period include, among others: Le Signe de vie ("Sign of Life", 1946), Terre sur terre ("Earth on Earth", 1946), Sans coup férir ("Without a Need to Fight", 1949), De mémoire d'homme ("From a Man's Memory", 1950), Parler seul ("Speaking Alone", 1950), and La Face intérieure ("The Inner Face", 1953), followed in 1955 by À haute flamme ("Flame out Loud") and Le Temps naissant ("The Nascent Time"), and the 1956 Le Fruit permis ("The Permitted Fruit").[84]^[160] Tzara continued to be an active promoter of modernist culture. Around 1949, having read Irish author Samuel Beckett's manuscript of Waiting for Godot, Tzara facilitated the play's staging by approaching producer Roger Blin.^[161] He also translated into French some poems by Hikmet^[162] and the Hungarian author Attila József.^[153] In 1949, he introduced Picasso to art dealer Heinz Berggruen (thus helping start their lifelong partnership),^[163] and, in 1951, wrote the catalog for an exhibit of works by his friend Max Ernst; the text celebrated the artist's "free use of stimuli" and "his discovery of a new kind of humor."^[164]

1956 protest and final years

In October 1956, Tzara visited the

His return to France coincided with the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution, which ended with a Soviet military intervention. On 24 October, Tzara was ordered to a PCF meeting, where activist Laurent Casanova reportedly ordered him to keep silent, which Tzara did.^[153] Tzara's apparent dissidence and the crisis he helped provoke within the Communist Party were celebrated by Breton, who had adopted a pro-Hungarian stance, and who defined his friend and rival as "the first spokesman of the Hungarian demand."^[153]

He was thereafter mostly withdrawn from public life, dedicating himself to researching the work of 15th-century poet

Much critical commentary about Tzara surrounds the measure to which the poet identified with the national cultures which he represented. Paul Cernat notes that the association between Samyro and the Jancos, who were Jews, and their ethnic Romanian colleagues, was one sign of a cultural dialogue, in which "the openness of Romanian environments toward artistic modernity" was stimulated by "young emancipated Jewish writers."^[168] Salomon Schulman, a Swedish researcher of Yiddish literature, argues that the combined influence of Yiddish folklore and Hasidic philosophy shaped European modernism in general and Tzara's style in particular,^[169] while American poet Andrei Codrescu speaks of Tzara as one in a Balkan line of "absurdist writing", which also includes the Romanians Urmuz, Eugène Ionesco and Emil Cioran.^[170] According to literary historian George Călinescu, Samyro's early poems deal with "the voluptuousness over the strong scents of rural life, which is typical among Jews compressed into ghettos."^[171]

Tzara himself used elements alluding to his homeland in his early Dadaist performances. His collaboration with

At home, Tzara was occasionally targeted for his Jewishness, culminating in the ban enforced by the Ion Antonescu regime. In 1931, Const. I. Emilian, the first Romanian to write an academic study on the avant-garde, attacked him from a conservative and antisemitic position. He depicted Dadaists as "Judaeo-Bolsheviks" who corrupted Romanian culture, and included Tzara among the main proponents of "literary anarchism".^[179] Alleging that Tzara's only merit was to establish a literary fashion, while recognizing his "formal virtuosity and artistic intelligence", he claimed to prefer Tzara in his Simbolul stage.^[180] This perspective was deplored early on by the modernist critic Perpessicius.^[181] Nine years after Emilian's polemic text, fascist poet and journalist Radu Gyr published an article in Convorbiri Literare, in which he attacked Tzara as a representative of the "Judaic spirit", of the "foreign plague" and of "materialist-historical dialectics".^[182]

Symbolist poetry

Tzara's earliest

Beitchman notes that, throughout his life, Tzara used Symbolist elements against the doctrines of Symbolism. Thus, he argues, the poet did not cultivate a memory of historical events, "since it deludes man into thinking that there was something when there was nothing."[192] Cernat notes: "That which essentially unifies, during [the 1910s], the poetic output of Adrian Maniu, Ion Vinea and Tristan Tzara is an acute awareness of literary conventions, a satiety [...] in respect to calophile literature, which they perceived as exhausted."^[193] In Beitchman's view, the revolt against cultivated beauty was a constant in Tzara's years of maturity, and his visions of social change continued to be inspired by Arthur Rimbaud and the Comte de Lautréamont.^[194] According to Beitchman, Tzara uses the Symbolist message, "the birthright [of humans] has been sold for a mess of porridge", taking it "into the streets, cabarets and trains where he denounces the deal and asks for his birthright back."^[195]

Collaboration with Vinea

The transition to a more radical form of poetry seems to have taken place in 1913–1915, during the periods when Tzara and Vinea were vacationing together. The pieces share a number of characteristics and subjects, and the two poets even use them to allude to one another (or, in one case, to Tzara's sister).^[196]

In addition to the lyrics were they both speak of provincial holidays and love affairs with local girls, both friends intended to reinterpret William Shakespeare's Hamlet from a modernist perspective, and wrote incomplete texts with this as their subject.^[197] However, Paul Cernat notes, the texts also evidence a difference in approach, with Vinea's work being "meditative and melancholic", while Tzara's is "hedonistic".^[198] Tzara often appealed to revolutionary and ironic images, portraying provincial and middle class environments as places of artificiality and decay, demystifying pastoral themes and evidencing a will to break free.^[199] His literature took a more radical perspective on life, and featured lyrics with subversive intent:

In his Înserează (roughly, "Night Falling"), probably authored in Mangalia, Tzara writes:

Vinea's similar poem, written in Tuzla and named after that village, reads:

Cernat notes that Nocturnă ("Nocturne") and Înserează were the pieces originally performed at Cabaret Voltaire, identified by Hugo Ball as "Rumanian poetry", and that they were recited in Tzara's own spontaneous French translation.^[201] Although they are noted for their radical break with the traditional form of Romanian verse,^[202] Ball's diary entry of 5 February 1916, indicates that Tzara's works were still "conservative in style".^[203] In Călinescu's view, they announce Dadaism, given that "bypassing the relations which lead to a realistic vision, the poet associates unimaginably dissipated images that will surprise consciousness."^[171] In 1922, Tzara himself wrote: "As early as 1914, I tried to strip the words of their proper meaning and use them in such a way as to give the verse a completely new, general, meaning [...]."^[202]

Alongside pieces depicting a Jewish cemetery in which graves "crawl like worms" on the edge of a town, chestnut trees "heavy-laden like people returning from hospitals", or wind wailing "with all the hopelessness of an orphanage",^[171] Samyro's poetry includes Verișoară, fată de pension, which, Cernat argues, displays "playful detachment [for] the musicality of internal rhymes".^[15] It opens with the lyrics:

The Gârceni pieces were treasured by the moderate wing of the Romanian avant-garde movement. In contrast to his previous rejection of Dada, Contimporanul collaborator Benjamin Fondane used them as an example of "pure poetry", and compared them to the elaborate writings of French poet Paul Valéry, thus recuperating them in line with the magazine's ideology.^[204]

Dada synthesis and "simultaneism"

Tzara the Dadaist was inspired by the contributions of his experimental modernist predecessors. Among them were the literary promoters of Cubism: in addition to Henri Barzun and Fernand Divoire, Tzara cherished the works of Guillaume Apollinaire.^[145][205] Despite Dada's condemnation of Futurism, various authors note the influence Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his circle exercised on Tzara's group.^[206] In 1917, he was in correspondence with both Apollinaire^[207] and Marinetti.^[208] Traditionally, Tzara is also seen as indebted to the early avant-garde and black comedy writings of Romania's Urmuz.^[202][209]

For a large part, Dada focused on performances and satire, with shows that often had Tzara, Marcel Janco and Huelsenbeck for their main protagonists. Often dressed up as Tyrolian peasants or wearing dark robes, they improvised poetry sessions at the Cabaret Voltaire, reciting the works of others or their spontaneous creations, which were or pretended to be in Esperanto or Māori language.^[210] Bernard Gendron describes these soirées as marked by "heterogeneity and eclecticism",^[211] and Richter notes that the songs, often punctuated by loud shrieks or other unsettling sounds, built on the legacy of noise music and Futurist compositions.^[212]

With time, Tristan Tzara merged his performances and his literature, taking part in developing Dada's "simultaneist poetry", which was meant to be read out loud and involved a collaborative effort, being, according to

Art historian Roger Cardinal describes Tristan Tzara's Dada poetry as marked by "extreme semantic and syntactic incoherence".[67] Tzara, who recommended destroying just as it is created,^[215] had devised a personal system for writing poetry, which implied a seemingly chaotic reassembling of words that had been randomly cut out of newspapers.^{[109][216][217]}

Dada and anti-art

The Romanian writer also spent the Dada period issuing a long series of manifestos, which were often authored as prose poetry,^[84] and, according to Cardinal, were characterized by "rumbustious tomfoolery and astringent wit", which reflected "the language of a sophisticated savage".^[67] Huelsenbeck credited Tzara with having discovered in them the format for "compress[ing] what we think and feel",^[218] and, according to Hans Richter, the genre "suited Tzara perfectly."^[49] Despite its production of seemingly theoretical works, Richter indicates, Dada lacked any form of program, and Tzara tried to perpetuate this state of affairs.^[219] His Dada manifesto of 1918 stated: "Dada means nothing", adding "Thought is produced in the mouth."^[220] Tzara indicated: "I am against systems; the most acceptable system is on principle to have none."^[4] In addition, Tzara, who once stated that "logic is always false",^[221] probably approved of Serner's vision of a "final dissolution".^[222] According to Philip Beitchman, a core concept in Tzara's thought was that "as long as we do things the way we think we once did them we will be unable to achieve any kind of livable society."^[192]

Despite adopting such anti-artistic principles, Richter argues, Tzara, like many of his fellow Dadaists, did not initially discard the mission of "furthening the cause of art."^[223] He saw this evident in La Revue Dada 2, a poem "as exquisite as freshly-picked flowers", which included the lyrics:

La Revue Dada 2, which also includes the onomatopoeic line tralalalalalalalalalalala, is one example where Tzara applies his principles of chance to sounds themselves.^[223] This sort of arrangement, treasured by many Dadaists, was probably connected with Apollinaire's calligrams, and with his announcement that "Man is in search of a new language."^[224] Călinescu proposed that Tzara willingly limited the impact of chance: taking as his example a short parody piece which depicts the love affair between cyclist and a Dadaist, which ends with their decapitation by a jealous husband, the critic notes that Tzara transparently intended to "shock the bourgeois".^[171] Late in his career, Huelsenbeck alleged that Tzara never actually applied the experimental methods he had devised.^[41]

The Dada series makes ample use of contrast,

Tristan Tzara's first play, The Gas Heart, dates from the final period of Paris Dada. Created with what Enoch Brater calls a "peculiar verbal strategy", it is a dialogue between characters called Ear, Mouth, Eye, Nose, Neck, and Eyebrow.^[227] They seem unwilling to actually communicate to each other and their reliance on proverbs and idiotisms willingly creates confusion between metaphorical and literal speech.^[227] The play ends with a dance performance that recalls similar devices used by the proto-Dadaist Alfred Jarry. The text culminates in a series of doodles and illegible words.^[228] Brater describes The Gas Heart as a "parod[y] of theatrical conventions".^[228]

In his 1924 play Handkerchief of Clouds, Tzara explores the relation between perception, the subconscious and memory. Largely through exchanges between commentators who act as third parties, the text presents the tribulations of a love triangle (a poet, a bored woman, and her banker husband, whose character traits borrow the clichés of conventional drama), and in part reproduces settings and lines from Hamlet.^[229] Tzara mocks classical theater, which demands from characters to be inspiring, believable, and to function as a whole: Handkerchief of Clouds requires actors in the role of commentators to address each other by their real names,^[230] and their lines include dismissive comments on the play itself, while the protagonist, who in the end dies, is not assigned any name.^[231] Writing for Integral, Tzara defined his play as a note on "the relativity of things, sentiments and events."^[232] Among the conventions ridiculed by the dramatist, Philip Beitchman notes, is that of a "privileged position for art": in what Beitchman sees as a comment on Marxism, poet and banker are interchangeable capitalists who invest in different fields.^[233] Writing in 1925, Fondane rendered a pronouncement by Jean Cocteau, who, while commenting that Tzara was one of his "most beloved" writers and a "great poet", argued: "Handkerchief of Clouds was poetry, and great poetry for that matter—but not theater."^[234] The work was nonetheless praised by Ion Călugăru at Integral, who saw in it one example that modernist performance could rely not just on props, but also on a solid text.^[126]

The Approximate Man and later works

After 1929, with the adoption of Surrealism, Tzara's literary works discard much of their satirical purpose, and begin to explore universal themes relating to the human condition.^[84] According to Cardinal, the period also signified the definitive move from "a studied inconsequentiality" and "unreadable gibberish" to "a seductive and fertile surrealist idiom."^[67] The critic also remarks: "Tzara arrived at a mature style of transparent simplicity, in which disparate entities could be held together in a unifying vision."^[67] In a 1930 essay, Fondane had given a similar verdict: arguing that Tzara had infused his work with "suffering", had discovered humanity, and had become a "clairvoyant" among poets.^[235]

This period in Tzara's creative activity centers on The Approximate Man, an epic poem which is reportedly recognized as his most accomplished contribution to French literature.^[67][84] While maintaining some of Tzara's preoccupation with language experimentation, it is mainly a study in social alienation and the search for an escape.^[84][236] Cardinal calls the piece "an extended meditation on mental and elemental impulses [...] with images of stunning beauty",^[67] while Breitchman, who notes Tzara's rebellion against the "excess baggage of [man's] past and the notions [...] with which he has hitherto tried to control his life", remarks his portrayal of poets as voices who can prevent human beings from destroying themselves with their own intellects.^[237] The goal is a new man who lets intuition and spontaneity guide him through life, and who rejects measure.^[238] One of the appeals in the text reads:

The next stage in Tzara's career saw a merger of his literary and political views. His poems of the period blend a

Among the late 20th-century writers who acknowledged Tzara as an inspiration are Jerome Rothenberg,^[252] Isidore Isou and Andrei Codrescu. The former Situationist Isou, whose experiments with sounds and poetry come in succession to Apollinaire and Dada,^[224] declared his Lettrism to be the last connection in the Charles Baudelaire-Tzara cycle, with the goal of arranging "a nothing [...] for the creation of the anecdote."^[226] For a short period, Codrescu even adopted the pen name Tristan Tzara.^[7][253] He recalled the impact of having discovered Tzara's work in his youth, and credited him with being "the most important French poet after Rimbaud."^[7]

In retrospect, various authors describe Tzara's Dadaist shows and street performances as "happenings", with a word employed by post-Dadaists and Situationists, which was coined in the 1950s.^[254] Some also credit Tzara with having provided an ideological source for the development of rock music, including punk rock, punk subculture and post-punk.^[7][255] Tristan Tzara has inspired the songwriting technique of Radiohead,^[256] and is one of the avant-garde authors whose voices were mixed by DJ Spooky on his trip hop album Rhythm Science.^[257] Romanian contemporary classical musician Cornel Țăranu set to music five of Tzara's poems, all of which date from the post-Dada period.^[258] Țăranu, Anatol Vieru and ten other composers contributed to the album La Clé de l'horizon, inspired by Tzara's work.^[259]

Tributes and portrayals

In France, Tzara's work was collected as Oeuvres complètes ("Complete Works"), of which the first volume saw print in 1975,^[67] and an international poetry award is named after him (Prix International de Poésie Tristan Tzara). An international periodical titled Caietele Tristan Tzara, edited by the Tristan Tzara Cultural-Literary Foundation, has been published in Moinești since 1998.^[259][260]

According to Paul Cernat, Aliluia, one of the few avant-garde texts authored by Ion Vinea features a "transparent allusion" to Tristan Tzara.

The many polemics which surrounded Tzara in his lifetime left traces after his death, and determine contemporary perceptions of his work. The controversy regarding Tzara's role as a founder of Dada extended into several milieus, and continued long after the writer died. Richter, who discusses the lengthy conflict between Huelsenbeck and Tzara over the issue of Dada foundation, speaks of the movement as being torn apart by "petty jealousies".[42] In Romania, similar debates often involved the supposed founding role of Urmuz, who wrote his avant-garde texts before World War I, and Tzara's status as a communicator between Romania and the rest of Europe. Vinea, who claimed that Dada had been invented by Tzara in Gârceni ca. 1915 and thus sought to legitimize his own modernist vision, also saw Urmuz as the ignored precursor of radical modernism, from Dada to Surrealism.^[285] In 1931 the young, modernist literary critic Lucian Boz evidenced that he partly shared Vinea's perspective on the matter, crediting Tzara and Constantin Brâncuși with having, each on his own, invented the avant-garde.^[286] Eugène Ionesco argued that "before Dadaism there was Urmuzianism", and, after World War II, sought to popularize Urmuz's work among aficionados of Dada.^[287] Rumors in the literary community had it that Tzara successfully sabotaged Ionesco's initiative to publish a French edition of Urmuz's texts, allegedly because the public could then question his claim to have initiated the avant-garde experiment in Romania and the world (the edition saw print in 1965, two years after Tzara's death).^[288]

A more radical questioning of Tzara's influence came from Romanian essayist

References

• Alice Armstrong, "Stein, Gertrude" and Roger Cardinal, "Tzara, Tristan", in
  ISBN 0-415-26583-5
• Philip Beitchman, "Symbolism in the Streets", in I Am a Process with No Subject,
  ISBN 0-8130-0888-3
• Enoch Brater, Beyond Minimalism: Beckett's Late Style in the Theater,
  ISBN 0-19-506655-3
• ISBN 978-973-23-1911-6
• Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde,
  ISBN 0-226-28735-1
• Saime Göksu, Edward Timms, Romantic Communist: The Life and Work of Nazım Hikmet,
  ISBN 1-85065-371-2
• Dan Grigorescu, Istoria unei generații pierdute: expresioniștii, Editura Eminescu, Bucharest, 1980.
  OCLC 7463753
• Marius Hentea, TaTa Dada: The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2014.
  OCLC 1090828679
• Irene E. Hofman, Documents of Dada and Surrealism: Dada and Surrealist Journals in the Mary Reynolds Collection, Art Institute of Chicago, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, 2001
• ISBN 2-7351-1084-2
• ISBN 0-8264-1167-3
• Kirby Olson, Andrei Codrescu and the Myth of America,
  ISBN 0-7864-2137-1
• Petre Răileanu, Michel Carassou, Fundoianu/Fondane et l'avant-garde,
  ISBN 2-84272-057-1
• ISBN 0-500-20039-4

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Tristan Tzara.

Wikiquote has quotations related to Tristan Tzara.

Wikisource has original works by or about:
Tristan Tzara

• Works by Tristan Tzara at Project Gutenberg
• From Dada to Surrealism, Judaica Europeana virtual exhibition Archived 25 January 2013 at the Wayback Machine, Europeana database
• Tristan Tzara: The Art History Archive at The Lilith Gallery of Toronto
• Recordings of Tzara, Dada Magazine, A Note On Negro Poetry and Tzara's renditions of African poetry, at UbuWeb