TZARA, TRISTAN (1896–1963)

Romanian-born French poet and essayist.

Tristan Tzara was a highly significant, and at times unrecognized, figure in twentieth-century culture. As a creator, chronicler, and critic, he wrote prolifically all his life. By the time of his death, he left behind numerous volumes of poetry, plays, essays on art and literature, critical commentary, unfinished studies on Rabelais and Villon, and an unfinished autobiographical novel entitled Place Your Bets. Tzara's life journey westward from Romania to Switzerland, France, and briefly Spain constitutes a noteworthy example of the international character of the century's avant-garde movements and forms the background of his unceasing search for a genuine poetic language in conditions of war and human frailty.

Tzara was born Samuel Rosenstock in Moinesti, Romania. While studying mathematics and philosophy in Bucharest in 1912, he began to publish in his native language. His first postsymbolist poems appeared in Simbolul (The symbol), a literary journal he had founded with Ion Vinea and Marcel Janco. Tzara derived the pseudonym he adopted in 1915 partly from the name of an esteemed predecessor, Tristan Corbière, and partly from tara, the Romanian word for country.

Tzara moved to Zurich to continue his studies in the fall of the same year and came to join a group of rebellious émigrés in a daring artistic venture. Along with Hugo Ball, Jean Arp, Richard Huelsenbeck, and his friend Janco, he founded "Dada" in February 1916. The members of this heterogeneous lot were united in their hatred of bourgeois morality and of the detached status of traditional artistic expression. They detested the trivialization of language they saw in the countries fighting in World War I and in modern culture in general. Instead, the dadas set out to clean the slate and free art from all rules and expectations. In their manifestos they proclaimed a new, more vivid role for art, encompassing chance, spontaneity, chaos, nonsense, laughter, and provocation. At the Cabaret Voltaire and other venues, the dadas enacted their destruction of the arts and their reconfiguration of the creative process in a series of explosive performances. Tzara, who had opted for French as his language of communication, also edited the review Dada from 1917 to 1922, a position he used to propagate the cause of Dada beyond Zurich's boundaries. Tzara's own texts from this period, such as the play La première aventure céleste de M. Antipyrine (1916; The first heavenly adventure of Mr. Antipyrine), are colorful, fast-moving, and fractured panoramas of an unacceptable exterior world.

At war's end, when the adherents of Zurich Dada dispersed to other European cultural centers, Tzara and Francis Picabia were drawn to Paris. They were welcomed with open arms by the group Littérature, which included Louis Aragon, André Breton, and Philippe Soupault. To the consternation and amusement of the public, the Paris dadas took up the task of disintegrating the structures of language and staged a number of anti-art provocations. A rift among the artists gradually became apparent, and Tzara suffered a public falling out with his friends in July 1923, when they disrupted a performance of The Gas-Operated Heart at the Théâtre Michel. Dismissed as a nihilist and provocateur, Tzara spent the next few years largely isolated while his former comrades established surrealism. When Breton offered an apology in 1929, Tzara became associated with the surrealists once again and contributed substantially to defining the movement's activities and ideology. In a number of insightful essays and in the cycle of poems L'homme approximatif (1931; Approximate man), he investigated the transformative power of dream and reflected on the capacity of language to transmit reality and wonderment. In the 1930s Tzara strove to bring about a reconciliation of surrealism and Marxism and began to turn away from aesthetic, surrealist revolt to political commitment. He became a member of the French Communist Party in 1936 and served as delegate of the Second International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture to Spain during the Spanish Civil War, where he was at the front among Spanish intellectuals and befriended Pablo Picasso. Forced into hiding during the Nazi occupation of France, Tzara participated in the Resistance. His clandestinely published poems expressed a concern with the possibility of human efficacy in the world.

In a speech entitled "Le surréalisme et l'aprèsguerre," given in 1947 at the Sorbonne, Tzara expressed his final disenchantment with surrealism, pointing at its inability to connect dream to action and at its silence during the war. In his later works, such as Parler seul (1950; Speaking alone), Tzara pressed on along his prolonged poetic journey, finding a difficult but humanized language.

See alsoAragon, Louis; Breton, André; Dada; Surrealism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Tzara, Tristan. Approximate Man, and Other Writings. Translated by Mary Ann Caws. Detroit, Mich., 1973.

——. Œuvres complètes. Edited by Henri Béhar. 6 vols. Paris, 1975–1991.

——. Primele poeme/First Poems. Translated by Michael Impey and Brian Swann. New York, 1976.

——. Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries. Translated by Barbara Wright. New York, 1992.

Secondary Sources

Erloff, Michael. "'Dit le bon': Tristan Tzara in Zurich." In Dada Zurich: A Clown's Game from Nothing, editedby Brigitte Pichon and Karl Riha, 104–111. New York, 1996.

Impey, Michael H. "Before and after Tzara: Romanian Contributions to Dada." In The Eastern Dada Orbit, edited by Gerald Janecek and Toshiharu Omuka, 126–136. New York, 1998.

Peterson, Elmer. Tristan Tzara: Dada and Surrational Theorist. New Brunswick, N.J., 1971.

Cornelius Partsch