Tristan Tzara

April 16, 1896, Moinesti – December 25, 1963, Paris

Born Samuel Rosenstock, this Romanian poet took for his nom de guerre a name as staccato and aggressive as the nonsensical Dada – the battle-cry of the cultural rebellion he helped launch in 1916 in the multilingual setting of Zurich. Tzara’s iconoclastic Manifeste Dada 1918 – written in French, as were all subsequent works – is a remarkable instance of utter nihilism propelled by a flood of positive verbal energy. In 1920 he moved to Paris to direct another Dada campaign until Breton turned the group’s attention towards Surrealism.

Tzara settled permanently in France and later contributed to Surrealism with a book on dreams called Grains et issues (1935); in the post-war period he was to become a Communist and a stern critic of Surrealist idealism. While he refused to acknowledge any discontinuity in his poetic output, one may discern a shift from the asymmetrical verbal montages of the Dada period, which exploit incongruous newspaper headlines and printer’s errors, to the smoother, even rhapsodic intonations of L’Homme approximatif (1931), where visionary prospects are imparted through glittering metaphors. A collector of African sculpture, Tzara also wrote knowledgeably on the visual arts. His Œuvres complètes (1975-1991) comprise six volumes.

More on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_Tzara

În limba română: http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_Tzara

Tristan Tzara about Dada from documentary Dada – Europe after the rain

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