Tristan Tzara Between Periphery and Centre

Abstract

Besides a short view over the Romanian vanguard, the present contribution deals with the life-time voyage of Tristan Tzara, born Samuel Rosenstock, from his birth-place Moineşti in the North-east of the country via Bucharest to Zurich, with a survey of his years in Paris. The question as to whether his early Romanian poems already indicate elements of later Dadaistic practice will be answered by denominating as central themes what Dadaism transposes into forms: from the willingness to destroy the reader’s illusions to the technicalities of pre-cinematograhic montage. We choose as an example the first simultaneous poem of Zurich in three languages, “L’amiral cherche une maison à louer” (1916), by Tristan Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck and Marcel Janko (Iancu), which could be compared last but not least to Saussure’s Course of general linguistics, published in Switzerland at the same time. In his later Paris years (1934), Tzara would refuse the title proposed by Saşa Pană for an edition of his early texts of Bucharest Poems before Dada, arguing that there was a case of a “jerky continuity” and a “mutual penetration”.