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Tristan Tzara


Tristan Tzara

“You'll never know why you exist, but you'll always allow yourselves to be easily persuaded to take life seriously.”

One of the main forces behind the Dada movement, Tristan Tzara, a Romanian born French poet and essayist, caused a sensation in the early twentieth century with his provocations, disruptions and ideas. Originally named Samuel Rosenstock, Tzara joined with other Dada originators such as Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Marcel Janco, Arthur Segal, Jean Arp, Sophie Taeuber, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Hans Richter in Zurich to form a loose Dada collective during the World War I years.

Putting on performances at the Cabaret Voltaire – which included reciting and performing experimental poetry, dance, prose, music, sounds, visual art and other creative expressions – the group quickly gained notoriety. However, like everything, it didn’t last and the group eventually dispersed, with Tzara taking Dada to Paris in 1919 to continue his Dadaist work with writers such as Andre Breton, Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault.

Tzara wrote many of the early Dada texts, including, The First Heavenly Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine (1916), Twenty-Five Poems (1918), and Seven Dada Manifestos (1924). He also started and maintained the short-lived journal DADA.

We began with the possibility of NOT writing: hence our timely arrival. Having chosen between apples & oranges, and opting for beef, we now sit at the feast of social construction, napkins on our heads. We give grace to our silent potentials, then eat them raw with an air of arrogant indifference.
(From the start of Tristan Tzara's Eighth Symphony
or How Dada came to me in the form of this self-contained manifesto)

Tzara also wrote the memorable piece, To Make a Dadaist Poem, instructing the reader to take a pair of scissors to a newspaper and then to cut an article of choice up into its individual words to then put all the words into a bag which would then be shaken up. Once this was done, he instructed the reader to dip their hand into the bag and one by one pull out the order of words for a new and original poem.

After the Dada movement slowed Tzara began to associate more with the Surrealist movement before joining the Communist Party in 1936 and the French Resistance movement during World War II. During and after this time his poems and prose began to drift further away from Dada-like provocations and closer to lyrical poetry. 

Tzara died in 1963 at the age of 67 in Paris, having made a valuable contribution to life and art. Along with his creative work he will always be synonymous with the Dada movement.

“I speak only of myself since I do not wish to convince, I have no right to drag others into my river, I oblige no one to follow me and everybody practices his art in his own way."


attribution: sinaloaarchivohistorico

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