Before They Were Famous: Tristan Tzara, Nationhood, and Poetry

Stephen Forcer University of Birmingham

Even in synopsis, it is clear that the life of Tristan Tzara offers particularly rich opportunities for the investigation of identity, cultural hybridity, nationhood, and an array of further issues to do with Tzara as a Romanian national who spent the vast bulk of his career writing in French. Born to Jewish parents on 16 April 1896 in the then-rural town of MoineúWL %DFăX WKHPDQQRZUHPHPEHUHGE\FXOWXUDOhis- tory as the monocle-wearing Father of Dada was known until late adolescence by his original name of Samuel Rosenstock: Tristan Tzara was a pseudonym not adopted until October 1915. It officially became his name in 1925 (Béhar 12).1 Tzara was educated in French in Bucharest (he also studied English and German, and scored well in all languages [Béhar 13]), had a voracious appetite for reading²with a particular taste for French Symbolist poetry²and indeed managed to publish a few Romanian poems in a magazine founded by his close IULHQG ,RQ 9LQHD %pKDU   ,Q  7]DUD¶V SDUHQWV VHQW KLP WR college in German-speaking Switzerland, where he met and became friends with an eclectic group of individuals²themselves from diverse national and ethnic backgrounds²who formed the nexus of Dada: in 1916 Jean (Hans) Arp, Emmy Hennings, Hugo Ball +HQQLQJV¶VKXVEDQG DQG5LFKDUG+XHOVHnbeck joined with Tzara at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, where their raucous performances in- cluded verbal abuse directed at the audience in various European languages (plus some that were invented  ³VLPXOWDQHRXV SRHWU\´ (multi-lingual verse delivered at the same time by more than one performer [OC 1: 491±500]), and kazoos and other percussive instru- ments. Drawn by the pull of André Breton and the coalescence of Sur- realism, Tzara moved to Paris in 1920. In fact, he lived in France for the rest of his life, including during the Second World War. After the

1 %pKDU¶VHGLWion appears as part of a series of monographs, Les Roumains de Paris, published by Oxus. 72 Stephen Forcer war, Tzara returned to Paris and operated from an apartment that housed work by an international collection of artists (Picasso, Arp, de Chirico, Giacometti, and Miró) as well as unique collections of Afri- can masks and artifacts (Béhar 5). His Paris apartment was situated in the rue de Lille, in one of the beaux quartiers of the French capital: Romanian-born Tzara died there in 1963, just a few hundred meters IURPWKH0XVpHG¶2UVD\WKH3RQW5R\DO, and a host of other sites that FRQVWLWXWH 3DULV DV D SRZHUIXOO\ P\WKLFDO FXOWXUDO ³SOD\JURXQG´ (Hayward 26) at the epicenter of French culture and history. From this overview, let us draw out the main issues addressed in this chapter in respect of Tzara as one of the most well-known Fran- cophone Romanians in twentieth-century European culture. Firstly, and in contrast to the reliance on authorial and historical essences that WHQGVWRFKDUDFWHUL]HZULWLQJDERXW7]DUD¶VSRetry, I want here to test his Francophonia in relation to the content and textuality of his liter- ary work, and to look at the ways in which his diverse relationships to nation, language, identity, and selfhood may or may not play out at the level of the poems themselves. I will focus on the French transla- WLRQVRI7]DUD¶VYHU\ILUVWSXEOLVKHGSRHPVZKLFKUHSUHVHQWWKHILUVW and last body of work that he published in Romanian. By reading these poems closely and in terms that they themselves set out in situ, I hope to establish a productive tension between, on the one hand, the WH[WXDOPHGLDWLRQRIVHOIDQGQDWLRQKRRGLQ7]DUD¶VYHUVHDQGRQWKH other, the more low-resolution personal and historical issues for which he is more commonly remembered, such as his departure from Roma- QLDWKH'DGDLVWV¶UHMHction of national identity, his support of the Re- publicans during the Spanish Civil War, and his French naturalization. One of my more general aims in this chapter is to offer some VHQVHRIWKHVKHHUGLYHUVLW\DQGTXDQWLW\RI7]DUD¶VOLWHUDU\RXWSut. For this is a writer whose six-volume complete works contain over thirty separate collections of poetry, and who continued to write in verse, prose, and prose poétique for nearly forty years after the totemic Sept manifestes Dada [Seven Dada Manifestos] (OC 1: 355±90). As such, 7]DUD¶VSXEOLVKHGRXWSXWUHSUHVHQWVDQH[WUHPHO\GHQVHLIXQH[SORLWHG case study for those interested in Romanian nationals writing in French. To conclude, I will return to the biographical sketch with which this chapter began. For, in some ways bizarrely, it is only re- FHQWO\WKDWVRPHRIWKHPRVWEDVLFIDFWVDERXW7]DUD¶VEDFNJURXQGDQG career have become available in published biographies or monographs