TaTa Dada: The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara
2015; Oxford University Press; Volume: 69; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/fs/knv163
ISSN1468-2931
Autores Tópico(s)Medieval European Literature and History
ResumoThis is the second biography of Tzara to be published. It is very different in style from the first, François Buot's Tristan Tzara: l'homme qui inventa la révolution Dada (Paris: Grasset, 2002): Marius Hentea's book is shorter, simpler, more straightforwardly chronological, more evocatively illustrated, and more readable for the non-specialist. Buot gives space to the evocation of the various social and artistic milieux surrounding Tzara; in Hentea's more direct narrative, the figure of Tzara himself is more consistently centre stage. Hentea devotes three chapters to Tzara's childhood and adolescence; six to the Dada years, from 1915 to 1923; and four to the forty years of Tzara's life after Dada. Tzara's writings are not infrequently cited as illustrations of the points being made about his life. Given the elusive style of his poetry, and the difficulties of reading it in English translation (the original language is rarely cited), readers may find these illustrations problematic. But what comes out very clearly, from beginning to end, through the very problematic nature of those illustrations, is the constancy of Tzara's obstinate and durable devotion to art. His turbulent times, one discovers, shaped his political and personal actions, but had relatively limited purchase on his aesthetic principles. His constant promotion of ‘primitive’ art; his defence of poetry as an activity that must reject all attempts at objective definition, if necessary by strategic incoherence and paradox; his absorption in the physical substance of words as a plastic material for artistic creation (materialized, towards the end of his life, in his work on anagrams in Villon, so curiously reminiscent of Saussure's last obsession); his practice of publishing his poetry in books with small print runs, collaborating with visual artists from Arp to Picasso; the curious contrast between his passionate advocacy of art and an apparently limited interest in popularizing his own — all these add up to a strikingly coherent artistic personality. The clearest rupture in his career seems to come in 1923, when Breton and Éluard violently disrupted the Soirée du Cœur à barbe in Paris. Never again did Tzara attempt to stage such an event. Dada as a performing enterprise was over for him, but the spirit of Dada lived on in his publications. There are some errors of fact in Hentea's book: for example, Tzara is buried in Montparnasse not Père-Lachaise, and Hentea is fooled, like many before him, into thinking the ninth Dada soirée actually took place, when in fact it was a hoax perpetrated on journalists by Dadaists. Nonetheless, the copious documentation of this biography, with its photographs and endnotes, forms a fascinating and instructive contrast with the tone of the poetry cited, so thoroughly divorced from what we like to think of as reality, so confident that, in fact, poetry itself is reality, as Hentea indeed remarks (p. 272). This book provides a foil to that poetic reality, which genuinely does help in reading it; and anything that helps anyone to read Tzara's poetry is to be welcomed.
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