Tristan Tzara

Biography

In October 1912 a sixteen-year-old schoolboy from Bucharest, together with Ion Vinea and Marcel Janco, was putting out the Symbolist magazine “Simbolul”. He signed himself with the pen name Samyro then, a partial anagram of his real name, Samy Rosenstock. A few issues appeared, and by December of that year the magazine had stopped.

Rosenstock was born in Moinești, in Western Moldavia, into a Jewish family of timber merchants. The sources disagree on the date: 16 April 1896 or 4 April; the first is the more usual. At eleven he moved to Bucharest, where he attended a boarding school and then a lycée. Romanian laws of the time restricted the rights of Jews, and he became a full citizen of the country only after 1918. In 1914 he enrolled in mathematics and philosophy at the University of Bucharest but did not finish the course. In the autumn of 1915 Vinea printed two of his poems in the magazine “Chemarea”, the first signed “Tristan Tzara”. Where the name came from is still disputed: Vinea claimed the choice for himself, while another version holds that it is a Romanian pun, “trist în țară”, “sad in the country”. He adopted the name legally in 1925.

In the autumn of 1915 Tzara left with Janco for neutral Switzerland, for Zürich. After that he almost stopped writing in Romanian and wrote mainly in French. In February 1916 Hugo Ball rented premises for the Cabaret Voltaire, and among those who agreed to perform were Tzara and Janco. Tzara recited Romanian poetry and later performed “simultaneist” verse, which he regarded as the first in Zürich. Who invented the word “Dada”, and where, the participants argued about all their lives. Ball claimed he picked it at random from a dictionary, while Janco credited Tzara. In June 1916 he began to publish the magazine “Dada”.

For the rest of the war he was the movement’s chief organizer. He wrote to Paris, Berlin and Italy, drew in André Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard and Philippe Soupault, and drew up a list of “Dada presidents” from different countries. His Zürich performances often ended in scandals. Ball left the group, citing differences with Tzara. In 1918 his “Vingt-cinq poèmes” (“Twenty-five Poems”) appeared, and in the same year Francis Picabia visited Zürich.

At the end of 1919 Tzara moved to Paris and joined the editorial board of the magazine “Littérature”, run by Breton, Soupault and Aragon. The story of his welcome on Boulevard Raspail under an arch of pamphlets was, according to Hans Richter, invented by the Dadaists themselves: in fact he walked from the Gare de l’Est to Picabia’s house. He published “Bulletin Dada” and “Dadaphone”, took part in a show at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre in March 1920, and worked with Robert and Sonia Delaunay on “poem-dresses”. By 1921 his relations with Breton and Picabia had broken down, and in July 1923, at the “Evening of the Bearded Heart”, Breton disrupted the staging of “The Gas Heart”. After that the Dada evenings ceased. In 1924 the “Seven Dada Manifestos” and the play “Handkerchief of Clouds” appeared.

He reconciled with Breton in 1929 and briefly took part in Surrealist meetings. The collections “L’Arbre des voyageurs” (“The Travelers’ Tree”, 1930), “The Approximate Man” (1931), “Où boivent les loups” (“Where Wolves Drink”, 1932) and “L’Antitête” (“The Antihead”, 1933) followed. In 1930 he directed a film based on his own play “Le Cœur à barbe”, in which Breton and other Surrealists appeared. In 1925, in Stockholm, he married the Swedish artist Greta Knutson, and in 1927 their son Christophe was born. To Tzara’s commission the Austrian architect Adolf Loos built him a house in Montmartre, which was decorated with examples of African art.

In 1936 he joined the French Communist Party. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War he went to the Republicans and visited besieged Madrid with Ilya Ehrenburg. The poems of this period went into the collection “Midis gagnés” (“Conquered Southern Regions”, 1939). During the occupation of France he hid in the south, and at the end of 1940 he was in Marseille among the refugees helped by the American Varian Fry. Later he joined the Maquis, worked at a clandestine radio station in Toulouse and wrote for Resistance publications. In 1942 he was stripped of his Romanian citizenship, and after the war, in 1945, he became a French citizen. In the same year he represented the Sud-Ouest region in the National Assembly.

After the war came “Le Signe de vie” (“Sign of Life”, 1946), “Parler seul” (“Speaking Alone”, 1950) and “La Face intérieure” (“The Inner Face”, 1953). In 1949–1950 he chaired the committee for the release of the Turkish poet Nazım Hikmet, who was freed in July 1950. Tzara translated poems by Hikmet and by the Hungarian poet Attila József, and when he read the manuscript of “Waiting for Godot” he helped bring it to the stage by approaching the director Roger Blin.

In October 1956 he went to Hungary, met writers there and called the movement in that country “revolutionary”. The party spoke out against his statement, and in the same year he left the French Communist Party. In 1960, with other intellectuals, he signed a letter against French policy in Algeria, after which the Minister of Culture announced that he would not subsidize films involving the signatories. In his remaining years he studied the work of François Villon and collected African art. In 1961 he was awarded the Taormina Prize.

Tzara died in Paris on 24 December 1963 and was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery.