TRISTAN TZARAcles recede. Its movement takes place within its own mystery, and gives move-
ment elsewhere, in regions we have not yet attained, in the wake of the planets,
beyond themselves, to the shattering sovereign masses of an apple, a chair, a
curtain of trees or a group of card-players, suddenly frozen in their own move-
ment by the surge of the invisible squall which carries them on.
Confident now, this force can finally allow itself the most exquisite form of
play: on the transparent leaf of the stretched surface, a few light touches, a
handful of hints, sometimes su≈ce to build a mountain.
Then, in the spaces between the touches of colour, there are no more than face-
less gaps, no more than the void. And yet, manifestly, the mountain still stands.
As though (I tremble to say it), as though gradually reality were mingling with
a kind of omnipotent absence...
And suddenly our heart misses its beat: the Enchanter has won his trick:
earth, sea and sky, the world has been thrown o√ its axis in the mind.
—david kelley
Tristan Tzara (Sami Rosenstock) 1896–1963
romania
T
he founder of the Dada movement, first in Zurich (1916), then in Paris
(1919–1920), Tzara became known as ‘‘Papa-Dada.’’ Dadaism, which
predated Surrealism, mounted a nihilistic attack on the values of bour-geois society; Tzara issued the group’s first manifesto in 1918. In 1919, he moved to
Paris, where Breton had been eagerly expecting him. Aragon and Breton partici-
pated in the revolutionary activities of the Dadaists until founding the Surrealist
movement. For a time, however, the writers would continue to be linked by their
sympathy for communism. Although Tzara’s poetic masterpiece, the epic
L’Homme approximatif—as important for French poetry as T. S. Eliot’s Waste
Land was for Anglophone poetry—has strongly Surrealist overtones, his later
poems, after 1939 especially, are of a clarity and simplicity appropriate to his
political adhesion. Like the poems of Aragon and Éluard after their departure