On the Outskirts of Modernity: Tristan Tzara and Dada in Romania

Abstract

When it came to origins, Tristan Tzara (1896–1963) seemed to dismiss the subject outright. If he did not emerge from the womb with monocle and Underwood at the ready, Tzara nonetheless cultivated such a mysterious aura about his background that his son imagined him to be ‘an extreme case of self-making’, like ‘a comet having popped up from nowhere’.2 The first book on Tzara, written by Rene Lacote for the Poetes d’aujourd’hui series, begins in Zurich during 1916, as if the first twenty years of Tzara’s life never transpired.3 A half-century later, Francois Buot opens his biography of Tzara by professing difficulty in finding any trace of its young subject.4 A new interest in the Romanian context of Dada has been sparked by Tom Sandqvist’s Dada East (2006), but more needs to be done.5 When Tzara’s Romanian-language poems were collected in the early 1930s, he objected to the title Poemes avant Dada because it gave the impression of ‘rupture’ whereas, in his eyes, ‘there had been continuity [. . . ] a latent necessity’.6 That the poems he declaimed on the inaugural night of the Cabaret Voltaire were in Romanian is frequently forgotten, while ‘Il fait soir’ in Cabaret Voltaire contains the note: ‘[t]ranslated from Romanian 1913’.7 Tzara’s early poetry was written, and his first experiences as an impresario for modern art took place, in his country of birth. In 1912, while still in high school,