TaTa Dada: The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara
Author(s): Marius Hentea
Tristan Tzara, one of the most important figures in the twentieth century's most famous avant-garde movements, was born Samuel Rosenstock (or Samueli Rosenstok) in a provincial Romanian town, on April 16 (or 17, or 14, or 28) in 1896. Tzara became Tzara twenty years later at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, when he and others (including Marcel Janco, Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Hans Arp) invented Dada with a series of chaotic performances including multilingual (and nonlingual) shouting, music, drumming, and calisthenics. Within a few years, Dada (largely driven by Tzara) became an international artistic movement, a rallying point for young artists in Paris, New York, Barcelona, Berlin, and Buenos Aires. With TaTa Dada, Marius Hentea offers the first English-language biography of this influential artist. As the leader of Dada, Tzara created "the moment art changed forever." But, Hentea shows, Tzara and Dada were not coterminous.
Tzara went on to publish more than fifty books; he wrote one of the great poems of surrealism; he became a recognized expert on primitive art; he was an active antifascist, a communist, and (after the Soviet repression of the Hungarian Revolution) a former communist. Hentea offers a detailed exploration of Tzara's early life in Romania, neglected by other scholars; a scrupulous assessment of the Dada years; and an original examination of Tzara's life and works after Dada. The one thing that remained constant through all of Tzara's artistic and political metamorphoses, Hentea tells us, was a desire to unlock the secrets and mysteries of language.
General Information
- :
- : MIT Press Ltd
- : MIT Press
- : 02 October 2014
- : United States
- : 05 September 2014
- : books
Other Specifications
- : Marius Hentea
- : Paperback
- : 759.4
- : 368
- : 60 b&w illus.
More About The Product
Tristan Tzara, the daddy of Dada, the French communist, and the involuntary Kabbalist, emerge reconciled in this well-researched and engaging biography. An adult scholar has written with sympathetic integrity about the enfant terrible of the 20th century, and has revealed the golden thread linking the many faces of Tzara: poetry. Marius Hentea's attention to poetry compellingly places Tzara in the company of the greatest French poets. -- Andrei Codrescu, author of The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess In the past decades, there have been dozens of books on Dada, but its founder, Tristan Tzara (born Samueli Rosenstock in the Romanian town of Moinesti) remains elusive. In this, the first Tzara biography in English, Hentea brilliantly recaptures Tzara's various incarnations -- from Jewish shtetl boy to sophisticated Gymnasium student, to Dada provocateur and nihilist, to reluctant Surrealist, Stalinist, and finally, in the post-World War II years, to ardent student of medieval poetry. The picture of virulent anti-Semitism in turn-of-the-century Romania is especially striking and provides a new perspective on the deeper motives that brought Dada into being. Anyone interested in the avant-garde will want to read this superb book! -- Marjorie Perloff, Professor Emerita of Humanities, Stanford University; author of The Futurist Moment and Unoriginal Genius Marius Hentea has provided us with a richly researched and fluently written biography of Tristan Tzara, which closely follows this complex poet and avant-garde activist through a myriad of displacements and changes of direction. With an impressive command of published and archival sources in both French and Romanian, Hentea not only enriches our knowledge of the most familiar period of Tzara's career, the years of Zurich and Paris Dada, he also motivates new interest in several less-known episodes of his life: Samuel Rosenstock-Tristan Tzara's origins in pre-World War I Romania, his engagements during the Spanish Civil War, his activity in hiding as a foreign-born Jew in France during World War II, his fraught relations with the Communist Party over the 1956 Hungarian uprising, his role in the scholarly canonization of Dadaism, his obsessive research into poetic anagrams late in his life, and much more. TaTa Dada marks a major achievement in modernist and avant-garde studies. -- Tyrus Miller, Professor of Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz
Marius Hentea, a Romanian-born literary scholar, teaches in the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University. He is the author of Henry Green at the Limits of Modernism.
