Tristan Tzara

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

DADA DOES NOT MEAN ANYTHING, Tristan Tzara wrote in bold capitals partway through his 1918 Dada Manifesto, and the line still reads like a dare. Tzara was twenty-two, a Romanian-born poet performing at Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire, and the manifesto he wrote there is less an argument than a demolition, aimed at logic, at art criticism, at the entire idea that a poem owes anyone sense. He meant it literally. His sound poems strung syllables together for their noise, not their meaning, a discipline as deliberate in its way as a sonnet's rhyme scheme, just aimed at the opposite target. The First World War is the reason the joke is not a joke. Tzara and Dada's other founders watched a rational, educated Europe organize itself to kill millions of its own young men with an efficiency no earlier war had managed, and concluded that reason itself, the thing modern culture was proudest of, deserved no more trust than nonsense did. Refusing to make sense was not a failure of seriousness. It was Tzara's most serious position. He carried it to Paris in late 1919, where it fed into Surrealism under Andre Breton, a movement Tzara rejoined only after the two men's early break healed in 1929. By December 1944 he was writing for a Sartre-edited newspaper from inside the French Resistance, the nonsense poet turned committed partisan, proof that refusing meaning was never the same thing as refusing to choose a side.