Tristan Tzara: Survival and “Speaking Alone”

“Speaking Alone” is a translation of the title poem from Tristan Tzara’s French poetry collection, Parler seul, written during the summer of 1945 and first published in a seminal artist book cocreated with Tzara’s friend and longtime collaborator, Spanish artist Joan Miró. Though Tzara is best known as the cofounder of the Dada movement and the author of its most energetic manifestos, he was a prolific poet, as well as an art and literary critic, and anti-fascist and human rights activist, until his death in 1963. 

Tzara wrote “Speaking Alone” weeks after Victory in Europe Day, while staying, with his teenage son, as the guest of psychiatrist Lucien Bonnafé at Saint-Alban, one of the few progressive mental asylums in France. Bonnafé, who had sheltered Paul Éluard for a time during the war (after his poetry was dropped from planes as part of an anti-Nazi campaign), offered Tzara a place to rest and regroup after his years spent displaced from his Paris home, hiding in the south of France, often separated from his son. 

At the time of Tzara’s stay, Bonnafé ran the hospital with Francesc Tosquelles, an innovative Catalan psychiatrist who advanced the idea that a hospital could function like a small society, with patients working cooperatively to produce food and art, publish a newspaper, and interact with the surrounding community. Both Bonnafé and Tosquelles had strong ties to avant-garde movements in France and, like Tzara, had been active in the Résistance. Tzara biographer Marius Hentea writes: “Bonnafé’s ideas squared with Tzara’s own intuitions about how society conditioned individuals into false binaries (sane/insane, normal/mad).”

Tzara was moved by his interactions with the natural environment in Saint-Alban and by his conversations with the residents, including many patients he befriended. “Speaking Alone” is a reckoning with the trauma of war. Although it carries some of the wild energies of Tzara’s younger work, it moves at a reflective pace, paying lucid attention to the reality of this highly charged time and place.

Speaking Together: The Artist Book

Before exploring Tzara’s solitary voice, which the title of this poem suggests is central, I’d like to consider the way he speaks, instead, “together” with his longtime friend and collaborator Joan Miró and with the people he met at Saint-Alban. Tzara collaborated with an astonishing number of artists, including Sonia Delaunay, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso. The great majority of his over 50 published books contain images; some books include a few illustrations, and, in others, the text is fully integrated into an artist book, perhaps the finest of which is the boxed edition of Parler seul, which contains 72 lithographs by Miró. 

Miró’s bright shapes, created in response to Tzara’s manuscript, evoke the poems’ landscape and animals—hedgehogs, fish, sheep, birds, and even a ladybug—drawn from the natural world in which the residents at Saint-Alban cultivated food, walked, and rested. At the time of publication, poet and critic Michel Leiris wrote,

Nothing is more haphazard, and, at the same time, more organized than this book, which is the birth of a book, or the gradual creation of an object for which printing, on the one hand, and vocabulary, on the other, seem to be the only animating principles. Without a doubt, these words that appear one upon the another, following no law but poetry, speak alone, and the materials Miró employs are also singular: letters or numerals, when they are not simple dots or short strokes, are seemingly arbitrary marks on the white of the page.

Parler seul, as Leiris suggests, is an ideal collaboration that unifies the work of both artists under one set of intentions. Tzara’s biographer Henri Béhar calls the volume “an editorial miracle” and praises the way it “projects the reader into the universe of humanity, certainly suffering, but not devoid of humor and joy.” 

The colorful book is playful, even whimsical at times, but, as critic Serge Fauchereau wrote of the collection, “tenderness and fire presided over the composition of these poems.” Tzara, always politically engaged, famously said, “Poetry is up to its neck in history,” though he rooted his expression of history in his own daily experience and environs—especially here, as he regained his footing in the early aftermath of the war.

Sense and Surrationality

Senseless, the first word in “Speaking Alone,” offers a key with which to enter the strange textual world Tzara presents. First and foremost, we find the senselessness of war. Tzara opens the poem with a cascade of images of suffering, beginning with the line “senseless here’s the man with the crystal contractions,” perhaps implying a patient having seizures or spasms, who is “nevertheless present at the passage of spring,” in this case the last spring of World War II. The next stanza describes a senseless world in which things are not as they should be: “the light is black” and water fails to quench. The patients and the displaced people at Saint-Alban have themselves been rendered or labeled senseless because of mental illness or the trauma they experienced in the war, a war that had also deeply affected Tzara. 

In 1940, Tzara escaped house arrest in occupied Paris and fled to the south of France, at times living under an assumed identity. He was targeted for being Jewish, foreign-born, and Communist, and he refused to publish poetry under a regime that required publications to be approved by Vichy censors. Poet Pierre Seghers, in his book on poets and poetry in the French Résistance, writes of Tzara,

During most of the war and the Occupation, nothing. Secluded in Aix-en-Provence, then in Lot, he kept silent. Enraged, organized, meticulous, passionate, Tzara does not want to publish anything. But he writes, for himself, to extricate the scorching shrapnel, the machine-gun fire of time that tears him apart, poems that he will take up again once the Germans have left.

Tzara would later recover his apartment in Paris, which had been appropriated by the occupiers, returning with his son to find the place damaged and many of his belongings stolen.

The word senseless offers another way into the poem if we consider Tzara’s complex relationship with sense or logic in poetry and his efforts to defy logic in the service of poetic ideals. One of Tzara’s most well-known Dada manifestos, written on the heels of World War I, thirty years before “Speaking Alone,” includes instructions on “How to Make a Cut-Up Poem” by selecting a news article, snipping apart the words, shaking them in a bag, and pulling the words out one by one to compose a poem that, presumably due to a combination of chosen subject matter and chance, “will resemble you.” This method of creating partial-sense, resonance, and even resemblance by bypassing sense or logic plays out in increasingly subtle ways in Tzara’s œuvre. 

For Tzara, crucially, a resistance to sense does not equate to a resistance to reality. In the 1930s, once Dadaism had been subsumed by surrealism, and Tzara had become a mature lyric poet, he championed, with Gaston Bachelard, Louis Aragon, and others, the idea of the surrational, an approach to poetry (and art and  philosophy) that, like surrealism, eschews traditional logic, but crucially differentiates itself from the surreal in transcending rationality rather than reality in the service of poetic truth. A poem might forgo the rational, but, instead of using divination, automatic writing, or other surrealist techniques, the poet engages closely with the real, with the present moment, with a sensory experience of the world and the moral and ethical realities of life. In a lecture he gave the year before the publication of “Speaking Alone,” Tzara asked, “Doesn’t all poetry have, at its base, as food, the concrete life of seen images, conceived by our senses in their raw materiality?”

One aspect of “the real,” the observed, that makes its way into the second stanza of this poem is the hunger of children in Saint-Alban and in Lozère. As Tzara cared for his own son, he interacted with other children living in the hospital. In the poem, children’s “words” are “wooden,” and their voices are “no longer recognizable” in their “gullets of sky.” The appearance of truth or “verisimilitude” reflects both the “tarnished gold” of “escapes,” which could also be translated as “exiles,” and the “frankness of their hungers.” During this time, millions were starving in mental hospitals across France due to a government policy of neglect, and although food was available at Saint-Alban thanks to the presiding doctors’ innovative model of care including collective organization and patient-run gardens, hunger was a reality in the local area and among many people across France.

Speaking Together: Translation

As the translator of this poem, a writer who rewrote or “re-spoke” this poem both alone in English and “with Tzara,” in chorus with his French version, I focused on two key challenges of the work: first, in terms of word choice and syntax, to leave the poem’s associative structure open to many readings and interpretations—in other words, to resist the urge to “make sense” of the poem in the translation—and second, to do justice to the sound play that marks Tzara’s work in French. The third stanza, in my translation, opens with the following lines:

dogs with your tongues out

tugging at the rope until you lose 

that rainy look in your hempen eyes

lost lost in a fur pelt

dogs who cheat the night

in the well of justice 

true forged water

and lose the sparkling stones

In the absence of capitalization and punctuation, the line breaks, which closely align with the French, help parse the syntax, fraught as it is with menace and mystery, in this section. Are the dogs here aggressors, who “cheat the night / in the “well of justice,” or are their “tongues out” because they are tired, they are beginning to be defeated, and they must “cheat the night” or death, losing what is precious to them in the process? I wanted to allow these questions to surface in English, as they had in the French version, so I stayed close to the original lineation to allow the lines to couple and decouple across multiple readings, offering different perspectives, as they have for me. 

Tzara approaches the end of this stanza with an almost hallucinatory chain of word association, here in English: “horrors distresses faces / passed passed over passed away,” which evokes the surfacing, in waves, of traumatic memories. That second line, “passés repassés trépassés” in French, could have been written, in a more literal translation, “past passed again [or even ‘ironed’] dead,” but patterning the phonemes (the repeated “passed” which sounds like “past,” and ending on the “long a” sound, as it does in French) and using repetition and rhythm that echoes the original felt more resonant.

Speaking from the Silence of Solitude

In the lines that follow, we find the poem’s only instance of a first-person pronoun: “nothing but sludge where we dock,” in a dizzying smoky scene of arrival on “islands of grassy vertigo.” This section culminates in the description of a windy precipice where there’s a “ditch up front,” the void is “everywhere,” and “from each side silence.” Here, the poem reaches both a place and an emotional climax of alienation and anxiety, devoid of human warmth, that crucially ends on the word “silence,” the word that provides the volta or hinge to the surprisingly redemptive resolution of the poem. 

The next and penultimate stanza opens with this swerve:

you entered the dwelling place of dead tenderness alive

and in each step you recognized

yourself as an enticing answer

Perhaps the addressee, the “you” of the poem who, in a sense, becomes the subject, is one of the many included in the group “we” that docked near the islands earlier in the poem. This person addressed as “you” eventually “entered the dwelling place of dead tenderness alive,” as if, in the imagined world of the poem, there’s a cave where a love, a feeling that’s been snuffed out by violence somehow still “dwells,” and there, the person addressed by the poem’s speaker “recognize[s]” themself as “an enticing answer” to the problem of survival. In a bewildering landscape, “you’ve” found shelter, turned inward, and found a small ember of feeling, something sustaining, even after enduring the unimaginable. It’s not hard to imagine that Tzara, living in Saint-Alban and involved in ongoing conversations with patients and with presiding doctors Lucien Bonnafé and Francesc Tosquelles, would invent or evoke this poignant poetic model for psychological healing.

Just as the Dadaist cut-up poem would “resemble” its creator, the central figure of “Speaking Alone,” the “you,” is “lucid in these hours that look like [them].” A transformation has occurred, and the figure has found their own “footsteps,” and an inner sense, even though progress comes in the form of “a little loss a little gain” and even though “the world” is still reduced to “ash.” Amid the senseless suffering, “you” find at least an echo of something recognizable within.

Because “Speaking Alone” is the final and title poem in the collection, the ending carries the weight of many preceding pages. The final stanza begins “confined in the horizon of voices” and returns to the “you,” who, in one possible reading, is plagued by rats they can’t fend off because of their “broken voice.” However, in the cathartic closing lines,

with an invisible noise on the mouth and fingers

you came out alive

The silence is broken by a noise that’s uncannily “invisible.” The “you” of the poem emerges with a synesthesia-tinged sound that falls short of speech. The addressee has not yet been able to “speak alone,” though they have gotten “out alive,” and they may now be on the precipice of speech. In the poem’s ending, Tzara may be addressing himself, his son, his interlocutors at Saint-Alban, or even, more broadly, any survivors of war who must grapple with “justice at the bottom of the well,” with “dead tenderness,” and yet, who find themselves alive.  

Intriguingly for a poem titled “Speaking Alone,” there’s no appearance of the first-person singular pronoun, no “I.” Tzara’s resistance to gathering himself into the “je” or “I” of the speaker, his decision to instead haunt the poem as a dematerialized guiding presence, hints that he himself may still be on that precipice of speech, still more fluent in silence, still reckoning with his years of forced invisibility and self-imposed literary hiatus.

In his Dada days, Tzara often delivered his belligerent provocations in the first person, both singular and plural, sometimes speaking for the group. Later, after his estrangement from the surrealists, his avant-garde hijinks were replaced with political engagement that included his anti-fascist and Communist organizing and later his involvement in decolonial and human rights initiatives, both of which required a greater scrutiny of who speaks for and with whom. As contemporary poets consider how to respond to social crises with poetry that engages with the political while rising above the level of polemic or propaganda, we find in Tzara a poetic voice who grappled with that question for decades, at times to dazzling effect. Tzara defied pressure to align his aesthetic, and in particular his poetry, with a prescribed ideology, asserting in a 1947 lecture at the Sorbonne that

poetry is action. It does not allow itself to be locked into closed systems. If poetry does not serve humanity, if it does not help us to free ourselves from internal constraints, moral constraints, and external constraints, social constraints, it is no more than an object of enjoyment, simple amusement.

By exploring “Speaking Alone,” and attending to the words and the relationships between the images, we can hear Tzara’s voice, in that same lecture, insisting that “poetry does not have to express a reality. It is itself a reality. It expresses itself. But to be valid, it must be situated in a larger reality, that of the world of the living.” In this missive from the broken, bewildering early days of France’s liberation from fascist force, Tzara makes a poetic “noise” with his “mouth and fingers,” writing toward a newly forming reality and toward a vision of broader forms of human liberation.