In the entry "The Vastest Human Song", I reproduced the first pages of this issue of the journal Europe devoted to Tristan Tzara. This is why I limit myself here to providing the article analyzing more particularly his collection The Approximate Man.

"One writes to seek men": Tzara and The Approximate Man From the spring of 1925 began to appear, in French and sometimes in English, in various avant-garde journals, several songs of a long poem by Tristan Tzara entitled The Approximate Man. Until December 1929, when the journal The Surrealist Revolution gives a fragment, which will become the last song in the definitive edition of the eponymous collection. The choice could not be more judicious, at a time when the movement's only journal was questioning its public: "What kind of hope do you put in love?" As an argument, came the Second Manifesto of Surrealism, published in full before it came out in volume, slightly augmented. It is obviously to this writing, of first draft one might say, that one must refer to read in its entirety the appeal he launches to Tzara, after having engaged in a general examination of the poetic situation since the first manifesto: That said, we are on the other hand seized with the desire to render to a man from whom we have been separated for long years this justice that the expression of his thought still interests us, that judging by what we can still read of him, his concerns have not become foreign to us and that, under these conditions, there may be reason to think that our misunderstanding with him was not founded on anything so serious as we may have believed. No doubt it is possible that Tzara who, at the beginning of 1922, at the time of the liquidation of "Dada" as a movement, was no longer in agreement with us on the practical means of pursuing the common activity, was the victim of excessive prejudices that we had, for this reason, against him - he also had excessive ones against us - and that, during the too famous performance of The Bearded Heart, to make our rupture take the turn we know, it was enough on his part of an unfortunate gesture on the meaning of which he declares - I have known it for a short time - that we were mistaken. It is very willingly, for my part, that I accept to stick to this version and I see from then on no reason not to insist, with all those who were involved, that these incidents fall into oblivion. Since they took place, I consider that Tzara's intellectual attitude having not ceased to be clear, it would be showing narrow-mindedness not to publicly give him credit for it. As far as we are concerned, my friends and I, we would like to show by this rapprochement that what guides, in all circumstances, our conduct, is nothing less than the sectarian desire to prevail at all costs a point of view that we do not even ask Tzara to share integrally, but rather the concern to recognize value - what is value for us - where it is. We believe in the effectiveness of Tzara's poetry and it is as much to say that we consider it, outside of surrealism, as the only one truly situated. When I speak of its effectiveness, I mean to signify that it is operative in the vastest domain and that it is a marked step today in the direction of human deliverance. When I say that it is situated one understands that I oppose it to all those that could be as well of yesterday and the day before yesterday: in the first rank of things that Lautréamont has not made completely impossible, there is Tzara's poetry. "Of Our Birds" having barely appeared, it is fortunately not the silence of the press that will stop its misdeeds so soon. Without therefore needing to ask Tzara to pull himself together, we would simply like to engage him to make his activity more manifest than it could be these last years. Knowing him desirous himself to unite, as in the past, his efforts with ours, let us remind him that he wrote, by his own admission, "to seek men and nothing more". In this regard, let him remember, we were like him. Let us not let it be believed that we thus found ourselves, then lost ourselves. I quote at length, integrally. So many others have referred to this Second Manifesto as a simple book of accounts, of settling accounts, I mean, that I must well make heard in its entirety André Breton's reasoning when he accepts to return to his previous attitude. He was not a man to repent, and it must be believed that he had excellent reasons to come to this, without knowing if his appeal would be heard. He had followed attentively Tzara's publications since the moment when he had, in a way, excluded him from the group, and he recognized in his work the qualities that he expected from all works published under the sign of surrealism. It must be believed that he was so far from the mark that he accepted to return to his personal intervention during the evening of The Bearded Heart in July 1923, on the insults both verbal and autograph uttered against him. The alleged excuse is not without salt: he would have been mistaken about the meaning of Tzara's gesture before the police, at the entrance of the Michel Theater. He had believed that the latter was pointing his finger at him and his surrealist friends, in order to have them questioned, whereas, smaller than the toughs who surrounded him, Tzara was only seeking to get some air. Consequently, he offers him the peace of the brave, without asking him to account for his opinions of the moment. Indeed, while surrealism was evolving towards engagement with the Communist Party, Tzara, who, since the beginnings of Dada, distrusted all political enlistment, continued to preach the total independence of the poet. This is why Breton does not hesitate to say that Tzara's poetry is the only one that is situated. The term is to be taken in the sense that Max Jacob confers on it in the preface to The Dice Cup: "Everything that exists is situated" (1916). A situated poetry is a poetry of its time, which expresses the ideas and feelings of men. In summary, Tzara was not wrong to pursue his solitary path, but, in view of his poetic production, he should rejoin the surrealist movement. No reproach will be made to him, and even he will not be asked to espouse the communist theses of his new-old friends. The proof is provided by the publication of the last song of The Approximate Man immediately following the Manifesto. In the journal, the reader could not know that he was reading a part of song XIX and last of a long epic poem, which was not to appear integrally in volume until two years later, under the same title.

From this single fragment, we can determine what could have seduced the surrealists to the point of fraternizing with their dissident author. First and foremost, there is this fact, surprising for some, that Dada did not reduce poetic activity to nothing. On the contrary, one might say, it emerged all new and as if regenerated by the treatment it had made it undergo. Tzara's poetry concedes nothing to the reader. The author accepts no compromise, no return to formal or narrative poetry. Similarly, he accepts none of the recipes of surrealist automatism (I say well recipes, and not aspirations). So that a new tone emanates from this individual song, which proclaims the difficulties of man to live in the world, within a fundamentally hostile nature. How not to feel involved by this repetend, in the Baudelairean sense of the term, this kind of refrain of three or four verses returning several times with an internal variation: and rocky in my schist clothes I have vowed my waiting to the torment of the oxidized desert and to the robust advent of fire

The rest of the song, not published in The Surrealist Revolution, shows well that, from the origin, it was conceived to serve as a conclusion to this lyrical epic by recapitulating all human approximations, anxieties and vertigos to which man finds himself confronted, to the measure of his trials. The effectiveness of this poetry is not measured in terms of practice but of spiritual action, of adherence of the contemporary reader, I mean of the time of writing as of the present time. The Approximate Man. This title seemed to me to conform to the definition of Littré, more exactly of the Petit Littré that Tzara practiced assiduously: "APPROXIMATIVE: Which is made by approximation. Approximate estimation. Approximate calculation." This is to say that the adjective designates successive approaches, while marking its proximity to mathematical vocabulary. Apparently, there is no particular difficulty here, all the more so when we know Tzara's pronounced taste for this discipline.

However, the latest translation of the volume proposed in Spain highlights the double meaning of the adjective. It is titled El hombre aproximado (2014), replacing the academic El hombre aproximativo. Even if one has not been raised in Picasso's language, one feels the difference well (1). The translator explains himself by accusing his predecessor of using a Gallicism. In short, it would be a question of distinguishing between the passive form and the active way: a fixed value, all relative, opposing a knowledge by repeated approaches. To be sure of it, I know no other method than to note all the occurrences of the word in Tzara's complete work, in order to see what meaning, what particular nuance he conferred on this word. In all his writings, verse and prose mixed, he uses approximatif 14 times, approximative 4 times, and 10 times the noun approximation (in singular and plural). Let us retain only this declaration from the Dada Manifesto 1918: "approximation was invented by the impressionists" (I, 360), which brings us back to the universe of pictorial creation. Then comes an eponymous poem, published in 1924 and taken up in The Travelers' Tree (II, 31). It is, without doubt, the primitive nucleus of song III, and even of the whole collection, the poet questioning: you come you swim you dream you read You sometimes run after the clear the unlimited why of your actions (II, 31)

The object of the entire poem is defined by this declaration that returns eight times in the songs, with variants. Which makes it an epic of knowledge: "approximate man like me like you reader and like the others". Later, at the time of memories, Tzara explained himself very clearly on his realization, during his radio interviews with Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes: The Approximate Man was written between 1925 and 1930. It was in 1929 that a fragment of this poem appeared in The Surrealist Revolution, events having led me to reconcile with the surrealists. Parallel to them, my evolution made me abandon the demonstrative, provocative, and negating character of poetry for a more constructive expression of poetic matter. I was moving towards a conception of life where the extreme individualism that was mine was going to reconcile with the basic feelings common to most men. It was no longer the words that, by their unusual rapprochement, made their customary meaning explode, but it is the complex of the poetic image that was substituting itself as a component to my first concerns. This was the passage towards a new objectivity. (OC V, 405) But we possess a testimony from the very time of the elaboration of the collection, which the French surrealists should hardly have known, for they would certainly have rebelled against certain judgments relating to their recent political engagement. The paradox is well there: while, nowadays, Tzara passes for the poet most linked to the Communist Party (after Aragon, obviously), it is he who, from Dada until the thirties, is the most hostile to the group's rapprochement with any political organization! He says: To recognize the materialism of history, to say in clear phrases even for a revolutionary purpose, this can only be the profession of faith of a clever politician: an act of betrayal towards perpetual Revolution, the revolution of the spirit, the only one I advocate, the only one for which I would be capable of giving my skin, because it does not exclude the Holiness of the self, because it is my Revolution, and because to realize it I will not need to soil it with the help of a lamentable mentality and pettiness of a picture dealer. [...] Communism is a new bourgeoisie starting from zero; the communist revolution is a bourgeois form of revolution... (OC II, 418)

Now, hold on tight, he says this to the poet Ilarie Voronca, who came to visit him in his magnificent villa on avenue Junot, who publishes his remarks in the Romanian journal Integral in April 1927, (integrally reproduced in the Complete Works). Two formulas summarize them: in 1920, he wrote "to seek men". Disappointed in his quest, he continues: "I continue to write for myself, for the moment, and failing to find other men, I always seek myself." (OC I, 417) Concerning a quest for oneself, it is appropriate to date well each of the remarks. It is the moment, indeed, where, while uttering his attacks against the surrealist group and its leader, Tzara comes to revise his positions, to such an extent that, two years later, he will shake the hand of the one who had most ostracized him. Conversely, it is quite possible, as the historians and sociologists of surrealism explain, that Breton saw there an opportunity to rebalance his troops after the ruptures and great purges that followed the Bar du Château meeting. With the departure of Soupault, Vitrac, Artaud, Desnos, Baron, Leiris, Limbour, Prévert, Queneau, etc., the return of a poet of Tzara's stature was a godsend for the group, all the more so as it was going to be accompanied by the entry on stage of René Char, Dali, Georges Hugnet, Georges Sadoul, André Thirion, René Magritte. However I remain convinced that, above all, the poetic quality of Tzara's works is the necessary and sufficient cause of this rapprochement. The songs of The Approximate Man, published here and there, provided a concrete example. At that time, we have many examples, poets still read each other! They could not have remained insensitive to the remarkable evolution that, from the Twenty-Five Poems and the Seven Dada Manifestos (1924) led to The Indicator of Heart Paths (1928) and to The Travelers' Tree (1930), to culminate in these nineteen songs of The Approximate Man. The poem, the depth of the song, took precedence over the anecdote, the petty human quarrel, to such an extent that the outbursts of the performance of The Gas Heart (1923), the accusatory remarks of The Lost Steps and Nadja found themselves denounced by their own author. The reconciliation took place in 1929, and we have many proofs of the rediscovered friendship, but I prefer to quote, because it is of a private nature, this less known testimony of their reconciliation:

To Tristan Tzara/ to the poetry he embodies/ and which will have had his forehead his eyes/ his laugh (his unforgettable laugh) when/ I was twenty years old, thirty years old and/ still many other ages,/ and to the man I adore/ who is made of astonishing ideas for hair, of outstanding feelings/ for the slightest movements, of future actions/ full of meaning and grandeur for the fine and perfect hand,/ with the pride and joy of/ knowing him at all minutes/ where I do not kill myself/ 17ndré 13reton.

This is the autograph dedication carried on a copy of the original edition of The White-Haired Revolver (1932). It figured prominently in the Strasbourg exhibition. The individual Tzara is therefore poetry in itself, and the best remedy against depression, anxiety and despair!

lycanthropy

Yet this is not the image that the common reader has of the said poet. I deduce from this that Tzara, just as unstable and ambivalent as the rediscovered friend, had succeeded, by means of the poem, precisely, in dominating his own solitude, the feeling of what he called lycanthropy (2). This term, characterizing the very nature of the poet, does not appear in the collection The Approximate Man. Tzara will define it shortly after in his "Essay on the Situation of Poetry" as "a latent state of fury and hatred, of explosion and frenzy" (1931), then concerning the Bousingos, and of course Pétrus Borel, who called himself "the lycanthrope", making of this mental attitude the symbol of the revolt of individuals considering themselves superior, against society and against God. He comments: The Lycanthropy of Pétrus Borel is not an aesthete's attitude, it has deep roots in the poet's social behavior [...] who becomes aware of his inferiority in social rank and his superiority in moral order. (OC V, 111) As far as he is concerned, the author of The Approximate Man is a partisan of an individual and perpetual revolution. The solitary self engages in a long introspection: I empty myself before you pocket turned inside out I have abandoned to my sadness the desire to decipher the mysteries I live with them I accommodate myself to their lock (OC II 87) Everything happens as if the individual had to return to the origins of the world to know himself and understand his destiny, through a revolt always contained. Epic of the solitary man, The Approximate Man, always awkward and unfinished, emerges from the depths of the unconscious, arisen from the original magma. The song is so powerful that one could speak of epic poetry, of a kind of Legend of the Centuries referring to the history of man in his relations with nature. Tzara reveals himself here as a shepherd of words, guiding them through primitive darkness to the sun of life. Seized in his uncertain being, before any logical reconstruction, it is a man, or a stone, or a tree that speaks, as in the fourth of The Songs of Maldoror. Always anxiety dominates: "the earth holds me tight in its fist of stormy anxiety" (OC II 83), he declares at the threshold of a long wandering. Lycanthrope, the poet is more than ever in this song IX where he identifies with the solitary animal, the one who wants to ignore the gregarious instinct of the pack: the wolf bogged down in the forest beard curly and broken by jerks and fissures and all of a sudden freedom its joy and its suffering leaps in him another animal more supple accuses its violence he struggles and spits and tears himself solitude only wealth that throws you from one wall to the other in the cabin of bone and skin that was given to you as body in the gray enjoyment of animal faculties packets of heat serious freedom torrent that you may remove my flesh my shackle the fleshy chain around my vertiginous impetuous tensions adventures that I would like to throw by puddles packets and handfuls at my shameful timid face of flesh and so little smile o powers that I have only glimpsed at rare clearings and that I know and sense in the tumultuous encounter brake of light walking from one day to the next along the meridians do not put too often your collar around my neck let my flight gush from my earthy and dull creature let it shudder at the contact of bodily terrors escape from the cavernous veins of hairy lungs from almost moldy muscles and delirious darkness of memory (OC 114)

At the end of this song, the un-bogged wolf will find his shepherd, "the shepherd of incommensurable clarities" whom one could identify with I don't know what god of religions but who, for Tzara, can only be the ordering principle of language, reigning over the "celestial pastures of words". Which will make Jean Cassou say in Les Nouvelles Littéraires: extraordinary primitive poem, one of the most resolute, most complete testimonies of contemporary poetry. It demonstrates that in poetry there are never dead ends and that only extreme positions are valid. By persisting in what could only appear as an act of sterile negation, a fatal explosion, Tristan Tzara produces a positive, abundant, generous, passionate work, and which imitates everything that is most ardent and voracious in creation. (OC II 419) Tzara will develop and radicalize this image of the poet as a solitary wolf, moved by an excessive desire for purity, in Where Wolves Drink (1932), published the following year, and he will analyze its particular function in his "Essay on the Situation of Poetry", a poetry which, according to him, has developed on two simultaneous and successive axes, "poetry activity of the mind" and "poetry means of expression", which meet and rival in contemporary times, destined to produce "poetry-knowledge". This critical examination of the "principle of lycanthropy" and "poetic necessity" will continue in other essays, perfectly analyzed and synthesized by criticism. To finish on this central point, it does not seem anecdotal to me to specify that, in the correspondence deposited in the Doucet collection, his wife, Greta Knutson, to whom The Approximate Man is dedicated, calls him wolf, permanently.

The Approximate Man was known by the publication of fragments or entire songs in various journals. The order of publication does not necessarily follow the time of writing, insofar as each journal has its own rhythm of publication, and also because Tzara only definitively classified his nineteen songs at the moment when he handed over his manuscript to the publisher. The examination of the various states of the text, from notebook to drafts, to typewritten copies and multiple manuscript states, reveals no plan or principle of classification. It is clear however that the form, a long poem in several songs, is first. From the beginning, in 1925, Tzara knows what he is aiming for. The reader, the popular public that Tzara designates in his commentary on literary genres, is not accustomed to reading fragments of the epic, published in disorder, at the whim of the edition. So I wondered, in presenting the collection in the Complete Works, if there was a prior order of composition. I looked for a project, a plan among the numerous drafts, without finding the slightest trace. Nevertheless, reading it in its continuity, one has the feeling of a coherent composition, of a movement going, by successive approximations, that goes without saying, from an anguished expression of the individual, to the full conquest of his being. In 1929, Jean Cassou (1897-1986), literary advisor to the bookseller-publisher Jacques-Olivier Fourcade (1904-1966), informs him that the latter wishes to resume the conversation about this publication, which will include as a frontispiece an engraving by Paul Klee, signed by the artist and by the poet, to adorn the ten numbered copies. Effect of the 1929 crisis, combined with the guilty generosity of the publisher? the latter had to close shop after this last title. Paul Klee does not intervene by chance in the making of the volume. In Dada times, in Zurich, Tzara had exhibited one of his compositions at the Dada Gallery (March 17, 1917) and at the end of the same month, he had organized a lecture on the subject presented by Dr. Waldemar Jollos. He had also solicited him, successfully, for the journal Dada. Unfortunate correspondent of Vanity Fair, invited to treat German expressionism, he devotes to him a laudatory paragraph, presenting him as "the most remarkable personality of this Weimar school", adding pleasantly that "Klee has succeeded in making an important work in a small format, at a time when all painters were seeking external monumentality." (OC I, 602). Later, he will explain why the surrealists rejected cubism in favor of their own painters, as well as Picasso and Klee, who assigned to art the goal of illuminating the vital principles of creation and imagination. And above all, he was to devote to him a masterly transposition of art (ekphrasis), "Paul Klee the Apprentice of the Sun", published in the issue celebrating the resurrection of the Cahiers d'art, in 1945, modulating somewhat, with the same enthusiasm, the "Homage to Paul Klee" of 1929. It should also be noted that, apart from this etching, the painter has never illustrated but two books, both in 1920: Candide, and Postdamer Platz by Curt Corinth. Dedicated to Greta, his wife, married in August 1923 in Stockholm, the collection is dated 1925-1930, which corresponds exactly to the extent of its composition, the first song (1925) and the last (1930) remaining immovable in all classification projects. I do not think I was the first to notice the extraordinary unity of tone of this whole, composed of so many fragments over so many years. Avoiding repeating what I have already written in the notes of the complete works, and in order to base my impressions on a somewhat scientific approach, I submitted the collection to a factorial analysis of correspondences. And there, prodigy: all the songs are found grouped at the center of the graph, at the intersection of abscissas and ordinates, except song X and song IX, which oppose each other radically while being situated apart from all the others. Written in 1925, song IX which begins with this verse: "the wolf bogged down in the forest beard" is the song of the solitary wandering wolf-man, anxious, affirming his certainty when he proclaims the omnipotence of a creator shepherd, shepherd of words, and makes mention of a religious anxiety, by which he distinguishes himself from the whole. At the opposite, Song X has nothing more memorial. It is globally turned towards the exploration of arid and stripped spaces at altitude. It would be necessary to be able to pursue the analysis of each of the songs, confronting it with the data of lexical statistics, doubtless the most indicated in this case, since any coherent sampling can only appear as a coup de force. This will be the work of my successors! Faced with the scope of this work and its unity, some have questioned its generic identity. Emphasizing its generalized lyricism, as one speaks of generalized relativity, criticism immediately spoke of epic poetry, going so far as to speak of "anti-human epic", by reference to the qualifier that Tzara attributed to The Songs of Maldoror (OC I, 418). Saying this, the critics advanced cautiously, for Tzara's poem presents none of the traits of medieval epic, and above all they did not see its hero, unless to consider that modern man is always "anti-human". In developing his reflections on poetry, Tzara held the epic genre for a means of expression, tending to exalt religious or national sentiment, which is obviously not the case of the present collection. All the more so as in his eyes, the only form both lyrical and poetic, addressing the assembled people, was now only found in cinema, with the Fantômas series for example. How could they think, these critics lacking, as Tristan Tzara familiarly said on the radio, that he could have written a single "anti-human" word? nor that he could have been interested in adversaries of humanity? Certainly, he admired Lautréamont since his Zurich stay, but it was not for this reason, explaining to whoever wanted to hear him that several fictional characters took turns speaking there: "the illuminated assassin", "the annoying petty bourgeois", the "illuminated prophet", so many figures of the anti-human, in his eyes. It will therefore be appropriate to read this Tzaraist epic by determining the nature of the man he sings and, in the same momentum, to fix the characteristics of the aoidos, the one who says I, unlike traditional epic.

"What is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou takest care of him?" asks the psalmist (Psalms, 8, 4-5). And Kant, in turn, without really answering the question. Tzara seizes the question and develops his response throughout these long songs. Take the expression "approximate man", which gives its title to the collection. It is used seven times in the whole, of which 4 in Song II and then at the closure of Songs VIII, XIV and XVI, while specifying the identity of such a man with the narrator, the reader and, finally, any other individual. However, Tzara does not content himself with this formal repetition, he varies the context in such a way that I cannot dispense with quoting: First in the same laisse of Song II: approximate man like me like you reader and like the others heaps of noisy flesh and echoes of consciousness complete in the only piece of will your name transportable and assimilable polished by the docile inflections of women diverse misunderstood according to the voluptuousness of interrogating currents approximate man moving you in the approximations of destiny with a heart like suitcase and a waltz in guise of head steam on the cold ice you prevent yourself from seeing yourself great and insignificant among the jewels of frost of the landscape however men sing in circles under the bridges of cold the blue mouth contracted further than nothing approximate man or magnificent or miserable in the fog of chaste ages cheap habitation the eyes ambassadors of fire that each one questions and cares for in the fur of caresses of his ideas eyes that rejuvenate the violences of supple gods leaping at the triggers of the dental springs of laughter approximate man like me like you reader you hold between your hands as if to throw a ball luminous figure your head full of poetry (II, 84)

Then in clausula of three songs, operating a progressive reduction:

approximate man like me like you and like the others silences (VIII, 113) 1931 approximate man like me like you reader and like the others (XIV, 147) 1927 approximate man like me like you (XVI, 155) 1929

Now, if it is impossible to date the first citation, the following ones appeared, respectively in 1931, 1927, 1929. One can only come to one conclusion: the man that Tzara conceives, by successive approaches, is universal and permanent, failing to be eternal! And the intention of the poem has not varied from one song to another in the time of writing. Man is visibly the essential concern of the poet who invokes him more than fifty times, under the compound form that we have just examined, but also alone, determined, compared to a "furnace of invincible constancy" in the last laisse of the last song (XIX, 170), but also subjected to fire: "a man who vibrates to the indefinable presumptions of the labyrinths of fire" (XIX, 171). Let us recall the one who appears in the previous song: "man a little flower a little metal a little man" (XVIII, 162). In fact, as often happens in a corpus of a certain length, the word appears as if in gusts, thus at the center of song XV:

a man would like to burn a forest of men at the noise of phosphorescent troops in the night of my consolations a man would like to cry a man a man would like to throw his head in the fresh river his head a woman would like to cry over the man a man is so little thing that a fine thread of wind carries him away the man (145)

this at the end of a laisse where the individual is both violence and weakness, so uncertain that one would believe to hear the words of Ecclesiastes, son of David! This feeling of total vanity, the reader will have already experienced it in song IX: "so much does man fear the face of his god that deprived of horizons he trembles so much does man fear his god that at his approach he falls he drowns so much does man without horizons fear his death that deprived of god he hides his tomb so much does man fear" (116) However, one should not hasten to conclude that Tzara speaks of his faith. It seems to me that he treats here of primitive man and the gods he has built, monumental, in various points of the earth. Still the use of the singular allows doubt. Further on, the narrator will clearly explain his function: "I sing the lived man to the voluptuous power of the grain of thunder (XIV, 144). Not him, but all man, in his historical dimension. What is man? I asked above, situating him in his cosmic space. One can also define him by his actions, which here are in series, in alphabetical order of state or action verbs: "man shreds the prey of his rancor" (129) "and claws seize man in quest of a thank you of brick (132) "and man was growing under the wing of silence" (113) "man walks prisoner in the lining of his soul" (132) "man nests his senses and his proverbs" (137)

"man shortens with the infinitely year" (98) "man shortens with the shadow until night" (98)

It will never be said enough: in responding to the surrealists' invitation, Tzara brought them the most beautiful collection, as desperate as it proclaims the presence of a vital energy. Retracing the evolution of humanity, from primitive caves to cosmic explorations, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, I would say in parodying Haeckel's principle. Only his poetic trajectory, starting from a neo-symbolist lyricism, exploding under Dada's battering rams, opening wide the doors of the unconscious, could allow him to express himself thus, in search of truth. And, as if this questioning about man, this quest for humanity had to be endless, he prolongs it in the collection Where Wolves Drink, which will itself be followed by Grains and Issues, this prose poem that mixes oneiric lyricism with notes, with reflection on poetry in the process of being written. We know, this volume, Tzara will make it his divorce gift with surrealism. This does not mean that he has, from then on, renounced this poetics. He will pursue it, indeed, while transforming it to better take into account the history in which he was bathing up to his neck, he will say.

See also on this same site: Why The Approximate Man? (melusine-surrealisme.fr) Henri BÉHAR

1. See, respectively: Tzara, El hombre aproximativo, trad. y prologo de Fernando Millan, Madrid, Visor, 1975, 152 p. and El hombre aproximado, bilingual ed. by Alfredo Rodriguez Lopez-Vasquez, Madrid, Catedra, 316 p.
2. See Jeanne-Marie Baude: "Poetry and lycanthropy in Tristan Tzara's work", in Amorality of Literature, Morals of the Writer, proceedings of the international colloquium, gathered and published by Jean-Michel Wittmann, Paris, Champion, 2000, p. 215-227; and for clinical lycanthropy: Jean-Michel Gentizon, On Lycanthropy, L'Age d'Homme, 2016.