Performance, multilingualism and transnationalism in the exophonic poetry of Tristan Tzara and Isidore Isou.

This project aims at exploring the multilingual dimension of the 20th Century literary movements of Dadaism and Lettrism through an analysis of the poetic works of their respective founders: the Jewish Romanian artists Tristan Tzara (1896-1963) and Isidore Isou (1925-2007). After moving to Paris, Tzara and Isou decided to stop speaking Romanian and instead speak French. The poetry they wrote after their relocation to France includes words and letters coming from Yiddish, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Romanian and Oceanic languages such as Fijan and Maori. The project will analyse the use of these underexplored languages in their poetry, that are merging and composing what is called 'transnational poetry'. The core aim of the project is to evaluate stylistically and ideologically the multilingual poetry of Tzara and Isou within their cultural background.