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Speaking Alone
senseless here’s the man with the crystal contractions with the rumor of sand with a doll’s past tense at the hollow step in a bed of distress nevertheless present at the passage of spring spring Tristan Tzara wrote this poem during the summer of 1945, weeks after the end of World War II, and so this particular “spring” may refer to the horrific final season of the war. man as long as he passes his stop is wall wall of heavy shoulders and now the light is black the sun salty water no longer quenches the children’s eyes their words wooden voices no longer recognizable in the little space left ajar in their gullets of sky and like justice at the bottom of the well verisimilitude verisimilitude The French word here is "vraisemblance," which combines "vrai"(true) with "semblant" (semblance or appearance). It can translate to "likelihood" or "verisimilitude" here because perhaps the well in the previous line functions as a mirror; truth's appearance reflects the disorienting layers of reality in the weeks immediately following the war, during which many in Europe, though newly liberated, were still hungry, ill, and displaced. reflects the tarnished gold of summer’s escapes the frankness of their hungers howling dogs outrageous vacations 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 the iron of the walls like never seen before horrors distresses faces passed passed over passed away from earth from potash from vitreous smoke sludge sludge on the horizon nothing but sludge where wewe Ironically for a poem titled “Speaking Alone,” this is the only first-person pronoun in the poem and refers to a group of people docking in an isolated, uncanny, imaginary landscape. Henri Béhar writes: “Tzara composed this poem while he was lodged at the Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital, in Lozère, where he had long conversations with the patients, even befriending some of them. From then on, his poetry tried to speak not for them but from their point of view, through a kind of empathy of which few poets are capable. [. . .] He puts his poetic practice at the disposal of the very strong emotional demand that he had felt in his interlocutors.” dock and islands of grassy vertigo the cobblestones are deserted the loves uneasy why love only avarice and everywhere the void the laughable transparency of the ravine man among men and the ditch up front the wind underneath and from each side silencesilence This section, with its layered images and metaphors, enacts a mythic challenge to logic. Scholar Elmer Peterson, citing Tzara’s 1947 lecture, posits that Tzara believes “the essence of poetry is in the recapture and expression of these myths which our rationally ordered society has subverted.” you entered the dwelling place of dead tenderness alive and in each step you recognized yourself as an enticing answer the world hasn’t changed from ash for you nor has anguish crucified itself a little loss a little gain it’s always the weight of windowpanes bearing down on your dark forehead but you are lucid in these hours that look like you walking among your footsteps which the scales tally through the starry years on the tree of painstarry years on the tree of pain Stars and trees are two of the shapes used by Joan Miró in the 72 vivid, iconic lithographs he created for the original artist book publication of Parler seul. confined in the horizon of voices no wall can resist your warm memory faced with the broken voice rats can run between your legs the fine grass has yet to escape your call with an invisible noise on the mouth and fingers you came out alivealive Marius Hentea writes of Tzara’s long period of isolation and silence during the war: “Even in the most damning solitude, the need for personal connections and human warmth remains." He continues, "It is through these connections [. . .] that the final poem can end with a triumphant cry.”