Customer Reviews

Chanson Dada: Tristan Tzara Selected Poems

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Chanson Dada still contains some of the best English language translations of Tzara. Poet Lee Harwood (a poet of some 20 plus poetry titles himself) has captured part of the essence of Tzara. I only wish the volume was bilingual and more comprehensive. Tzara is still woefully under translated when one considers the amount of writing he did. Harwood's essay "Dada my heart belongs to dada" is a wonderful, evocative mini-survey of Dada.

I openly admit that I don't understand over half of the poems in this book, but they're all amazing and evocative, and there are times when a certain phrase or stanza describes my view of the world perfectly. Tzara was great person and writer, and Lee Harwood did a great job translating his poetry. Lee's essay was also really interesting.

I was very excited to get a whole book of Tzara's after only reading him in anthologies (mostly the same poems in every one). The layout of this book prevented me from enjoying it. The font is terrible, and combined with questionable letter spacing and page placement it is kind of hard to read. I'm no design purist/snob, but something about it really jumped out at me and got under my skin. So bland considering the Dada's were so inventive with type. It's a shame because there are other books by this publisher that look rather interesting, but if they are designed in the same fashion I'll skip those. Writing by such imaginative authors shouldn't come out looking like a self-published chapbook!