Black Scat Books has just released my translation of Isidore Isou’s “Considerations on the Death and Burial of Tristan Tzara,” as the eighth of their elegant little chapbooks, “Absurdist Texts and Documents.”

Isidore Isou is little known to American readers, and few of his writings have been translated.  In the late 1940s, he founded a new literary movement, Letterism, devoted to reducing poetry to letters and phonemes.  He and his associates took to the clubs of post-war Paris to declaim their creations, often at high volume.  You can see them interviewed by Orson Welles here: that’s Isou in the middle, with Maurice Lemaître to his right, doing the talking, and Jacques Spacagna to his left.  (The club performance that follows is by Gabriel Pomerand.)

Tzara was one of Isou’s artistic heroes; in this article, he recounts his sad, hilarious, and embarrassing behavior at Tzara’s funeral.  My translation (plus introduction) is published in a limited edition of fifty copies, and available from Black Scat Books.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)