SOURCE: "A Step on Tzara's Road to Communication," in Dada/Surrealism, No. 4, 1974, pp. 35-41.

In the following essay, Caldwell suggests that in L'Indicateur des chemins de coeur Tzara demonstrated a concern for linguistic coherence that was part of his transition from Dada to Surrealism.

During the 1920s, in a transition from Dadaism to Surrealism that has been more readily assumed than pinpointed, Tristan Tzara produced ten poems of rich thematic unity, a volume entitled L'Indicateur des chemins de coeur. The dominant theme of these poems is a desire for communication, not only between humans, but between humans, animals, plants, and the cosmos.

Part of this theme is announced by the title of the volume. Although Tzara is not the only author to have used a train schedule as a metaphor for communication with a loved one (we find it in Proust's Un Amour de Swann: "il se plongeait...