Gadji beri bimba
Gadji beri bimba is a sound poem by Hugo Ball (1886–1927), one of the co-founders of the Zurich Dada movement. It is one of the first Dadaist poems to be recited in Cabaret Voltaire .
background
Hugo Ball recited this unsemantic poem based on sounds (and therefore differentiated from nonsense poems ) along with other onomatopoeic works such as Caravan (Train of Elephants) for the first time in June 1916 at the Dadaist events in the café, cabaret, which he founded in the same year and Künstlertreff "Cabaret Voltaire" in Zurich's Spiegelgasse 1. Dressed in a stiff " cubist " Pappanzug that binds to a bishop - Regalia recalls, and a cup-shaped miter on their heads and claw-like gloves, gave ball in front of music stands, standing, a helpless and grotesque Appearance. He had to be carried into the hall in this bulky outfit because he was almost immobile.
Ball had informed his Dada colleague Tristan Tzara on June 14, 1916 of his plan to recite phonetic poems in a very special costume as a “magical bishop”. Ball noted in his diary on June 23, 1916: “I had constructed a costume for it. My legs stood in a round column of shiny blue cardboard that came up to my waist, so that until then I looked like an obelisk. Over it I wore a huge coat collar, which was covered with scarlet fever on the inside and gold on the outside, held together at the neck in such a way that I could move it like wings by raising and lowering my elbows. In addition, a cylinder-like, high, white and blue striped shaman hat. ”Ball had, however, only incompletely written the poem down in his notes and presumably improvised it in the evening.
The nonsense lecture was given with markedly sacred seriousness to the cluster hits of a piano. The ritual of the performance and the intonation of the chant satirize church liturgies . The reciter explained the ideological superstructure: “With these tone poems we wanted to forego a language that has been devastated and made impossible by journalism . We have to withdraw into the deepest alchemy of the word and leave even the alchemy of the word in order to preserve poetry in its most sacred domain ... "
With his absurd sound poetry, Ball took up the idea of the Italian futurist Carlo Carrà of the "creation of a total art" that is supposed to combine visual, acoustic and haptic impressions simultaneously in the sense of a total work of art , and set this up (together with his Dada colleague Richard Huelsenbeck , Marcel Janco and Tristan Tzara ) in cabaret lectures and simultaneous poetry . Ball's sound poems reflect on the word sequences of the fascist writer and intellectual architect of Futurism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti .
In contrast to the simultaneous poems of the other Dadaists, Ball separated most radically from a conventional language in his phonetic poems: Gadji beri bimba dispenses with an understandable word interpretation and eludes any semantic access. The hint of a real language can possibly still be guessed in the compilation of the verses, the concentration is entirely on the tonal "musical" quality, which in its rhythm and tonality takes up African languages , child-language imitations or onomatopoeic incantations. The African art , which at this time especially with the French artists "en vogue" was, this had a significant impact, it proved but as an effective means to access the "primitive adventure time" to respond, so Chants nègres and Musique et danse nègre were popular program pieces by the Zurich Dadaists.
Despite all the seemingly ridiculousness of the lecture, Ball took the concept of renouncing language or words extremely seriously. He noted in his diary that he had started "slowly and solemnly" with Gadji beri bimba in Cabaret Voltaire and was already dissatisfied with the recitation of the next poem because he noticed that his voice during the performance was the "ancient cadence of priestly lamentation " adopted "that style of mass chant as it laments through the Catholic churches of the Orient and Occident." That Ball soon turned to strict Catholicism regarding this liturgy remains speculative, at least a short time later he distanced himself from the Dada movement "To reflect on the broken connection to his ecclesiastical youth."
It was first printed in 1928 in De Stijl magazine (Leiden), no. 85/86.
The "literal" onomatopoeia in the simultaneous act of sound and painting was continued by the Dadaists Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter , who in 1918 formulated an "analogy between music and painting".
The text
gadji beri bimba glandridi laula lonni cadori
gadjama gramma Berida bimbala glandri galassassa laulitalomini
gadji beri'm blassa glassala laula lonni cadorsu sassala bim
gadjama tuffm i zimzalla binban gligla wowolimai'm beri ban
o katalominai rhinozerossola hopsamen laulitalomini hoooo
gadjama rhinozerossola hopsamen
bluku terullala blaulala loooo
ZimZim urullala ZimZim urullala zimzim zanzibar zimzalla zam
elifantolim brussala bulomen brussala bulomen tromtata
velo da bang band affalo purzamai affalo purzamai lengado tor
gadjama bimbalo glandridi glassala zingtata pimpalo ögrögöööö
viola laxato gala viola zamai bimalo
bimalo namo zuffi gala namo zimbrabu namo namo
tamo gadjama gaga di gadjama affalo pinx
gaga di bumbalo bumbalo gadjamen
gaga di bling blong
gaga blung
Adaptation in music
The Greek composer Theodore Antoniou set Gadji beri bimba to music in 1970 and Ball's five other sound poems from 1916 under the title Parodies for baritone or actor and piano. Over fifty directors' instructions in the score turn the work into an enjoyable and absurd competition between vocalist and accompanist.
Hugo Ball poem was from the American US- New-Wave - band Talking Heads set to music and released in 1979 under the title I Zimbra on the album Fear of Music . The rhythmic chant , performed by David Byrne , was accompanied by an African groove . The album ushered in the funk- oriented phase of the group and at the same time expressed Byrne's interest in Raï and the world music that was becoming popular in the 1980s , which he implemented in numerous solo projects after the Talking Heads broke up.
literature
- Gerhard Schaub (Ed.): Hugo Ball: Complete Works and Letters 1904–1927 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2003, ISBN 3-89244-701-2
- Karl Riha: DADA totally. Manifestos, actions, texts, pictures . Reclam, 1994, ISBN 3-15-059302-6
- Erdmute Wenzel White: The Magic Bishop: Hugo Ball, Dada Poet . Camden House Inc., 1998, ISBN 1-57113-128-0 (English)
- Katja Stopka: Semantics of Noise: About an acoustic phenomenon in German-language literature . Meidenbauer, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-89975-541-3
Web links
- Poems by Hugo Ball
- Hugo Ball in a cardboard suit (photograph, 1916)
- I Zimbra in the English language Wikipedia
Individual evidence
- ↑ Hugo Ball's diary entry from: Hugo Ball: Escape from Time . Zurich 1992, p. 105
- ↑ Freiburg Literature Office: Speaking about language - Gadji beri bimba - The sound poem in Dadaism ( Memento of the original from February 15, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . (As of March 26, 2008)
- ↑ a b Karin Thomas: Until Today - Style History of Fine Art in the 20th Century , DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne, 1986, p. 80
- ↑ a b Katja Stopka: Semantics of Noise . Meidenbauer, Munich 2005, p. 242ff.
