拍品專文
This important manuscript is amongst the earliest examples of Zdanevich's revolutionary zaum poetry. The poem is dedicated to Roland Garros, the celebrated French pilot, who perished during the First World War. Zdanevich brilliantly catches the drama of the war with a series of onomatopoeic zaum passages designed to imitate the sound of shell-fire and explosions. As Henri Douard of the Iliazd Club points out, in essence Zdanevich's poem owes a great deal to the Italian Futurist's experiments with language. Zdanevich met Marietti in 1914 and was greatly impressed by the Italians invention of parole in liberta where words were invented to mimic sense rather than to transmit meaning. 'Roland Garros' appears to have been written after this memorable meeting and was later to lead to Zdanevich's remarkable zaum poetry published under the banner of 41O in Tiflis from 1917 onwards, Serge Spasski recalles the impact that Zdanevich's extraordinary experiments with language had on him 'soon after the war had started Zdanevich read me a recent poem. It was dedicated to the memory of a young pilot who died at the front. Standing beside a lectern taller than him, he read or rather growled his booming voice, lines of zaum verse and passages of onomatopaic rhyme. Read by him the verse had an extraordinary impact. It was poetry loaded with rythm, internalrhyme and assonances. The intention was to mimic the grinding of engines, the explosion of bombs and exchanges of gunfire... Bravo Garros! A triumph for Zdanevich' (S. Spasski, 1940).