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Many of us first heard of the poet Ghérasim Luca (1913-1994) through Gilles Deleuze. The late French philosopher claimed in his book Dialogues (1977) that the little-known Surrealist was no less than “a great poet among the greatest.”
Such praise from this luminary enticed new readers to approach Luca’s provocative work, which at the time was published in limited bibliophilic editions. Luca’s prose and poetry have since become widely available in attractive, scrupulously edited volumes (10 to date) brought out by Editions José Corti, leading many to discover this Romanian who settled in Paris in 1952 and adopted French as his literary language.
An écorché vif (as such tormented creative artists are called—meaning they have been “skinned alive”), Luca burned his mark into modern French poetry by means of a ferocious irreverence, intellectual daring, wacky puns and meaning-multiplying “stutterings.” Luca’s grim, lewd, death-haunted writings puzzle, disgust and induce laughter; they can even mystify, as in the daily unsigned letters he once wrote—and had a friend actually send—to an anonymous, arbitrary “Monsieur” (see Levée d’écrou, 2003). To sum up, Luca’s poems and prose are as playful and illuminating as they are bizarre and disturbing.
Along with fellow Romanians Eugène Ionesco (1912-1994) and E. M. Cioran (1911-1995), he contributed both brilliantly and eccentrically to 20th-century French literature. Born a Jew in Bucharest, Salman Locker—his real name—became Ghérasim Luca much later and only by chance. When his first text was about to appear in a Bucharest literary review, a friend suggested “Gherasim Luca” as a pseudonym. Locker inserted the pen name, then learned that his friend had come across one “Gherasim Luca” in an obituary. The deceased stranger was described as “Archimandrite of Mount Athos and linguist emeritus.”
So was launched Locker-Luca’s writing career, under the signs of death, false identity, emigration, solitude, metaphysics, foreign languages, coincidence and chance. This indeterminacy of name and fragility of personhood were soon compounded. Luca managed to survive World War II, while six million fellow European Jews were exterminated. Like his close friend, the Romanian poet Paul Celan, Luca would be haunted by his miraculous luck and would grapple ever afterwards with the dilemma of “writing poetry after Auschwitz.”
This predicament, which involves the perversion of language by Nazi ideology, surely informs Luca’s increasing penchant, after the war, for word play (an analogous case is that of Georges Perec). A revealing footnote to his persistent existential insecurity is that his official first name had three spellings (Salman, Solman, Zolman) and that Ghérasim was sometimes accented, sometimes not. In Un loup à travers une loupe (1998), a series of prose texts written in Romanian in 1942 then translated by the author into French, Luca quips that “only a coffee cup or perhaps a watermelon—and they would have to be especially prone to hallucinations—would dare to find points in common between me and the world.”
Yet like all of us, Luca was necessarily imprisoned in the world. In revolt against this all-too-human condition, he contended that it was only by using the absurd in his writings that he could escape absurdity. Hence the numerous puns, which draw and quarter normal logic because they demand reading in opposite directions at the same time. A relatively easy example to dissect is found in Paralipomènes (1986), where a poem comprises the distich: “lit légal contraire à la loi / lit moral contraire à la morale.” At first glance, the lines comically observe that a “legal bed [is] contrary to the law / [a] moral bed [is] contrary to morality.” But after reading the distich aloud, one discovers that the lines simultaneously inverse the logic: illegality is “contrary to the law” while immorality is “contrary to morality.”
Luca continues the game with lit réel, which means “real bed” but also l’irréel, “the unreal.” I’ll let you ponder lit-monde, lit-tige, lit-dé and lit-mage. The poet ends with lit-lit mi-table (“bed-bed half-table”) and the surreal lits sans cieux, (“beds without heavens”). Yet when read together, these compound words also mean “illimitable licentiousness,” a conclusion calling for the no-holds-barred eros that Luca also lauds. He called this punning style “speaking in slips of the tongue” and argued that—as in the case of the world’s endemic absurdity—one could try to get out of the mind-debilitating straitjacket of language only by conscientiously practicing the lapsus linguae, not to forget the lapsus vitae, a “slip of one’s life.”
In Luca, this dead-serious word play moreover implies the riskiest “life play,” a desperate search for a deep, rich, redemptive “true life” that is absent from what we call our lives. His double entendres enable him to be downright ludicrous on one level, all the while poignantly yearning, on another level, for this genuine life that cannot be recovered or attained. Luca relishes gallows humor. In Théâtre de bouche (1987), a character announces: “Etre nez / c’est humer / s’inhumer.” Yet amidst the hilarious gruesome joking, his recurrent idea of an “absent life” is thought provoking. In the opening text of Un loup à travers une loupe, for instance, the audacious, virile, handsome but also distraught narrator “swills down the magnificent poisonous beverage that is our absent life.” A poem in Le Chant de la carpe (1986) similarly depicts bodies mimicking “the deaf or absent / life / of any given word.” In Paralipomènes, Luca sums up this permanent sense of loss with a resounding question: “Man, what emptiness are you?”
Though he usually remains darkly pessimistic, even radically nihilistic, Luca sometimes surprises by offering glimmers of hope. The glimmers are assuredly faint and fleeting, yet they can arise even when he contemplates mankind’s possible extinction in a nuclear war—a fear that was particularly widespread among Europeans during the 1980s. In La Proie s’ombre (1991), he notes that “one rings the bell at / condemned, boarded-up doors / while the front door, neglected, remains open, banging back and forth.”
What is this overlooked front door? Often Luca shows it opening onto absolute love, the convulsive amour fou that the French Surrealists championed. Groping for that front door of exalted, ecstatic love—seeing, in our blindness, what is obvious—constitutes mankind’s last remaining hope. Luca already speculates in Un loup à travers une loupe that “between an apparent life and death, is not love perhaps the only certainty?” In La Proie s’ombre, he distributes an adamant declaration over nine pages (three of which are left blank) set in capital letters: “LA POÉSIE / SANS LANGUE / LA RÉVOLUTION / SANS PERSONNE / L’AMOUR / SANS FIN.” In the Corti edition, the words in fact grow bigger on the page as one reaches “LOVE / WITHOUT END.”
Not surprisingly, the most moving of Luca’s poems is a long erotic chant entitled “The End of the World.” He invents evocative verbs by means of nouns and adjectives: “I moon you / you cloud me / you high-tide me / I transparent you / you penumbra me / you translucent me....” Characteristically, the apocalyptic title takes on a double meaning as the love poem progresses toward a crescendo involving an iris.... 
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