“The next day the ocean seemed to me even more enrapturing than an operating table. With frowning locks flung over my shoulders, this outmoded mantle from which I never separate, I board this raft without first forgetting to abandon on the shore the two oars, futile to my thirst for carnations, to my hunger to have been tenebrity. Prone on my spine with my stalking dog supine upon my lungs, I stare nostalgically into the sky, enumerating to the thousands the stars, the moon, the wolf’s lair, the vermilion, the Danube, the plague, etc. Over my brow creeps the slashing lip of a saber and two globules of plasma trickle on my cheek recalling the illustrious internal episodes which I am about to intersect like the mysteries of a circus. Monocle fitted to my eyeball, mustache twisting with panache, I stride forth, reckless and viraginous, spellbound and entrancing, slurping with cheeks inflated this magnificent viperous broth which is our internal life. You are a fawn stalked by the swift hunter within me, yes, you! the most enrapturing idol I ever pursued, you who transmutes the macrocosm into the unsurpassed trope of our internal murmur. With temples glued one to the other and both glued to a marble statue, we roam across a palpating byway and our steps disinter cities, rivers, hawks…” (more)

By Gherasim Luca

Translated by Julian Semilian

l’eau qui a l’air d’allumer
                            le feu sur la terre
            l’air d’allumer l’air sur le feu
            l’air d’allumer sur l’eau
ce qui a l’air de s’éteindre sur terre
            l’air d’allumer et d’étreindre
            l’eau et le feu en l’air :

le cancer tu
                    questionne la santé bavarde
depuis quand sers-tu
                    dans la maison de sourds ?
de puits en puits de vérité :

O vide en exil                A mer suave

        I mage            E toile renversée

                    U topique

The Inventor of Love & Other Writings
Translated by Julian and Laura Semilian

Black Widow Press, Boston, MA 02116
143 pp.

“… Gherasim Luca, surrealist poet, artist, and theorist, has finally been translated into English, with two volumes this year: The Passive Vampire and Inventor of Love & Other Writings. Known as well to allies of surrealism and related circles in his native Bucharest and in Paris — where he exiles himself some forty years until his actual suicide in 1994 — he has come to us, as it often happens, through the praise of another. In this case, it is Gilles Deleuze who finds in Luca, quite simply, “a great poet among the greatest…”

http://www.corpse.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=545

Ghérasim Luca is a great poet among the greatest: he invented a prodigious stammering, his own.

— Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues