Translated!: Romanian Surrealist Ghérasim Luca

In 1939, the son of a Romanian tailor traveled to Paris hoping to meet his heros, the French surrealists whose work he'd been following since he was a teenager. Ghérasim Luca's dream was cut short by the war, and when he and his friend Gella Naum returned home, they helped found the Romanian Surrealist Group in Bucharest.

Although Luca has been considered by many to be a key writer in the evolution of surrealism and 20th century thought (notably by Gilles Deleuze, who called him "the greatest French poet"), up to now he has been little known outside of France or Romania.

Twisted Spoon, a small press based in Prague, has now made Luca's first surrealist text, The Passive Vampire, available for the first time in English. Published initially in 1947, the book had a sort of a legendary "lost" status in Paris until it was reissued in France in 2001.

The Passive Vampire explores our relation to the material world, especially objects, constantly subverting our preconceived ideas about what we see and think. The influence of the French surrealists, particularly Andre Breton's Mad Love and Nadja, is easily felt throughout. Luca's poetic, stream-of-consciousness prose reminded me of why I loved reading the French surrealists so much:

"Objects, these mysterious suits of armour beneath which desire awaits us, nocturnal and laid bare, these snares made of velvet, of bronze, of gossamer that we throw at ourselves with each step we take...

"...objects, those philosopher's stones that discover, transform, hallucinate, communicate our screaming, those stone-creams that break the waves, through which the rainbow, living images, images of the image will pass, I dream of you because I dream of myself..."

Luca inserts pictures of 18 objects throughout the text, mostly assemblages--objects assembled from other objects. The objects have a life of their own, revealing more the longer you look. One object, with the caption "Dusk," looks like a cloth pad with pen nibs (there must have been a name for this at the time... pen nib pad? but who uses pen nibs anymore?) and doll hands and legs attached. A closer look shows that the figure seems to be a broken or hiding man. Luca describes the process of creating the objects in his prologue, "The Objectively Offered Object," which gives them an added dimension.

Thankfully, more of Luca's work, Inventor of Love & Other Writings, will be published by Black Widow Press in late August. Petre Railneanu, one of the leading authorities on Luca, describes Inventor of Love as an important next step in Luca's surrealist thinking and experiments:

"'Everything must be reinvented, nothing exists anymore in the whole world,' resonates as the leitmotif throughout the text. Birth, like love and death, imprisons the 'axiomatic humanoid of Oedipus,' scattered like an 'obscurantist epidemic' for the last few thousands of years, and must be reinvented.”

The book also has an introduction by Andrei Codrescu, with whom Luca apparently once spent a "lost" evening in New York. Let's hope to hear more about that, and more from this extraordinary thinker/poet.

Twisted Spoon has a great page on Luca and the Romanian Surrealist Group, if you want to read more about them. They even have a recording of Luca reading his work.--Heidi

Comments

[Karen on April 03, 2009 at 11:31 AM]

Great book!