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Inventor of Love & Other Writings (Translation Series)

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Far ahead of his time when written in the 1940s, The Inventor of Love by Gherasim Luca (1913-1994) is a discourse on the re-invention of love that begins on the somber note of suicide. It is a work of desire and despair, and reconciliation... A key member of Romania's Surrealist Group in Bucharest. As John Olsen admirably and aptly describes Gherasim Luca, he "writes with the ferocity of Rilke's panther, blood and sinew turning in a circle prescribed by the bars and walls of mortal confinement, a flame inside its own darkness. The writing is intense, relentlessly intense. The ribs of his words contain a heat that is uncanny in its ardor. It is the product of friction, agitation, disquiet. It erupts into flame like the tinder ignited by aboriginal fire stick, a fine trickle of smoke rising upward from a continuous chafing. Each word is a the spectral instance of a salvation soaked in expansion. The drivbe outward from an inward trauma that is nothing less than existence itself, a raw condition that must enact and exalt its own place in a world denatured by platitude and passive acceptance". These twists and thrusts of convulsive beauty are given their due in this collection which theough a prose that is lyrical and intense it foreshadows the intimacy it invites, the madness that is at the heart of its own stammw=ering beatitude, the distress that each word distils, awakens and ignites. Luca is not a surrealist in the more common sense of the term, since we are able to follow his thoughts and trace his narrative drive through its disquietude, it is as if he were a lucid Breton traumatized writing as if he were painting like Schiele, living like Aragon and honest like Ionesco. How beautiful to read these pages and become a spectator to human tragedy as it gains the intensity of truth on the edge of reason...

Gilles Deleuze was unsparing in his endorsement of the Romaninan poet and I here take liberty to quote his words: "I believe that Ghérasim Luca is one of the greatest French poets, and of all time. He certainly does not owe this to his Romanian origin, but he makes use of this origin to make French stammer in itself, with itself, to carry the stammering into the language itself, not simply the speaking of it. One has never achieved such an intensity in the language, such an intensive use of language". ("One Manifesto Less," The Deleuze Reader, ed. Constantin V. Boundas [New York, NY: Columbia UP, 1993] 213)