ABSTRACT
Many of us first heard of the poet Gherasim Luca through Gilles Deleuze. The late French philosopher claimed in his book Dialogues that the little-known French-writing Romanian was no less than "a great poet among the greatest." Later, as Luca's prose and poetry became widely available in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s—in attractive, scrupulously edited volumes, no one could ignore any longer this Romanian surrealist who had settled permanently in Paris by 1952 and had already adopted--with his book Le Vampire passif —French as his literary language. In Luca, the dead-serious wordplay moreover implies the riskiest "life-play," a desperate search for a deep, rich, salvatory "true life" that is absent from what we call our "lives." Though he usually remains darkly pessimistic, even radically nihilistic, Luca sometimes surprises by offering glimmers of hope.
