Gherasim Luca (or Gherashim Luca) (23 July 1913 — 9 February 1994) was a Surrealist theorist and Romanian poet. He is frequently cited in the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
Born in Bucharest the son of a Jewish tailor, he spoke Yiddish, Romanian, German, and French. During 1938, he traveled frequently to Paris where he was introduced to the Surrealist circles. World War II and the official antisemitism in Romania forced him into local exile. During the short pre-Communist period of Romanian independence, he founded a Surrealist artists group, together with Gellu Naum, Paul P?un, Virgil Teodorescu and Dolfi Trost.
His first publications, including poems in French followed. He was the inventor of cubomania and, with Dolfi Trost, the author of the statement "Dialetic of Dialectic" in 1945. Harassed in Romania and caught while trying to flee the country, the self-called étran-juif ("StranJew") finally left Romania in 1952, and moved to Paris through Israel.
There he worked among others with Jean Arp, Paul Celan, François Di Dio and Max Ernst, producing numerous collages, drawings, objects, and text-installations. From 1967, his reading sessions took him to places like Stockholm, Oslo, Geneva, New York City, and San Francisco. The 1988 TV-portrait by Raoul Sanglas, Comment s'en sortir sans sortir, made him famous for a larger readership.
In 1994, he was expelled from his apartment officially for "hygiene reasons." Luca had spent forty years in France without papers and could not cope. On February 9, at the age of 80, he committed suicide by jumping into the Seine.
Most of his poetic works were written in French. There are no known translation of his poem collections into English. However, with the authorisation of éditions Corti, a forthcoming chapbook of his poems translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain will be featured in "Poetry International", Issue no. 15, Spring 2010.
Un loup à travers une loupe, Bucharest, 1942. Poems in prose, initially published in Romanian. Later translated into French by Gherasim Luca. Apart from Ce Château Pressenti, they remained unpublished in French until 1998, Éditions José Corti
Quantitativement aimée, Éditions de l'Oubli, Bucharest, 1944
Le Vampire passif, Éditions de l'Oubli, Bucharest 1945
Dialectique de la dialectique, together with Dolfi Trost, Éditions surréalistes, Bucharest, 1945
Les Orgies des Quanta, Éditions de l'Oubli, Bucharest 1946
Amphitrite, Éditions de l’Infra-noir, Bucharest 1945
Le Secret du vide et du plein, Éditions de l'Oubli, Bucharest 1947
Héros-Limite, Le Soleil Noir, Paris 1953 with an engraving and three drawings
Ce Château Pressenti, Méconnaissance, Paris 1958, with frontispiece and engraving by Victor Brauner. This poem is part of Un loup à travers une loupe
La Clef, Poème-Tract, 1960, Paris
L'Extrême-Occidentale, Éditions Mayer, Lausanne 1961 with 7 engravings by Jean Arp, Brauner, Max Ernst, Jacques Hérold, Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta, Dorothea Tanning
La Lettre, no editor mentioned, Paris, 1960
Le Sorcier noir, with Jacques Hérold, Paris 1996
Sept slogans ontophoniques, Brunidor, Paris 1963 with engravings by Augustin Fernandez, Enrique Zanartu, Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, Jacques Hérold.
