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Limited Edition Chapbook
Bilingual Edition
60 pages
December 1, 2026
Ghérasim Luca
Verbal Eyes
Translated from French by
AUSTIN CARDER
The first English translation of Je m’oralise, the essential artist's book and ars poetica by Ghérasim Luca: “our greatest poet in French,” wrote Gilles Deleuze, “of course, he is from Romania.”
Verbal Eyes is a postcard-sized facsimile of handwritten text and ink drawings, composed in 1968, the culmination of Luca's decades-long research into what he called ontophony: the revelation of a resonance of being through the sonic and visual life of words. In it, Luca charts the movement from the imprisoned word to the liberated breath, from passive description to what he called creaction. Words and drawings flow from the same pen; neither illustrates the other. The result is at once a meditation on language and a performance of it.
Luca wrote exclusively in French after settling in Paris in 1952, consolidating a practice that Gilles Deleuze described as the ability “to stammer not just words, but language itself.” Je m’oralise is the essential statement of that practice and its most intimate document. Published here for the first time in English, Verbal Eyes translates not only Luca's words but the alchemical operation they perform.
GHÉRASIM LUCA (1913–1994) was a Romanian-born Jewish poet and artist who wrote exclusively in French after emigrating to Paris in 1952. Born Salman Locker in Bucharest, he learned French and German alongside his mother tongues of Yiddish and Romanian, and came early to the surrealist avant-garde. After World War II he co-founded the Bucharest Infra-Noir group with Gellu Naum, Paul Paun, and Dolfi Trost, co-authoring with Trost the manifesto Dialectic of the Dialectic. Forced to leave Romania in 1952, he settled in Paris, where he developed a kinetic sound poetry that Gilles Deleuze praised as knowing how “to stammer not just words, but language itself.” His illustrated book-objects appeared from the legendary avant-garde press Le Soleil Noir, and his later work from Éditions José Corti. His public performances beginning in 1967 directly influenced Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, and Bernard Heidsieck, among others.
AUSTIN CARDER is a writer and translator based in San Francisco. Translations from French to English include André Breton’s Cavalier Perspective (City Lights Books, 2025) and Georges Schehadé’s Poetries (The Song Cave, 2021). He received his BA in English from Yale in 2015 and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Brown in 2022.
