Lorand Gaspar (1925-2019) and Paul Celan (1920-1970) were students and poets in exile in Paris after World War II, both from Mitteleuropa. They never met, neither talked about each other yet. They shared the Eastern Europa multicultural culture and history, they spoke Rumanian, German, French, English, Russian, Arabic, all languages from which (or to which) they translated major poets like Rimbaud, Rilke, Valéry, D.H. Lawrence, Pilinszky or Mandelstam. They crossed the tragedy of war and violence. Celan’s parents, as Jews, were killed in a work camp in Transnistria, and Paul fled to Paris via Bucarest and Vienna. Gaspar, born in Târgu Mureș in Transylvania and of Hungarian culture, escaped from a German prisoners camp and walked towards Paris. As European poets in German and in French, they assumed a modernist conception of poetry which could have brought them closer, in spite of political divergences and different conceptions of life.

In Feuilles d’hôpital (2024), care is one of the leading themes in Lorand Gaspar’s thought, structuring the different layers of his writing while also conveying a particular ethos. Much more than an intellectual theme, care is, in fact, a fundamental disposition that defines Gaspar’s singular presence (présence) in the world – which we may translate as a set of personal, moral and professional values taking into account the presence of the vulnerable Other seen both as a fundamentally distinct subjectivity and as an intrinsic part of a one and single suffering Body. At the intersection of values such as receptiveness, compassion, and the desire to heal and repair (réparer), Gaspar’s ethos in Feuilles d’hôpital aligns with the core principles of the contemporary “care theory”.

Lorand Gaspar was a lifelong mediator between cultures, mastering several languages and translating German literary works into French. Nevertheless, his own poems are relatively unknown in German-speaking countries, with only one major translation, Erde aller Erde (2005) by Joachim Sartorius. This article examines Gaspar’s presence in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, focusing on the limited translations and available academic studies. It provides a critical analysis of the inaccuracies in Thomas Augais’ essay and the mixed reception of Erde aller Erde in the German-language press. The study also examines Gaspar’s poetry reading at the Lyrik Kabinett in Munich in 2005 and sheds light on his personal connection to the German language. Finally, the article explores the potential of artificial intelligence as a tool for translating poetry, illustrated by a new translation of a Gaspar poem assisted by AI. This innovative approach could help to bridge the reception gap for foreign poets and make their works accessible to a wider audience.

Lorand Gaspar was a doctor of many talents (poet, essayist, translator, photographer, etc.), but beyond this simply accumulative vision, my “return” to Gasparian poetics seeks to perceive how these different activities contributed to the implementation of a commitment to perception and practical wisdom, based on the idea of knowledge that is fundamentally open to successive questioning and different forms of otherness. Taking as a starting point his notes on the practices of medicine in Feuilles d’Hôpital (2023), as well as his intermedial discourse in Carnets de Patmos (1998), my aim is to explore the ways of what I call Lorand Gaspar’s “poethics of translation”, which enabled him to anticipate the hermeneutic horizon of solicitude (or “care”) that has in the meantime established itself as a real turning point in the various fields of thought and art alike.

This study provides an analysis of Lorand Gaspar’s sequence of poems “Pierre” through the notion of enactive contemplation. The purpose of the paper is to investigate the forms of knowledge that are encoded in Lorand Gaspar’s literary language and to offer a comprehensive account of the ways in which poetic language expresses the perception of the real world and of the conceived-mental world through a philological analysis. From a theoretical point of view, the study is primordially grounded on phenomenological principles and on the cognitive science’s notion of enaction which allow to consider the poem as an interactive process rather than as a finished object, although it also refers to various tools of geopoetics and lyric theory in order to provide an argumentation of what poetic contemplation entails. The scope of the study is focused on the series “Pierre” but it can, nevertheless, be extrapolated to Gaspar’s poetics as a whole.

If translating poetry implies a poetic act aimed at recreating the poem’s essential unity of form and content, as well as the convergence of the elements that contribute to its semantic and rhythmic density, then the challenges raised by Lorand Gaspar’s poetry could not be approached without considering the function of rhythm in his work. Focusing in particular on Sol absolu et autres textes (1982), in which rhythm can be perceived as an expression of body and mind within language, the aim of this study is to analyze the English translation by Mary Ann Caws and Nancy Kline in order to explore how it captures and recreates the movement which is intrinsic to the original text.

Lorand Gaspar’s poetry seems to be a journey to the end of language, where word and world meet in a burst of light, a horizon where the intimacy of the self and its history lends a state of mystery to the approach to things, just as the landscape bathed in light suggests a sense of loss and rediscovery, of clarity and shadow, where being seems to hide and reveal itself at the same time. The earth (‘absolute soil’) is endowed with the capacity to reveal the valences of interiority, but also the markers of an itinerary of sacrificial knowledge and the poem’s condition of saying and at the same time hiding in its words an essential silence. The images of the desert, with its limpid, enveloping forms, appear as mirrors of the soul, experiences of the instant and detachments from the self, to reach a deeper attachment to nature, to the elements, to the voids and the fulls in the fabric of the world, whose identity seems to be made up of glimpses of otherness, of words, colours and forms, like the intense luminosity of a reflecting and encompassing gaze.

A significant part of Lorand Gaspar’s poetic approach is displayed in his reflections and representations that incorporate suggestions concerning his photographic practice. These elements reveal some important aspects of Gaspar’s epistemological and existential movement. Reading Gaspar’s poems is thus akin to exploring a dimension in which he responds to a “biological” need to see in order to orient himself both metaphorically and physically. In our study, we wish to highlight the photographer’s posture that Lorand Gaspar adopts even when he writes in verse, illustrating his predilection for certain themes strictly linked to the semantics of photography.

By reading the work of D. H. Lawrence, by choosing the poems to establish this anthology and by translating the texts selected in 1989 accompanied by Sarah Clair, Lorand Gaspar encountered questions similar to his own, on the systemic functioning of living things, on the approach of sensitive reality, on the presence of a transcendence not embodied but crossed by a living force, on the primordial question of time and the present moment to be grasped in its purest and greatest reality. More than a simple translation of the verses of D. H. Lawrence according to the principle of passage from one language to another, Lorand Gaspar experiences, in this work of translation, a real encounter which allows him to initiate a “dialogue” thanks to the poetry and written words. And, this dialogue will be interrogated to see all the poetic interactions between the two works and their consequences for the very poetry of Lorand Gaspar.

Lorand Gaspar, in his letters, a genre typically associated with intimate writing, blends the scientific, the poetic, and the literary. Linguistic and stylistic ambiguity is woven through a hybrid lexicon that draws from various fields. The interference of literary genres, along with poetry, creates a form of generic and transgeneric hybridity within Gaspar’s epistolary discourse. The letter writer frees himself from conventional genre codes just as he transcends spatial boundaries, allowing his thoughts and the identification of his “multiple” self to flow freely.