The Love of César Moro

Beatriz Hausner 

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From the outset, when delving into translating César Moro’s poetry, a strange siblinghood established itself, stirring the poet in me.  Translating, transferring poetics from one language to another does teach one. Translation is, without question, the deepest reading. With Moro, however, something else was at work: his imagery, the sheer force of his expression of Eros, caused the pieces of the puzzle that was my poetics to change in ways I could not have envisioned during those early attempts at translating his work. As I progressed, I experienced a marvelling at his expression of the beloved’s ecstasy ¾ his for his guys, mine for mine ¾, an intensity taken to the point of annihilation of the self through love for the Other.

The revelation came while translating César Moro’s “Carta de amor,” which I had first read in a Spanish translation by Ricardo Silva-Santisteban in La tortuga ecuestre y otros textos, a selection of his poetry published by Monte Avila Editores (Caracas, 1976). That book came into our home soon after its publication. I assume that Ludwig Zeller, my late stepfather bought it at Macondo Books, a bookstore my parents would visit during their periodic pilgrimages to New York City in search of literary resources entirely lacking in Toronto at the time. In fact, it was through Ludwig that I first heard of “Carta de amor.”

“Lettre d’amour” was created in Mexico, during a period of César Moro’s life that would prove transformative and extremely fruitful.  The manuscript of the poem, written in long hand by Moro, and dated 1942, was first published in 1944 in Mexico City by Éditions Dyn,  Wolfgang Paalen’s extraordinary publishing imprint, in a limited edition of 50 copies, with an original etching signed by Alice Paalen (née Rahon). 

The first Spanish translation was by Moro’s lifelong friend, the Peruvian poet Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, who published it in his Las moradas (eight issues, between 1947 and 1948), an immensely influential literary magazine, which would provide access, in Spanish translation, to the newest literary values of international literature to a new generation of Latin American creators.  Moro became an assiduous contributor to Las moradas, with articles as wide ranging as his take on the effects of dream in Marcel Proust’s “El sueño de la cena de Guermantes” (his translation), his impressions of Mexico City, translations of French poets like Pierre Reverdy and his surrealist colleagues (including a two-part translation of Leonora Carrington’s Down Under, which she’d just written), as well as book reviews.

The fact that César Moro wrote his most famous and emblematic Spanish poem in French proves that translation can effectuate enormous influence over a literary culture. The significance of this fact can’t be understated: roughly one half of Moro’s poetry is known and has come to influence successive generations of Latin American poets in Spanish translation1. “Lettre d’amour” exemplifies this phenomenon.

Born Alfredo Quíspez Asín in 1903 in Lima, Peru, Moro’s trajectory begins as a visual artist, with shows and publications of his art before he turned twenty. By then he had adopted the name César Moro. His earliest known poetry dates from that period. In 1925, in response to the oppressive conservatism of Peruvian society, Moro moved to Paris, where he would remain for the next decade. It was there that he became a French-language poet and became a member of the surrealist movement: he actively formed part of the Paris group’s activities, participated in their tracts and inquests, and published his poetry in their magazines. He returned to Lima in 1933, where he established a strong presence in the burgeoning literary and artistic scene. With the police after him, due to his political activities, in 1938 Moro moved to Mexico City, where he would come to write the largest part of his oeuvre in Spanish. Moro became a central figure of the literary and cultural renaissance that would see Mexico become home to artists, writers and publishers escaping the Spanish Civil war, as well as World War II. During this period of immense creative energy his work appeared in the major avant-garde publications of Mexico, including El hijo pródigo, where he published consequential articles. Notable among them is his response to Arcane 17, the book-length poem André Breton wrote during his sojourn in Québec (August to November of 1944).  Arcane 17 was first published in New York by Brentano’s in early 1945, in a limited edition that included colour illustrations by Roberto Matta. Moro’s review of Breton’s famous work was mostly unfavourable: his criticism focused on Breton’s insistence on love of the Other as being strictly heterosexual. Moro frames his view by criticizing Breton’s failure to keep up with developments in psychology. When one considers that César Moro was writing ground breaking homoerotic poetry, while at the same time openly differing with his friend André Breton on the crucial issue of sexuality, one can’t but be astonished at his courage and honesty.

“Love Letter” signals a change in Moro’s poetics. There is flexibility, ease at expressing wildness and strangeness, combined with the stylistic elegance of the poetry he had been writing in French. It is as if his bilingualism, instead of constraining his expression, worked as a liberator of his voices, allowing him to invent an entirely new diction. What force, or event could have triggered Moro’s poetic liberation? More precisely, who could have inspired such an extraordinary love poem? It is a question that haunted me until I delved into the second important compilation of César Moro’s work, Obra poética (Lima: Instituto Nacional de Cultura, 1980), where I found six, until then unpublished texts, which function as letters to someone by the name of Antonio A.M., whom Moro had met in 1939, a year after his arrival in Mexico. Written originally in Spanish the letters contain many of the elements that Moro would incorporate into “Lettre d’amour.” The tonalities of the letters come through the French, only more densely so, rendered through Moro’s scintillating imagery, where elements contrary and often strange in the extreme come into juxtaposition with one another, in order to build a kind of cosmic landscape for the beloved.

Another text corresponding to the same cycle of letters, closely modeled on the enumerative manner of André Breton’s legendary “L’union libre,” has Moro using his beloved’s name as the start of each line:

Translation is a transformative experience, and translating the work of César Moro has taught me how to express Eros through poetry: writing sex can be as pleasurable as having it.

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Date

February 12, 2023