Cesar Moro

Alfredo Quíspez-Asín Mas, known as César Moro, (Lima, August 19, 1903 - January 10, 1956) was a poet and surrealist painter Peruvian. After self-taught training, he signed his first work, a modernist drawing, in 1921 as "César Moro", the name chosen by him (apparently found in a novel by Ramón Gómez de la Serna) and with which from from that moment he would move around the world. Much of his poetry is written in French, during his long period of stay in Paris. In it he will interact with the top brass of French surrealism, such as André Breton and Paul Éluard.

Life

Born in Lima, he was the son of Jesús Quíspez Asín and María Elvira Mas Puch. His father, a well-to-do doctor from Ica, died early from Bright's disease in 1908, leaving his mother to care for him and his two brothers, one of them the future painter Carlos Maybe Asin.

He studied at the Jesuit College of La Inmaculada and, during his youth, adopted the name César Moro from a character in the story Reverte I, written by Ramón Gómez de la Serna. About this, André Coyné, who was a close friend and lover of the poet, said:

The most common thing is that one accepts the name he was born with. There will be one who thinks that what he determined Moro to remove Quispez Asin was already Carlos who could make the last name sound. But no; it was something deeper. Not well he began to feel the owner of a vocation, although he had a lot of doubts about it, he also began to feel the contrarity that existed between it and the name all — a first name and a last name — that he familiarly assumed.

Along with adopting a new name, More chose to make several changes to his life. In 1925, he traveled to Paris, where he tried different artistic disciplines during that stage, attended dance classes at the Ballet Academy, an activity that he ended up abandoning for health reasons, as well as painting and poetry. In 1926, he presented his first pictorial exhibition and, in 1927, the second, both received favorably by critics.

In 1928, he entered surrealism and began writing poems in French. In the period between 1928 and 1934, he continued his European activities in the field of painting but, above all, in that of poetry (Ces poèmes) and returned to Lima at the end of 1933. In 1935, together with the Peruvian poet Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, he organized the first surrealist exhibition in Latin America, at the Alcedo Academy in Lima. In addition to Moro himself, the Chileans Jaime Dvor, Waldo Parraguez, Gabriela Rivadeneira, Carlos Sotomayor and María Valencia participated in it, who had already carried out an abstract art exhibition in their country in 1933. From this exhibition, she starred in a polemic, perhaps the fiercest of the Vanguard, against the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro, whom she accused of "plagiarism", "imitator of Pierre Reverdy & # 34; # 3. 4; and "glory-hungry writer".

In 1938, and for political reasons, (he, along with Moreno Jimeno and Westphalen made the bulletin CADRE, for friends of the Spanish Republic) Moro left his country and took refuge in Mexico where he stayed for ten years in which he continued with his pictorial and poetic activities. During his stay in Mexico, he had a relationship with a young soldier named Antonio Acosta, who inspired the poem entitled ANTONIO is God and what was his best-known work: The equestrian turtle, titled that way due to the author's predilection for these animals. After his death, a number of letters written by the author were published, several of them addressed to Antonio.

I'm free of desire. I live inside him and he's no longer suffering from him. It is no longer multiple in purpose, if polyphacetic in desire. I no longer live but in desire. Wishing to see all the trees and the sky, the water and the air in you. My life has become simple, clear, fiery, clean. If I don't love it! It would be the 100-year war of my way. The dispersed fronts. Now the battle is one, one his fragor. I can give you all the names: sky, life, alphabet, air I breathe. If everything is you, my desire is one in its end. But if you are sometimes presented as air or light, I do not wish, nor live, and I am blind. Megalomania of love. What a delirium of greatness can match you. Or a desire for his only greatness, his only brightness. In your desire all repressed, exalted, demential, absurd forms are solved and made (... tives). Reality grows and death does not exist for the first time. Letter II to Antonio Acosta, 1939.

As for The Equestrian Tortoise, it could not be published at the time either because the number of subscribers could not be reached, despite the fact that it was announced that It would come out with a cover by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, finally being released in 1957 by Coyné. In Mexico, he only managed to publish Chateau de Grisou (1942) and Lettre d'amour (1943), the only collections of his poems published during his lifetime. There was another book that Moro wrote in Mexico: Pierre de Soleils, which perhaps inspired the title of Octavio Paz's most famous poem.

In 1940, he organized with the painter Wolfgang Paalen and the writer André Breton the Fourth International Surrealism Exhibition for the Gallery of Mexican Art. Moro wrote the prologue where he says that "Surrealism is the magic word of the century".

After her breakup with Antonio, Moro had other couples in Mexico, although none of them were long-lasting, returning to Lima in 1948. That year he began working as a professor at the Leoncio Prado Military College, where he taught French by the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. In 1955, he finished one of his main works, Amour à mort .

On January 10, 1956, he died of leukemia. André Coyné continued with the work of collecting, editing and disseminating his works.

Style

For More, poetry is a vital experience. Moro's work is one more poetic gesture within his own life. His encounter with surrealism in France marks a large part of his style. Among his most notable references are Francis Picabia and Pablo Picasso in the field of painting, while Benjamin Péret, André Breton and Paul Éluard influenced him in literature. In his works, More plots a relationship between love and madness as the pillar of his reasons for being: individual liberation and the liberation of the human being through imagination and dreams. In his review of the book Trajectoire du Rêve by André Breton, Moro refers to these themes as part of poetry:

In sleep and sleep, the capital problems of man must be solved: love, madness: poetry, revolution.

Being a passionate man who did not conform to conventions, his life was not free of scandals and, always following his own ethics, he continued the search for a truth far from that presented to him by the world around him, mixing topics such as the ridicule of existence and the world with the force of desire. A clear example of this is his most famous work, The Equestrian Tortoise, a set of thirteen poems in which Moro delves into the attraction of the senses in a world in which it can only exist by freeing it from its earthly burden, love, bodily possession and passion.

In the great contact of oblivion

a certain dead

trying to rob you of reality

to the deafening rumor of the real

a statue of purest fango

of my blood

of lucid shadow of untouched hunger

to boast endless.

The Equestrian Turtle, 1938

His style would change with time and his return to Peru, giving way to a less wild and surreal writing. About this, Coyné maintains:

The two texts in which Moro ratifies his break with Orthodox surrealism are 1944 and 1945, when the publication of the number 4 VVV and the new book of Breton Arcane 17 (Arcane 17). For years, Moro had confused surrealism and poetry. Henceforth, poetry will antecede to surrealism, or rather it will desist from applying any canon, recognizing it outside of any qualification.

Work

Poetics

• The equestrian turtle, its only book in Spanish (written in 1938 and published in 1957)
• Letters (1939);
• Lettre d'amour (1939);
• The castle of Grisú (1941);
• L'homme du paradisier et autres textes (1944);
• Trafalgar Square (1954);
• Amour à mort (1955).

Prose

• Sulphur glasses (1958). Most of his prose work collected by André Coyné.

Theater

• He wrote only one play called "The rooster eye", five-page work that has been represented twice in Lima under the direction of Rubén Quiroz.