VISION OF MOTH-EATEN PIANOS FALLING TO RUIN / VISIÓN DE PIANOS APOLILLADOS CAYENDO EN RUINAS

A man in a frock coat representing incest
Receiving congratulations from incest’s hot wind
An exhausted rose holds up a bird’s corpse
Leaden bird where do you keep your basket of song
And the rations for your serpentine brood of watch chains
Once you are done with death you will be a drunken compass
A halter waiting on the bed for a dying gentleman from the Pacific islands sailing a divine and cretinous musical turtle
You will be a mausoleum for plague victims or a fleeting equilibrium between two trains colliding
While the plaza fills with smoke and rubbish as it rains cotton rice water onions and traces of highest archaeology
A skillet gilded with my mother’s portrait
A grassy embankment with three coal statues on it
Eight sheets of paper handwritten in German
A few blue-nosed weekdays made of cardboard
Beard hairs from various presidents of the Peruvian Republic driving themselves like stone arrows into the pavement and producing a violent patriotism in people with bladder infections.
You will be a tiny volcano prettier than three thirsty dogs curtsying and swapping advice on how to grow wheat in mothballed pianos.

*

El incesto representado por un señor de levita
Recibe las felicitaciones del viento caliente del incesto
Una rosa fatigada soporta un cadáver de pájaro
Pájaro de plomo dónde tienes el cesto del canto
y las provisiones para tu cría de serpientes de reloj
Cuando acabes de estar muerto serás una brújula borracha
Un cabestro sobre el lecho esperando un caballero moribundo de las islas del Pacifico que navega en una tortuga musical divina y cretina
Serás un mausoleu a las víctimas de la peste o un equilibrio pasajero entre dos trenes que chocan
Mientras la plaza se llena de humo y de paja y llueve algodón arroz agua cebollas y vestigios de alta arqueología
Una sartén dorada con un retrato de mi madre
Un banco de césped con tres estatuas de carbón
Ocho cuartillas de papel manuscritas en alemán
Algunos días de la semana en cartón con la nariz azul
Pelos de barba de diferentes presidentes de la República del Perú clavándose como flechas de piedra en la calzada y produciendo un patriotismo violento en los enfermos de la vejiga.
Serás un volcán minúsculo más bello que tres perros sedientos haciéndose reverencias y recomendaciones sobre la manera de hacer crecer el trigo en pianos fuera de uso.

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from The Equestrian Turtle and Other Poems / La tortuga ecuestre y otros poemas–published by Cardboard House Press

Buy it here

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César Moro (Lima, Peru, 1903-1956) was a queer poet, painter and art critic, and a central figure in the transatlantic avant-gardes of the twentieth century. Living in France for much of the 1920s and 30s and writing in French, he was the only Latin American writer to participate in the original Surrealist movement and contribute to journals like Le surréalisme au service de la Révolution and Violette Nozières. In Mexico, where he lived from the late 1930s through most of the 40s, he worked with André Breton to create the Fourth International Surrealist Exhibition, collaborated with Wolfgang Paalen on the international Surrealist magazine DYN, and translated writers like Hans Arp, Leonora Carrington, Paul Éluard, and Benjamin Péret. Although he published poems and essays in Peru, Mexico, and Argentina throughout his life, The Equestrian Turtle is his only book in Spanish. Moro’s papers, including an important series of letters to Emilio Adolfo Westphalen and other unpublished works, are housed at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.

Leslie Bary teaches Latin American literature and theory at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She has published on Peruvian poets Emilio Adolfo Westphalen and César Vallejo, Spanish-American modernismo, the Brazilian avant-gardes, and the question of cultural identity in Latin American writing. She is the translator of Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto antropófago (1928). Recent work on Gloria Anzaldúa and Denise Ferreira da Silva is part of her current book project, That Discerning Eye: Race and the State in Modern Latin American Literature.

Esteban Quispe is a poet, translator, and independent researcher with an M.A. in French (University of Louisiana at Lafayette 2024) whose background is in both Peru and French Louisiana. His current research delves into various aspects of orality and poetics in French and Creole Louisiana. In César Moro’s The Equestrian Turtle, he discovered the watery, mutable depths of Spanish and French surrealist poetry, which led him to the very foundations of surrealist poetry and, ultimately, to the roots of poetry itself. His translations have been published in Asymptote, Tripwire, and Alchemy.