The Nocturne Cities of César Moro: A Study in Oneiric Exile
Those who walk beside the margins of the canon often walk longer, stranger roads. One such traveller was Alfredo Quíspez-Asín, better known by his pseudonym César Moro (1903–1956), a Peruvian poet and painter who died mostly forgotten in Lima, some years after ceasing to believe in the redemptive promise of either Europe or the Americas. Moro’s literary and aesthetic existence was one of exile—exile from nationalism, from literary orthodoxy, from family, and finally from terrestrial comfort. And yet, the detritus of his life—fragmented as obsidian—is among the most lucid and incandescent metaphysical testaments to have been penned in Latin American surrealism.
Born into a middle-class family in Lima, Moro left for France in 1925 ostensibly to study at the Collège de la Mission Laïque Française, though he diverted quickly into the surrealist circles of Paris. He became the only Latin American poet to be fully incorporated into the French surrealist group during the movement’s formative years, contributing to landmark publications such as *Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution* and *Minotaure*. Moro wrote exclusively in French during much of this period, partially to distance himself from what he deemed the provinciality of Peruvian literature—a bold, even discomfiting gesture among his contemporaries. As he once wrote: “La patrie est une hallucination collective, et le poème est la trahison définitive” (“The homeland is a collective hallucination, and the poem is the definitive betrayal”).^1
This ethos of betrayal—never malicious, but ferociously ethical—underscores much of Moro’s lyrical output. His early work, including *La tortuga ecuestre* (1938), displays an insatiable appetite for symbolic rupture. Consider the line: “Ciels de l’inacceptable, je vous habite sans visage / et ma douleur est une ville sans mémoire.”^2 His metaphors form an architecture of internal exile; the poet builds cities not to dwell in them but to escape from them. Here, pain is spatialized; thought is topographical. Moro’s cities are not civic spaces but mental cartographies, mapping what Gaston Bachelard might have termed “the topography of intimate being.”^3
Yet Moro was never purely a French surrealist transplant with Incan roots. His return to Lima in 1934 and subsequent political involvement—particularly in support of Spanish anti-fascists and against Peruvian conservatism—began his metamorphosis from pure aesthetician to ethically engaged poet. Though his major theoretical writings remain untranslated, his collaboration with fellow poet Emilio Adolfo Westphalen and painter José Sabogal reveals a fertile crucible wherein surrealism was recalibrated for Latin American psychological climates. In Peru, surrealism became less a matter of dream transcription and more a politics of the sacred and profane.
A telling moment in Moro’s poetic diary comes in *Lettre d’amour* (1943), an unusually direct love poem wherein the surrealist arsenal—automatism, convulsions of imagery—is muted in favor of emotional veracity:
> “Je t’arrache de la nuit / comme une ville abandonnée / où tes mains cherchent encore le dernier incendie.”^4
Note here that love is configured as an archaeological salvage—a rescue not of the beloved, but of the last event that could still matter. The poem, like much of Moro’s output, brings us to a threshold: the place where time dehisces and psychological territory replaces chronology.
In reflecting on Moro, one cannot avoid a certain spiritual exhaustion, as if one has walked through an unfamiliar neighborhood at dusk and found every window sealed by black paper. But suppose we linger at one window—the one from which “le dernier incendie” might still be glimpsed. What then? This is where the reader meets Moro not as literary artifact but as philosophical provocateur.
I am thinking now of a line from a prose fragment, “L’Arc et le Ciel,” where Moro writes: “La mystique échoue dans le même piège que la science: croire que le réel est un donné. Il faut rêver d’un rêve qui n’est pas le nôtre, mais l’avenir de notre nuit.” (“Mysticism fails in the same trap as science: believing that the real is an absolute. One must dream a dream that is not one’s own, but the future of our night.”)^5 This is no mere chestnut of surrealist ambiguity, but a radical metaphysical assertion: that personal consciousness is insufficient and must grope toward a collective unconscious whose telos has not yet come.
To walk in Moro’s cities is to walk in premonitions and their ruins. He was not content with the mere dialectic between dream and reason. His method involved estranging both. In this, he is echoed—perhaps unwittingly—by the later work of Edmond Jabès, Paul Celan, and even the cinematic obliqueness of Andrei Tarkovsky. But Moro precedes them. He whispers into the syntax of dreams and shiver.
It is tempting to moralize Moro’s life: to see in him a prototype of queer resistance (he was openly homosexual at a time and place when such openness was dangerous), or a harbinger of post-national poetics. Both are true, yet in accepting these easy allegories, one loses the strangeness—the treacherous sublimity—of his writing. For Moro, the ethical act was not political as such but metaphysical. The real horror, he suggests, is that we have settled too comfortably into the hallucination of ourselves.
Toward the end of his life, Moro returned—physically—to Lima, spiritually perhaps to a place beyond language. He wrote less, painted through illness, and descended into a silence that was not resignation but vigilance. One of his final aphorisms, scribbled in the margin of a notebook, simply reads: “Il faut déserter même la désertion.” (“One must desert even desertion.”)
What are we to do with such counsel? Perhaps, like dark water, we are not to do anything with it but listen—to recognize that the nocturne cities of César Moro are not destinations but coordinates for a deeper interiority. His works, fragmentary and scorched, invite a confrontation not merely with one’s stylistic limitations but with time’s tacit refusal to provide asylum.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, surrealism, exile
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^1 César Moro, “Correspondance avec André Breton,” *Cahiers du Sud*, 1937.
^2 Moro, *La tortuga ecuestre*, ed. Westphalen, Lima: Editorial Gleiser, 1938, p. 27.
^3 Gaston Bachelard, *The Poetics of Space*, trans. Maria Jolas, Beacon Press, 1994, p. 10.
^4 César Moro, *Lettre d’amour*, 1943 manuscript, Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris.
^5 Moro, “L’Arc et le Ciel,” in *Oeuvres complètes*, ed. Karl Posso, Paris: Éditions Allia, 2001, p. 81.