The Equestrian Turtle and Other Poems 
La tortuga ecuestre y otros poemas

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César Moro

Translated from the Spanish by Leslie Bary and Esteban Quispe

The Equestrian Turtle is one of the most remarkable poetic collections of twentieth-century Peru and a key Surrealist text.

Written in Mexico in 1938-1939 and published in Lima in 1957, this cycle of poems is an oblique chronicle of the poet’s relationship with the Mexican army officer Antonio Acosta. Exiled from Peru for political reasons, Moro spent the next ten years in Mexico, where he composed the thirteen poems included in the original publication of The Equestrian Turtle. This volume also includes four poems written for the collection but ultimately omitted, five closely related poems from this period, and seven “Letters to Antonio,” written in poetic prose. The letters, emerging from daily life, provide a fascinating complement to the poetry. Translators Leslie Bary and Esteban Quispe worked from the scholarly edition Obra poética completa (Alción Editora, 2015), one of at least eight editions published in Spanish. While the book has been translated into French, German, Italian, and Portuguese, this is the first bilingual edition in Spanish and English.

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Poetry | Paperback | Bilingual edition
172 pages | 6.5x6.5 in
April 15, 2025 | ISBN 978-1-945720-35-2
Typesetting and design by Mutandis
Covers letterpress printed with Bidon Community Print & Design Studio
The publication of this book was made possible in part by grants from the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures and the Poetry Foundation

 Praise 

César Moro’s The Equestrian Turtle joins Alice Rahon’s Shapeshifter and Joyce Mansour’s Emerald Wounds in making available in English important work written under Breton’s influence but excluded from Surrealism’s official history. In this document of romantic devotion and erotic obsession, Moro offers his own “delirious, sublime interpretation of reality,” a sensorium as open to “The total loss of speech of breath” as to “The fine, secluded odor of your armpits.” Bary’s and Quispe’s marvelous translations honor the “shattered economy” of the love affair while also admitting us into the felt presence of Moro’s beloved with his “fabulous, smoky mane.” Lit by love’s “incendiary body,” these queer poems burn with hallucinatory and rhapsodic immediacy.

César Moro's only Spanish-language collection The Equestrian Turtle is beautifully translated by Leslie Bary and Esteban Quispe who capture the fever pitch of flaming and naked love and Moro’s mantic voice. This collection is shaped by surrealism and the eros of Spanish and Quechua’s hybrid energy, and I’m thrilled for readers to discover this canonical work of Peruvian literature.

Healthy love can't begin its anodyne project of care without first setting lovers low, casting each as a subject in the other's empire. Desire your subjugation too much and empire can only react with disdain, cast you into exile, wandering the boulevard in a city that's no longer yours. In the park, were those copulating turtles? Did you recognize your monstrous love in the way their forms persist through millennia? Hideous beast, try to exceed your lover's sovereignty by proving no one can hound and harm you like you. To the innocent, your power will look like peace, to everyone else, it will read like poetry.

 Author 

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.  


 Translators 

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.

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