The Equestrian Turtle

Our translation of Peruvian Surrealist César Moro’s collection The Equestrian Turtle is due out from Cardboard House Press in April, 2025. You can pre-order your copy from Asterism Books.

César Moro (Lima, Peru, 1903-1956) was a 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.

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, The Equestrian Turtle is an oblique chronicle of the love affair Moro had in Mexico with Antonio Acosta, a military man. The critic José Miguel Oviedo observed that the experience of reading this text was as “to dive into a sea full of turtles, lichens and strange fish and emerge to moonlit wanderings on bleak terrain.”

Moro fragments not only perspective but also body and voice in these land and seascapes, or in Oviedo’s words, these “visions of violence and risk, dream and falling,” on which images of Antonio’s body are superimposed. Love is a transfiguration that shatters the self but also establishes a poetic language, and recreates the lovers as non-human actors in a natural world that both crowns and subsumes them.