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De trop t'avoir fixé ô pierre
Me voilà dans l'exil
Parlant un langage de pierre
Aux oreilles du vent.
-César Moro, "Pierre mère"
Introduction: The City of Their Discontent
During his relatively short life (1903-56), the Peruvian César Moro distinguished himself as a painter, a writer of poetry and prose, an editor, and a translator, although the scope of his contributions to Latin American art and literature has only recently begun to be appreciated.1 As many critics have noted, Moro inhabited a space of multiple marginalities, not least of which was his situation as a homosexual whose "scandalous" life was at odds with the rigid society of Lima in which he came of age.2 In the words of Ricardo Silva-Santisteban, Moro was "[u]n poeta peruano pero un poeta exiliado, no sólo de su idioma materno o por haber permanecido una larga temporada en Europa y luego en México . . . sino, sobre todo, por haberse sentido aislado y disconforme en su propia tierra, a la que siempre vio como hosca y salvaje" (27-28).
In order to understand the various marginalities Moro inhabited, and the sui generis poetic work that emerged from them, it is helpful to locate Moro within a constellation of Peruvian writers and intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century who evinced a shared set of attitudes with respect to their place of origin-their version of what Alberto Escobar has aptly termed the "imaginario nacional" of the era.9 These attitudes held the city of Lima to be hopelessly bourgeois, stagnant, and closed to innovative energies. Against this presumably backwards locale, in which artistic creation could not flourish, stood Europe-and in particular Paris-as the great incubator of creative minds. The sense of frustration with the contemporary culture of the patria-the common response to which was an exodus for months, years, or an entire lifetime-had already been modeled for Moro by such Peruvian luminaries as Abraham Valdelomar and José Carlos Mariátegui.4 Moro's own journeys also find echoes in those of his contemporaries César Vallejo, who traveled to Paris in 1923 at the age of thirty-one, never to return, and the lesser-known but important writer and critic Xavier Abril, who spent most of the decade between 1926 and 1936 in Europe. Even Moro's...