Cross Correspondence

With this edition of the Cross Correspondence (Correspondencia cruzada) entre Julián del Casal y Gustave Moreau we publish for the first time in Spanish the letters that Casal wrote to the painter Gustave Moreau.
Julián del Casal (Havana, 1863-1893) is one of the most important modernist poets in Latin America. In 1885, Casal discovered the pictorial work of Gustave Moreau through the descriptions that J. K. Huysmans proposed in his novel A contrapelo (1884). In love with these “sublime creations” he decided to compose several sonnets to celebrate them.
Despite the distance that separates Havana from Paris, the poet sends his verses to the French symbolist painter, and a correspondence is established between the two.
In 1892, Casal published his second book of poems, the third part of which was entitled “My ideal museum, paintings by Gustave Moreau”. A year later, Casal died of a rare lung disease without being able to realize his dream of personally meeting his “much-idolized master”, nor having seen his paintings except for black and white photographic copies.
This book collects for the first time all the elements of this story: the poems of “My ideal museum” and the cross correspondence in translations of Dominique Fernandez and Roger Herrera.

Dominique Fernandez (Paris, 1929) is a member of the French Academy and author of a considerable work that includes more than one hundred titles (novels, essays, travel chronicles). Italianist par excellence, having translated into French Sandro Penna or Pier Paolo Pasolini, this is the first translation that Fernandez, son of a Mexican intellectual, makes of a Spanish-speaking writer.
Roger Herrera (Havana, 1986) is deputy director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris and former professor of French at the Alliance Française in Havana. For more than ten years he has been studying the life and work of Julián del Casal.