Julián del Casal

In 1941, a young José Lezama Lima, the Cuban poet, essayist, and novelist—who would go on to author the polemically erotic neobaroque masterwork Paradiso (1966) and essays on cultural expression in the Americas, such as “La expresión americana” (1957)—published an article in a Havana newspaper on the late-nineteenth-century queer Cuban modernista poet Julián del Casal that advocated for a decolonial poetics of reception and failure and a creative use of the artist’s archive. This is the first published English translation of Lezama Lima’s “Julián del Casal.”