Sarduy, Severo. Cobra. Translated by Suzanne Jill Devine. First Edition. New York, Dutton, 1975. 22 cm. XI, 176 pages. Original hardcover with illustrated dustjacket in Protective Mylar. Excellent condition with only very minor signs of external wear. This volume combines two avante-garde novels, published in 1972 and 1978, respectively, by this Cuban expatriate author. Both deal with a main character who undergoes a metamorphosis. ([Library Journal] Amazon).

Cobra

SARDUY, Severo

Dutton

Text: English, Spanish (translation)

Maitreya (English and Spanish Edition)

Levine, Suzanne Jill

Literature & Fiction

Ediciones Del Norte

Essays by the author of Cobra and Maitreya exploring literature, painting, simulation in animals and humans as well as the ideas of Barthes, Derrida, and Kristeva. "An important document in the history of Latin American literary criticism."--Alfred MacAdam, Review

Written on a Body

History & Criticism

Lumen Books

For Voice

United States

Latin American Literary Review Press

Fiction. Translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine and Carol Maier. In his lifetime Severo Sarduy was best known for his exquistely wrought neo-baroque prose, but he was also an abstract painter and wrote plays and poetry in addition to fiction and essays. He abandoned medical school as a young man to pursue the world of art and literature, leaving his native Cuba shortly after the Revolution in 1960. He later became associated with the Parisian literary scene of the 1960's and 70's and later became a French citizen. Of his work Bruce Benderson writes, "Severo Sarduy was a baroque comedian and a callused workhorse in one...Each jewel-like sentence is structured with tawdry detail, only to unfold like a paper origami trick into new and more convoluted gesticulation, a new sacrilige."

Beach Birds

Otis Books | Seismicity Editions

Barroco and Other Writings (Cultural Memory in the Present)

Arts & Photography

Stanford University Press

Born in eastern Cuba, Sarduy studied at the University of Havana, and, with Guillermo Cabrera Infante, was one of the few writers involved in the fight against Batista. At an early age he was made publisher of the Lunes de Revolucion, the official organ of the 26th of July Movement. In 1960 he left for Paris.In Paris Sarduy became the editor of the Latin American collection of Editions du Seuil, and became involved with the Tel Quel group. Among the books he introduced to the French were Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Lezama Lima's Paradiso. Sarduy himself, meanwhile, published several works including Escrito sobre un cuerpo (Written on a Body), Maitreya, Colibri, La simulacion, Overdose, and Daiquiri, a book of poems that uses Baroque prosody to describe gay sex in explicit terms.De Donde son los cantantes (From Cuba with a Song) was Sarduy's first truly experimental work. Divided into three sections, each corresponding to the ethnic groups that make up Cuban nationality (Spanish, African, and Chinese), the book explores the disparate elements at work in Latin American culture. Culture, for Sarduy, is a series of radical and often violent displacements and errors. Transvestitism becomes the common denominator as a symbol of transformation (physical and spiritual) and delusion. As Gonzalez Echevarria observes, "In De Donde son los cantantes, the characters look as if they're made up for a carnival that will let loose their deepest and weirdest fantasies. Sarduy's novel exposes the complicity between the novel's conventions and society's patriarchal structure. He denounces the quest for Latin American identity as yet another ideological maneuver by essentially epic novelists who want to strengthen the hold of the mechanisms of authority."

From Cuba With a Song (Sun & Moon Classics)

Sun & Moon Press

Firefly is a dream-like evocation of pre-war Cuba, replete with hurricanes, mystical cults and slave-markets. The story is the coming-of-age of a precocious and exuberant boy with an oversized head and underdeveloped sense of direction, who views the world as a threatening conspiracy. Told in breathless and lyrical prose, the novel is a loving rendition of a long-lost home, a meditation on exile, and an allegory of Cuba’s isolation in the world.

Firefly

Archipelago

About the Author\nNovelist, poet, painter, and literary theorist, Severo Sarduy was one of the most groundbreaking Latin American writers of the twentieth century. Born in Camagüey, Cuba in 1937, he moved to Havana in 1956 to study medicine, but soon gave up his scientific pursuits for the arts. Often homoerotic and imbued with allusions to art, the absent or decaying body, the history of science, jazz and folk music, and the author's Spanish, African, and Chinese heritage, Sarduy's poetry has rarely appeared in translation, but his literary oeuvre was vast. Gabriel García Márquez once called Sarduy the best writer in the Spanish language. Richard Howard hailed Sarduy as a writer who "has everything...so brilliant, so funny, and so bewilderingly apt in his borrowings, his derivations, as well as in his inventions." Sarduy's neo-baroque style influenced such Spanish-language novelists as Mario Vargas Llosa, Juan Goytisolo, and Carlos Fuentes. From 1960 until the time of his death, the poet lived in Paris where he worked with Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and many others, on the literary magazine Tel Quel. Sarduy died due to complications with AIDS in 1993. Severo is the author of BEACH BIRDS (Otis Books / Seismicity Editions, 2007) and FOOTWORK: SELECTED POEMS (Circumference Books, 2021).\nPoetry. Latinx Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Cuban Studies. Translated by David Francis. Cuban writer Severo Sarduy was one of the most groundbreaking Latin American literary figures of the 20th-Century. His poems are acrobatic in content and form, innovative, and also part of a deep lineage and web of connection. David Francis translated the poems from Spanish into a gripping English. He writes, FOOTWORK is "a body of work that sings on its own, that celebrates the carnal life, the sensual experiences of dance, of painting, food, music, and sexual pleasure, but that also recognizes --in these pleasures --the imminence of one's passing." 
Although Sarduy's novels have been translated into English and received praise from such writers as Roland Barthes, Richard Howard, and James McCourt, this is the first collection of his poetry to appear in English translation. FOOTWORK represents work from throughout Sarduy's life, following the thrilling trajectory of a great thinker. 
Sarduy invents new forms to engage questions of identity, specifically how his own and Cuba's Spanish, African, and Chinese heritage is intrinsically intertwined with Cuba's history of slavery and indentured labor. As Francis writes, "Severo Sarduy was not known to follow convention. Nor did he think that conventional approaches to storytelling or lyrical composition could capture the complexities of human behavior or personal and national identity." The title, FOOTWORK, "recognizes how Sarduy's poems deliver devastating wit, which lands on its prototypical feet or adroitly maneuvers, purposefully, around naming objects, people, or body parts and toward unexpected endings," writes Francis. The poetry in FOOTWORK makes it clear why Gabriel GarcÃa MÃ¡rquez once called Sarduy the best writer in the Spanish language. 
"Baroque, yes, as we expect from the great Severo Sarduy: but these poems are also severe, mathematical, futurist, neoclassical, occasional, private, courtly, and lubricated. Some of the poems come from the heady world of poststructuralism, but most come from a Caravaggio-like sepulchral grotto, where a lush and explicit eroticism meets up with the sculpted and the shaped. Fixity is everywhere in this volume: fate fixes Sarduy, just as the seam between sex and language fixates his verse. David Francis's translations are a labor of love, executed with ingenuity and a voluptuary fineness." --Wayne Koestenbaum\nBook Description\nGroundbreaking poetry from Cuban writer Severo Sarduy, who Gabriel GarcÃa MÃ¡rquez called Sarduy the best writer in the Spanish language.

Footwork: Selected Poems

David Francis (Translator)

Poetry

Circumference Books

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