# Severo Felipe Sarduy Aguilar **Date of birth:** February 25, 1937 **Date of death:** June 8, 1993 **Categories:** Arts, literature, narrator, poet, essayist Narrator, poet, essayist, man of theater and radio, he was a versatile artist and one of the fundamental figures of the so-called Latin American postboom. Son of a railroad worker, until the age of thirteen Severo Sarduy lived at a railroad crossing in Camagüey, in the center-east of Cuba, called Cuatro Compañeros. There he received his first education and began to write. In his native province he published, in Joffre's printing house, the avant-garde poem "Tres," dated in 1953. He completed his high school diploma in Sciences and Letters at the Institute of Secondary Education in 1955, the year he began his collaboration in the Havana magazine Ciclón. During those years he was linked to some poetic groups and collaborated in El Camagüeyano with part of his early poetry. In 1956 he moved to Havana to pursue university studies in Medicine, which he interrupted due to the closure of the University. That year he began working in the Editorial and New Ideas Department of the Panamericana Advertising Technical agency. He soon established contacts with the group centered around Virgilio Piñera and the magazine Ciclón, and collaborated in Carteles, El Mundo and Diario de la Marina. He also became involved with the group of plastic artists Los Once, and wrote presentation texts for exhibition programs. His poems were included by Samuel Feijóo in Colección de poetas de la ciudad de Camagüey (1958). After the revolutionary triumph of 1959, he collaborated in the newspaper Revolución, especially through its Nueva Generación page and its cultural supplement Lunes de Revolución. That same year he was one of the founders of the National Union of Cuban Young Playwrights; and he was part of the editorial board of the daily page Arte y Literatura, of Diario Libre, where numerous texts of his appeared. At the end of 1959 he obtained a scholarship from the Department of Culture of the Ministry of Education to study art criticism in Europe. After a few months in Madrid, he decided to settle in France permanently starting in 1960. From then on, Sarduy manifested himself as a tireless traveler who moved through America, Western Europe, Asia and Africa. The decisive relationship he maintained with the cultures of Asia and the Maghreb is due to the itinerary he followed in countries such as Turkey (1961), Morocco (1968), India (1971), Tunisia (1972), Indonesia (1973), Iran (1974), Algeria (1975), Sri Lanka (1976), Nepal (1978), Sikkim (1978) and Bhutan (1978). In Paris, he published his first book, Gestos (1962), studied art criticism at the École du Louvre, and was appointed titular student of the École Pratique des Hautes Études of the University of La Sorbona, where he studied Greek art as well as structuralist methodology with Roland Barthes. With this renowned French intellectual he maintained, from then on, a close friendship. He was linked to the structuralist group of the journal Tel Quel, in which he collaborated. For many years he worked as director of the Hispanoamerican Collection at the Du Seuil publishing house. He worked for a long time as editor and speaker for French Broadcasting. He was also host of Literatura en Debate, a Spanish-language program on Radio France International, where his journalistic work, sustained over thirty years, allowed him to produce programs dedicated to science and culture. Sarduy is also the author of several radio plays, some of which were awarded prizes in France and Italy. Among them are Dolores Rondón (1965), La playa (1971), La caída (1971), Relato (1971), Los matadores de Hormigas (1971) and Para la voz (1977). His theatrical piece La playa premiered in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1969; and for his novel Cobra he received the International Médicis Prize in 1972. In 1991 the Editorial Gallimard commissioned him with the relaunching of La Croix du Sud, the first collection specialized in Ibero-American literature created by Roger Caillois. In the last years of his life he devoted himself to painting with good critical success, and in 1993 he exhibited his work in Paris. Shortly thereafter he died as a result of AIDS, a disease that had been detected three years earlier. His novel Pájaros de la playa was published posthumously. Considered one of the most important representatives of the Latin American postboom, Severo Sarduy is also an exponent of postmodernity based on a literary work that was sustained in the baroque, in structuralist and post-structuralist theories about language, as well as in formal experimentation. His aesthetic ideology conforms a theory that contaminates all the genres through which he expressed himself, and which include theater, the novel and poetry. Sarduy's writing is characterized by its ornamentation and parodic spirit, which at times becomes parable. His works are nourished by a polysemy that ranges from the word to the narrative structure: the doubling can manifest itself, for example, in characters that exceed sexual boundaries or in his attempts at novel-poems, where the narrative was violated within its own limits. Supported by a great wealth of information and vast culture, Sarduy took advantage of areas of knowledge ranging from cosmology to kitsch, from structuralism to neobaroque theory, from the languages of mass media to the fabric of language itself. Furthermore, he established connections with psychoanalysis and with the language theories of Jacques Lacan. On the other hand, Sarduy's literary work refers to horizons as suggestive and diverse as Afro-Cuban religions, Hispanic baroque, Taoist painting, structuralism or the art of disguise and tattoo; which he knew how to combine to open new paths for contemporary creation. With Gestos (1963), Sarduy initiated the so-called novelistics of the Revolution, and with it also began a narrative spatial journey, of broad coordinates: it begins in eastern Cuba, with other works such as De donde son los cantantes (1967), then extends to Europe with Cobra (1973), moves to the Far East with Maitreya (1978), and returns to America with Colibrí (1983) and Cocuyo (1990). All are novels structured and written under the ideas that Sarduy expresses in his essays Escrito sobre un cuerpo (1969), Barroco (1974) and La simulación (1982): above all language as body and body as text, transvestism and the expressive richness of the Latin American literary tradition. In his essay work, Sarduy constructs a strong theoretical discourse of semiotic and culturological reflection. In it he proposes, among other ideas, that the profound transculturation of the Caribbean has produced intense carnivalization, since continuous inversions of cultural values take place. Likewise, Cuban and Caribbean culture is perceived from dialogism, that is, through the intense crossing of multiple codes: linguistic, mythical, ritual, architectural or culinary... On the other hand, in "El barroco y el neobarroco" (1972), Sarduy first proposed the term neobaroque, which was incorporated into the critical works of many European philosophers, among them especially the Italian Omar Calíbrese in the book L´età neobarocca (1987). Sarduy's proposal of Latin American and Caribbean neobaroque is related to fractal geometry and other mathematical perspectives that allowed him to create the concept of retombée (French word meaning 'relapse'). Based on the study of historical baroque, Sarduy affirmed that the ellipse (in relation to Kepler's laws) falls back or underlies in the poetics of Góngora, in the paintings of Caravaggio or in the architecture of Borromini; supported by this theory of the bicentricity of the ellipse, Sarduy explained that reality is transgressive by nature. Among the multiple literary references of Sarduy, the readings of José Lezama Lima stand out, whose imprint he manifests in his essay "El heredero". Lezama provided him with the paradigm of interpretation of insular reality, the "oblique" perspective to understand the world, and the harmonious integration of Cuban culture with the universal. On the other hand, the influence of Octavio Paz also stands out, with whom he shared the fascination for India, the discovery of the Orient, the awareness of its otherness and the faith in the poetic word, something that also related him to his readings of Rubén Darío, Ramón de Valle Inclán, or Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Sarduy's dramaturgy consists of six texts: La playa, La caída, Relato, Los matadores de hormigas, Tanka and Je vous écoute. All are characterized by brevity, deeply questioning nature, scenic experimentation, freedom of writing, integration of specific languages from various areas of culture, confluence of diverse voices, temporal alternation, dissolution of characters and alternation of roles in theatrical representation. On the other hand, these are works that insist on sonic chaos, on the superposition of voices and on the communication of movements and scenographic effects, all of which converges with Sarduy's ideas about language, body and baroque. In his last novel, Pájaros de la playa (1993), Sarduy offers testimony of his suffering and the increasing deterioration of his own body, affected by AIDS. The work, set in a clinic, is dedicated to documenting the process and development of a disease that is never identified, and the symptoms develop through various infected characters and an extensive list of drugs that are enumerated. Present in the novel is the notion of a "fall," the feeling of marginalization and resentment against others. It is an intense reflective process that at times borders on the ironic and the carnivalesque, and which stands as an antithesis to the creative effect of the Big Bang, an idea developed in his previous work. If before the spirit of his works was playful and parodic, in this final novel it is almost philosophical. Now the body is not seen either from its artistic dimension, but as corrupt matter in full disintegration. Works Novels Gestos. 1963 De donde son los cantantes. 1967 Cobra. 1972. Maitreya. 1978. Colibrí. 1984. Cocuyo. 1990. Pájaros en la playa 1993 Essay: Escrito sobre un cuerpo. 1969. Barroco. 1974. La simulación. 1982 El cristo de la Rue Jacob. 1987. Nueva inestabilidad. 1987. Ensayos generales sobre el barroco. 1987. Poetry: Flamenco. 1970. Mood Indigo. 1970 Overdose 1972. Big Bang. 1974. Daiquiri. 1980 Un testigo fugaz y disfrazado. 1985 Radio script: La playa. 1971. La caída. 1971. Relato. 1971. Los matadores de Hormigas. 1971. Para la voz. 1977.