MÉRIDA, Mexico – The typewriter of Cuban Severo Sarduy was treasured in the Caja de Letras, of the Cervantes Institute in Madrid, the independent magazine recently reported Regular.
The artifact, an Olympia Splendid 6, was delivered to the high security chamber, which holds objects relevant to Hispanic American culture, by the Venezuelan editor Gustavo Guerrero, executor of the Camagüeyan.
“Nobody wrote about tattoos in the 1970s, about gender issues, diversity and the LGTBIQ+ group (in Cobra, published in 1971, the protagonist is a transvestite) or about the relationship between literature and technology. All this makes him a very contemporary writer,” Guerrero said at the award ceremony that took place in early July in Madrid, on the occasion of LGTBIQ+ Pride Week.
The ceremony was also attended by the director of Cervantes, Luis García Montero; the director general for real and effective equality for LGTBIQ+ people of the Spanish Ministry of Equality, Julio del Valle de Íscar; the deputy director of International Relations of the Institute and representative of “Exterior es Diverse”, Philippe Robertet, and as an honorary witness, the director of Culture of the institution, Raquel Caleya.
“Seven novels, eight books of poetry, six essays and five plays constitute, together with his artistic work, the essence of a legacy that refers to horizons as suggestive and diverse as Afro-Cuban religions, Hispanic baroque, Taoist painting, structuralism or the art of disguise and tattooing,” Guerrero added.
Sarduy was born in the province of Camagüey on February 25, 1937 and moved to Havana with his family at a very young age.
He began studying medicine, but abandoned it very early to dedicate himself to his true passion: literature.
After 1959 Sarduy collaborated with the newspapers Lunes de Revolución and Diario Libre.
Before arriving in Havana, he had already published poems in the magazine Ciclón, edited by the essayist and translator José Rodríguez Feo and the writer Virgilio Piñera.
In September of that year, the Cuban regime asked the scholarship holders to return to the Island. His decision to remain in Paris caused the Cuban authorities to consider him a “counterrevolutionary.”
Sarduy never returned to Cuba.
In France he soon became associated with the magazine of literary theory and criticism, As is.
From this European country he developed most of his work, which covers diverse genres such as poetry, criticism, journalism and narrative.
Among his great works are the novels Gestures, Where are the singers from, Cobra and Beach birds (published posthumously), the poetry collections Flamenco and Mood Indigo; and the essays Written on a Body, Simulation, The Christ of the Rue Jacob, New Instability and General Essay on the Baroque.
Although he left Cuba at a very young age, Sarduy, who called himself “a Cuban in Paris,” always developed a literary creation marked by Cubanness and the study of his roots: European, African and Chinese.
Nobel Prize winner for Literature Gabriel García Márquez said of him: “You are the best writer in the language, even if you are the least read.”
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2024-07-19 20:00:33
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