Severo Sarduy

Severo Sarduy was born in Camagüey, Cuba, in 1937. He started writing at an early age, publishing in various Cuban literary journals during his teenage years. He moved to Havana in 1956, during the final years of Fulgencio Batista’s regime, to study medicine, and contributed to the Ciclón literary review, while also writing for Diario Libre and Lunes de Revolución. After the revolution, he gave up his scientific pursuits for the arts, winning a scholarship to study art history in Madrid.

After living in Madrid, Sarduy moved to Paris, where he attended courses at the Louvre and the Sorbonne. He became close friends with Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers, and other writers connected with the French avant-garde literary review Tel Quel, where Sarduy wrote about literary theory and criticism. As editor of Éditions du Seuil, beginning in 1966, he was responsible for launching the work of writers Jorge Luis Borges, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, José Lezama Lima, and Gabriel García Márquez to a Francophone audience.

A gay man observing Fidel Castro’s increasingly homophobic regime from abroad—and fully aware of the state’s efforts to “reeducate” gay men in forced labor camps known as Military Units to Aid Production, or UMAPs—he never returned to the island. However, even after becoming a French citizen, he wrote, “I am a Cuban through and through, who just happens to live in Paris.”

Sarduy wrote poetry, novels, and essays. He was also a noted artist, with paintings and drawings now housed by Princeton University. He published the poetry collections Últimos poemas (1999), selections of which were translated and collected by David Francis in Footwork (Circumference Press, 2021); Un testigo perenne y dilatado (Hiperión, 1993); Un testigo fugaz y disfrazado (Ediciones del Mall, 1985); and Big Bang (Tusquets, 1974).

In 1963, Sarduy’s first novel Gestos [Gestures] (Seix Barral), was published, followed by De donde son los cantantes [Where Are the Singers] (Cátedra) in 1967. In 1971, he was awarded the Grand Prix Paul-Gilson for his radio play La playa [The Beach]. The following year, he published the novel Cobra (Cuneta, 1972), for which he was awarded the Prix Médicis. These novels were followed by Maitreya (Seix Barral, 1978); Colibrí [Hummingbird] (Argos-Vergara, 1984); and Pájaros de la playa [Beach Birds] (Tusquets editores, 1993).

Sarduy’s volumes of philosophical essays, including Nueva inestabilidad (Vuelta, 1987) and Escrito sobre un cuerpo [Written on a Body] (Sudamericana, 1968), showcase his significant impact on myriad topics of theoretical discourse, including the baroque and neo-baroque, homosexuality, cross-dressing, and deconstructive thought, commenting more broadly on their relationships to Spanish and Latin American arts and letters.

Gabriel García Márquez once called Sarduy the best writer in the Spanish language. Former Academy Chancellor 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 died due to complications from AIDS in 1993. He is buried in Paris.