Poem: Severo Sarduy

(finally posted)
One of the major roots of Cuban culture is Spanish, the other African--and the third, as I've learned, is Chinese. (The Native American contribution, as both Cubans themselves and some studies suggest, is less significant than in many other American cultures.) All come together in the person and work of Severo Sarduy (1937-1993), who was a highly original poet, novelist and critic. Sarduy, who's previously made an appearance in the Theater, when I translated one of his poems, is perhaps less well known than several other writers of his generation, like Reinaldo Arenas (1943-1990) or Roberto Fernández Retamar (1930-), but his works, beginning with the novel De donde son los cantantes (From Cuba With a Song, 1967), engraved his centrality to contemporary Cuban and global literature. In terms of his relation to Cuban tradition, he frequently explored the African and Chinese lines within Cuban culture, and was an exemplar of what he called and described critically, with panache, as the "neo-baroque," distinguishing it both from his predecessor José Lezama Lima's own 20th century baroque and from the earlier Spanish (and pan-European) Baroque style and mode. As my earlier post on him noted, he went to study in Paris in 1960, right after the Cuban Revolution had begun, became a member of the Tel Quel group and so was deeply immersed in the development of mid-century French critical theory (post-structuralism, specifically) as it was happening. Lacan in particular influences one theoretical strand in his work, though many different theoretical ideas and models (from Barthes to Derrida) deeply mark all his works from the earliest texts. Along with Arenas, Lezama Lima, and Virgilio Piñera (1912-1979), he is also one of the major queer Cuban writers of the 20th century, and his idiosyncratic explorations of homosexuality and transgenderism were decades ahead of their time. We are still catching up.

Here's a brief poem by Sarduy that I found online. When I have some time, I'll try to translate it, but reading it aloud will give you a sense of its compressed intricacies, intimacies, metrics, strangeness. "The wall is bleeding." He's marvelous. Enjoy.

HARLEY RED

El sueño no:
la pérdida.
El blanco roedor,
que ciega.
Pierdo pie. Todo es compuerta.
Mira:
el muro sangra.

Copyright © 2008, the estate of Severo Sarduy. All rights reserved.

And, as an extra delight, a fragment of an interview with Sarduy, discussing his book Cobra (1972), in Spanish:

Translation (Updated): Severo Sarduy

It's been a while since I published any poetry translations, so here's a rough attempt one by the extraordinarily inventive and innovative critic, poet and fiction writer Severo Sarduy's (1937-1993). It's the last of six from his "Páginas en blanco" series, "Cuadros de Franz Kline." It refers, I believe, to the drawing below (1954, 12 7/16 x 9 7/8 in., at the Pierpont Morgan Library, from ArtNet.com's site) and related paintings of this title by Kline, and entails considerable difficulty, because of its intricate linguistic shifts and wordplay. In it Sarduy writes in four different languages, English, French, Spanish, and Italian, and several of the words straddle two languages ("batello," "Salute"), while another, "monte," has two dissimilar meanings (mountain, woodland); yet another, "pájaro," has a particularly salient slang meaning for Sarduy, who was a gay man. (He was, fittingly, a member of the Tel Quel clique.) Let me not forget "pase," which functions as two different parts of speech--a verb and a noun, linked closely in etymology and connotation, or the French phrase "il fait beau," which is the usual statement one makes of good weather, "it's nice out," though here it takes on a somewhat different valence based on the source image. Then there is the title, which plays not only on Kline's painting, but on a persistent or fixed (fijo) theme of Sarduy's, which is difference, and in particular, racial difference; Sarduy was, among other things, an Afro-Cuban. Let me not even venture into the hurdles created by ekphrasis based on abstract work(s).... All of which make the poem untranslatable as such, and a reason for me to try.

Update: based on Kai's compelling argument about the valences of the Spanish verb "estar" versus "ser," both of which mean "to be," but the former of which connotes conditionality, impermanence, movement or spatial location, as opposed to the essentiality, permanence and transitive properties of the latter, I decided to add the "there," which also completes the music of the final stanza. Other thoughts?



BLACK AND WHITE

La raya negra y el batello,
el monte siamo tutti,
el barco blanco sobre el agua blanca
y la fijeza
de los pájaros sobre la Salute.
Pase,
il fait beau del otro lado
del otro lado, digo,
del río.
Estamos todos

BLACK AND WHITE

The black line and the little skiff
the mountain-woodlands we all are
the white boat on the white water
and the insistence
of the birds on the Salute.
Go on,
it's lovely from the other side
of the other side, I say,
of the river.
We all are there

Copyright © Severo Sarduy, 2007; translation by John Keene, 2007.