El barroco y el neobarroco

by Severo Sarduy

78 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Severo Sarduy was a Cuban poet, author, playwright, and critic of Cuban literature and art.

Sarduy became close friends with Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers, and other writers connected with journal Tel Quel. His third novel, Cobra (1972), translated by Sollers won the Prix Medicis for a work of foreign literature in translation. In addition to his own writing, Sarduy edited, published and promoted the work of many other Spanish and Latin American authors first at Editions Seuil and then Editions Gallimard.

In Sarduy's 1993 obituary in The Independent, James Kirkup wrote, "Sarduy was a genius with words, one of the great contemporary stylists writing in Spanish. ... Sarduy will be remembered chiefly for his brilliant, unpredictable, iconoclastic and often grimly funny novels, works of a totally liberated imagination composed by a master of disciplined Spanish style. He encompassed the sublime and the ridiculous, mingling oral traditions with literary mannerisms adopted from his baroque masters.

Reviews

[Esteban]

Como Deleuze, Sarduy busca en el barroco la acción de un procedimiento, pero su argumentación parece apegarse más a la ortodoxia estructuralista del momento, apoyada incluso en diagramas de inspiración saussuriana. Algunos párrafos logran alzarse por encima de ese lunfardo intelectual, pero tampoco logran decir nada muy original.

Creo que a Sarduy le debe haber gustado pensarse como un Jean-Baptiste Lully de las letras, pero habiendo leído con pocas horas de diferencia Cobra y éste ensayo su figura me parece más comparable a la de un Rameau; un creador más enamorado de su teoría que de su música.

[matías saavedra]

qué linda la palabra artificialización