Footwork: Selected Poems

by Severo Sarduy

Poetry. Latinx Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Cuban Studies. Translated by David Francis. Cuban writer Severo Sarduy was one of the most groundbreaking Latin American literary figures of the 20th-Century. His poems are acrobatic in content and form, innovative, and also part of a deep lineage and web of connection. David Francis translated the poems from Spanish into a gripping English. He writes, FOOTWORK is "a body of work that sings on its own, that celebrates the carnal life, the sensual experiences of dance, of painting, food, music, and sexual pleasure, but that also recognizes --in these pleasures --the imminence of one's passing." Although Sarduy's novels have been translated into English and received praise from such writers as Roland Barthes, Richard Howard, and James McCourt, this is the first collection of his poetry to appear in English translation. FOOTWORK represents work from throughout Sarduy's life, following the thrilling trajectory of a great thinker.
Sarduy invents new forms to engage questions of identity, specifically how his own and Cuba's Spanish, African, and Chinese heritage is intrinsically intertwined with Cuba's history of slavery and indentured labor. As Francis writes, "Severo Sarduy was not known to follow convention. Nor did he think that conventional approaches to storytelling or lyrical composition could capture the complexities of human behavior or personal and national identity." The title, FOOTWORK, "recognizes how Sarduy's poems deliver devastating wit, which lands on its prototypical feet or adroitly maneuvers, purposefully, around naming objects, people, or body parts and toward unexpected endings," writes Francis. The poetry in FOOTWORK makes it clear why Gabriel García Márquez once called Sarduy the best writer in the Spanish language. "Baroque, yes, as we expect from the great Severo but these poems are also severe, mathematical, futurist, neoclassical, occasional, private, courtly, and lubricated. Some of the poems come from the heady world of poststructuralism, but most come from a Caravaggio-like sepulchral grotto, where a lush and explicit eroticism meets up with the sculpted and the shaped. Fixity is everywhere in this fate fixes Sarduy, just as the seam between sex and language fixates his verse. David Francis's translations are a labor of love, executed with ingenuity and a voluptuary fineness." --Wayne Koestenbaum

264 pages, Paperback

Published February 1, 2021

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.