Abstract
In this work, for the first time translated into Portuguese, written in 1999 and included in the book The Pass of the Witness (2001), Edgardo Cozarinsky offers a critical reading of Severo Sarduy’s situation in France from a perspective that only he, as a witness privileged of that experience or even as a confessor, can offer. The target of this criticism is the “Parisian vampirization” of Sarduy, the one that made him a “prisoner” of the group Tel Quel (with the exception of Roand Barthes) and forced him to “play the part of Sarduy”, to betray himself. Instead, Cozarinsky argues, the authentic voice of Sarduy must be read precisely in that area which for so many of these Parisians was illegible: in the ethnic and cultural mestizaje sustained in a gesture of simultaneous audacity and lightness that lead to the ruin of all origin and goal, to an affirmation of the Cuban and Latin American whose complexity puts Sarduy in a series that is born with Rubén Darío and passes through José Lezama Lima.
Keywords
Sarduy; Paris; Tel Quel