| Severo
Sarduy Suzanne Jill Levine and Carol Maier, translators |
CHRIST ON THE RUE JACOB | ||
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PUBLISHERS
WEEKLY
Best Nonfiction Title of 1995 |
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CHRIST
ON THE RUE JACOB
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The
last major work by one of the greatest of modern Cuban writers, written
before his recent death in Paris of AIDS, represents the most revealing
writing of his career. “Truly beautiful.... [Sarduy's] intricate descriptions bear the stamp
of the eternal observer. But what descriptions: like a great singer, he
maintains a flow of carefully modulated phrases, one tumbling over the
next, without ever pausing for a breath.” Christ on the Rue Jacob is an inventory or marks, both the physical
marks on the body that “outline a possible autobiography, summarized in
an archology of the skin” and the mnemonic marks that record the remains
of experience that reside in memory.
Altogether, this wide-ranging collection — short, rich, and dense —
reveals with meticulous yet hallucinatory lucidity all the shimmering
constellation of love, letters, and life that is the haunting legacy of
Severo Sarduy.
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SEVERO SARDUY's works are exemplary of post-modernism. His books in English include For Voice, From Cuba with a Song, Cobra, Maitreya, and Written on a Body. An exiled Cuban, he was devoted to Baroque poetics, santería, Maoism, Tibetan Buddhism, and French theory (among his close friends were Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan). He died in Paris in 1993.
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SUZANNE JILL LEVINE's translations include work by Guillermo Carera Infante, Julio Cortázar, José Donoso, Mauel Puig, and Adolfo Bioy Casares. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1996), the PEN American Award for Career Achievement in Hispanic Studies (1996); and several grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is a professor in the Spanish & Portuguese Department at UC Santa Barbara.
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CAROL MAIER has translated Rosa Chacel, Octavio Armand, Carlota Caulfield, and Carmen Martín Gaite. She is Professor of Spanish Translation, Institute for Applied Linguistics, at Kent State University.
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