Otis College of Art and Design

Beach Birds · Severo Sarduy

Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Carol Maier

The disheveled girl with the transfusion came to join the group.

           “Waiting for birds?”

           “They already passed,” answered the frail man on the bench with a smile that outlined the tiny wrinkles in the corners of his eyes and around his lips.

           “A sand storm?”

           “No: the light is healing. Today we can see all of its seven colors. The sky is brimming with the same strength that we’ve come to lack.”

Severo Sarduy was born in 1937 in Camaguey, Cuba. He traveled to Paris where he worked on the journal Tel Quel. During the ‘60s, he collaborated with the magazine Mundo Nuevo and wrote for several literary and intellectual periodicals, including Plural, Papeles de son armadans, Sur, La Quinzaine Litteraire, and Ruedo Ibèrico. Sarduy edited the Latin American collection, Editions du Seuil, introducing Gabriel Garcìa Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude to an international audience in 1967. Estranged from the Castro government, Sarduy remained in Paris until he died of AIDS in 1993.

Further information:
http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/t/o/tob/503/sarduy.html

Translator bios:

Levine's honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1996), the PEN American Award for Career Achievement in Hispanic Studies (1996) as well as three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grants.

Maier is a professor of Spanish Translation at the Institute for Applied Linguistics at Kent State University. Her other translations include Maria Zambrano’s Delirium and Destiny and Rosa Chacel’s Memoirs of Leticia Valle.

ISBN: 978-09755924-8-9
PRICE: $12.95
Published 2007
182 pages

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