By Severo Sarduy
Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine
Introduction by James McCourt
ISBN: 9781628975802
Publication Date: 4/22/2025
The late Severo Sarduy was one of the most outrageous and baroque of the Latin American Boom writers of the sixties and seventies, and Cobra was his finest creation.
Cobra (1972) recounts the tale of a transvestite named Cobra, star of the Lyrical Theater of the Dolls, whose obsession is to transform his/her body. She is assisted in her metamorphosis by the Madam and Pup, Cobra’s dwarfish double. They too change shape, through the violent ceremonies of a motorcycle gang, into a sect of Tibetan lamas seeking to revive Tantric Buddhism. In its first edition from Dalkey Archive Press, Cobra was bound with Sarduy's novel Maitreya (1978) which continues the theme of metamorphosis. Transgressing genres and genders, reveling in literal and figurative transvestism, Sarduy's work is among the most daring achievements of postmodern Latin American fiction.
Praise
“Severo Sarduy has everything. . . . So brilliant, so funny, and so bewilderingly apt in his borrowings, his derivations, as well as in his inventions, his findings, he leaves one breathless, like a shot of rum." —Richard Howard
“Sarduy is the master of wordscapes that dip, shake, and explode. But if Cobra is a magical juggling act, of image balancing danger ously upon image, the translation is as remarkable as the book itself. Levine has managed to snare Sarduy’s sense of play, all his conundrums and fabulations, and a good many of his Spanish puns, with a gorgeous transference of rhythms from one language to another.” —Jerome Charyn, New York Times Book Review
“In Severo Sarduy’s Cobra, the alternation is that of two pleasures in a state of competition; the other edge is the other delight: more, more, still more! one more word, one more celebration. Language reconstructs itself elsewhere under the teeming flux of every kind of linguistic pleasure. Where is this elsewhere? In the paradise of words. Cobra is in fact a paradisiac text, utopian (without site), a heterology by plenitude: all the signifiers are here and each scores a bull’s-eye; the author (the reader) seems to say to them: I love you all (words, phrases, sentences, adjectives, discontinuities: pell- mell: signs and mirages of objects which they represent); a kind of Franciscanism invites all words to perch, to flock, to fly off again; a marbled, iridescent text; we are gorged with language, like children who are never refused anything or scolded for anything or, even worse, ‘permitted’ anything. Cobra is the pledge of con tinuous jubilation, the moment when by its very excess verbal pleasure chokes and reels into bliss.” —Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text
"Cobra is composed of jewel-like sentences that unfold like paper origami in convoluted proliferation. . . . Maitreya is one of the most radiant texts I have ever read, and the translation by Suzanne Jill Levine appears as seamless as a single ocean wave, spilling us from high elegance to low camp and back again without pause." —Bruce Benderson, Cups
"Hypnotic, poetic and challenging." —Gay Times
"Maitreya [is] a mesmerizing literary mosaic fusing the memories of a Caribbean sense of place with a fluid existential state where transmigration is commonplace." —Juana Ponce de Leon, Voice Literary Supplement
"Maitreya's outrageous characters maneuver through endless passages and trapdoors, as if in a 'Tibetan Book of the Dead' recited by saucy drag queens. The dialogue can be as sharp as that of divas speculating cock size, but the sentences are sometimes as ornate as the spaces his characters inhabit, rambunctious as their makeup." —Lawrence Chua, Voice Literary Supplement
"Sarduy rendered the epiphany of the body luminous, where the pleasure of the void meets the furious fire of the world." —Washington Post Book World
Biographical Information
Severo Sarduy (1937-1993), Cuban poet, fiction writer, playwright, and literary critic, is considered one of the best prose artists of the twentieth century. In 1972, he was awarded the Prix Médicis for Cobra, one of his six highly acclaimed novels. Sarduy also painted, hosted a radio program, and, as an editor at Editions du Seuil, introduced contemporary Latin American fiction to European readers. Sarduy was a leading intellectual in the early years of the Cuban Revolution.
Having translated Manuel Puig, Julio Cortazar, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and other notable authors, Suzanne Jill Levine is one of the most highly regarded translators of contemporary Latin American literature. She is a professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the author of The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction.
James McCourt is the author of Mawrdew Czgowchwz, Time Remaining, Delancey's Way, Now Voyagers: The Night Sea Journey and Queer Street. He has contributed to The Yale Review, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. He lives in New York City and Washington, D.C.