Severo Sarduy

1972 Prix Médicis

This novel narrates the attempts of Cobra, the most beautiful transvestite of the Teatro Lírico de Muñecas, to reduce the size of her feet. To achieve this, she resorts to different methods, but far from producing the expected results, all these procedures turn her nails a 'lezamesco purple' color, the soles are covered in greenish-black sores, and, finally, they sprout a 'white dwarf' from them, Cobra's little double or outgrowth.

Cobra is a surprising and groundbreaking work in many ways, not only because it addresses issues that, in the seventies when it was first published, were still quite eccentric to the Latin American literary canon, such as transvestism, drag queens, homosexuality, and even Buddhism, but also for its incredible language, inspired by both Spanish baroque and the musicality of Cuban speech. Sarduy's prose blends different languages, is rich in fantastic neologisms, hyperbolic (grotesque or sumptuous) images, hypnotic esdrújula sounds, Darian resonances, and Lezamian legacies.

This edition of Cobra, a central novel in the corpus of Latin American neobaroque and marginal to the boom, gives today's readers the opportunity to revisit or discover an inexhaustible work.

“Cobra would be that cosmetic mask, that transformation that takes place in a body, whose passion would be for me the only Western equivalent of the ritual theaters of the East. Those theaters where transvestism and religion (the text) form a single entity.” Severo Sarduy

“In Cobra, language is reconstructed elsewhere by the hasty flow of language. In what other place? In the paradise of words. It is truly a paradisiacal, utopian text (without place) (…) A speckled, colored text; we are filled with language like children to whom nothing will be denied, reproached, or, worse still, allowed.” Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

“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 danger­ously 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

“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

“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