Sarduy’s collaborations with France Culture extend from January 9, 1963, when the station was about to be created, until a few months before his death, on February 28, 1993, when À Naxos—a sound creation by Kaye Mortley where Sarduy is a guest voice—was broadcasted. In most of the files kept at INA archive, Sarduy is a guest—sometimes the only one—as a specialist in Latin American culture; in many others, the space is dedicated to him as the author or to one of his works. Sarduy even worked as an actor and his voice can be heard in various broadcasts, reading texts in French and Spanish by other writers, almost always Hispanic Americans. I suppose that, in those radio spaces dedicated to him, he had huge possibilities of participating in the production, taking decisions on musical pieces, effects, and voices to support his texts and reflections.
Sarduy’s relationship with this station has two well-marked stages: the sixties, where he collaborates more as a producer and guest author, and the subsequent years, when his success as a writer and editor grants him a recurring specialist position in various topics. Sarduy’s first invitation to a broadcast produced by others was on June 20, 1963. It was a weekly space entitled La vie des lettres, a literary causerie where Pierre Bellefroid, Michel Perrin, and Severo Sarduy share microphones with Nathalie Sarraute. This type of literary-themed programs will be periodicals in their catalog, and contemporary Latin American literature would be the most explored area: Guimarães Rosa, Jorge Luis Borges, García Marques, Lezama Lima, Octavio Paz, Manuel Puig, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier, Emilio Sánchez Ortiz, Julio Cortázar, Juan Rulfo, Jorge Amado, Álvaro Mutis. I have drawn up this list in chronological order so that its historiographic “disorder” illustrates the well-known disorder in the reception of that corpus by the European public. I should add the names of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Italo Calvino, Góngora, San Juan de la Cruz, Camilo José Cela, Witold Gombrowicz, Michel Butor, Patrick Roudier, Roger Caillois, Michel Foucault and, of course, Roland Barthes. Although diverse, this directory has two active centers: the baroque and the post-avant-garde, and it shows very well what could be called Sarduy’s aural library.
Of course, some texts are more endearing in this library, and these affective relationships are evident in Sarduy’s level of engage in the broadcast. I highlight here the programs of the series Un vie, une oeuvre focused on Cortázar (December 27, 1984 [link]), Lezama Lima (February 28, 1985), and Góngora (March 27, 1986 [link]) and the conversation with Jean Pierre Colas about Ecue -Yamba-O! which, according to the credits heard at the end of the broadcast, was produced by Sipriot for the series Un libre des voix.
Beyond the natural differences due to collections and time, there are other differences that could be based on Sarduy’s creative interests. The first of them is quantitative: the space dedicated to Carpentier has very few sound objects, only the voices of Sipriot, Colas, Sarduy, and the actor who reads two passages from the novel, and three musical fragments of the same song to Oyá distributed at the beginning, near the center and the end. The second, much more interesting, qualitative: there is no complexity in the editing of these objects, the opening and ending credits are entirely independent of the program itself and are not mixed with music, the passage from the short musical sections to the long-spoken passages have simplified transitions. Not a single sound effect has been produced for the broadcast, except for the voice of an ireme, overlap during the reading of the second fragment, effective, of course, due to the tonal difference that contrasts with the deep voice and the slow rhythm of the interpreter.
In the other hand, the program dedicated to Julio Cortazar has a remarkable sonic complexity: diverse music directly associated with the author—Gardel, Bessie Smith, Thelonious Monk, Charles Parker—and recorded originally for the broadcast; sound effects: poorly tuned stations, children playing hopscotch; readings of fragments in Spanish and French by male and female voices, Cortazar’s included. Sarduy occupies a prominent place in the bradcast, where he shares comments with Florence Delay, Laure Bataillon, and Héctor Bianciotti. However, despite this elaborate aural framework, it is impossible to associate such sound objects to Sarduy’s sonic imaginary—beyond the importance of jazz in Mood Indigo— or relate their arrangement on the plot with his criteria about Cortazar’s work.
Something similar occurs in Góngora ou le triomphe du Baroque, where Sarduy occupies a less prominent place in the debate—other participants are Phillipe Sollers, Phillipe Jacottet, Claude Esteban, Bernard Sesé and Gregorio Manzur—, but essential in the reading of poems in Spanish. Nothing in the musical sound objects is relatable with his sonic imagery, yet the fragments where Sarduy speaks or reads texts are the most complex in the program. For example, in the opening Sarduy begins to read Góngora’s “Soledad primera” having the introit of the Sonata in F minor by Domenico Scarlatti, performed by V. Horowitz, as background. His voice goes up and down a couple of times before the female voice of the regular announcer of this series presents the title and those responsible for the broadcast.
I want to conclude the illustration of how Sarduy’s engage to broadcast produced by others affected sound results with José Lezama Lima ou le triomphe du baroque. It is unlikely that Sarduy did not make crucial decisions. First, the birds’ chirp is almost omnipresent, next to the murmur of a city, which confirms the place of this sound object in its sonic imaginary and its relationship with Diario de Navegación by Columbus Secondly, the musical background: Yoruba and Catholic religious music, habaneras, contradanzas, and rumbas. They are always overlaped, such as the contradanza and the rumba, aural marks of two social strata from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Cuba, or the Yoruba and Catholic religious songs while an actress reads the fragment of La cantidad hechizada on the imaginative configuration of the panther that begins “En los textos chinos, aún en los del siglo V a. C, la remembranza de las mutaciones es firme”. Bringing together Africans, Europeans, and Chineses in a single fragment reproduce la cubanidadimagined in De donde son los cantantes. Both passages homologate his criterion that la cubanidad does not exist as mestizaje, but as superposición, a central idea in Lezama himself and that it is much easier to illustrate aurally than verbally.
