Three years after producing his first broadcast for France Culture, Sarduy co-produces with Denise Centore Cervantes parmi nous [listen]. This broadcast was part of the celebrations for the 350 years of the Spanish writer’s death. It aired on April 20, 1966, and the guest was Philippe Sollers, who explained the role of Don Quixote in the configuration of Western Modernity. Here, Sarduy find other way to approach Latin American identity: the answer comes now from the relations between the baroque and modernity. Therefore, this broadcast shows the path of his future creative praxis.
To illustrate those non-localist identity connections, Sarduy use “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote” and “Magias parciales del Quijote” by Borges. The well-known story occupies the second portion of the program. Michel Bouquet reads almost all the text, except for the fragment that goes from “‘Mi propósito es meramente asombroso’ me escribió el 30 de septiembre de 1934” until the Shakespeare’s quote: “Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk…” (Borges OC 447). The omission of those two paragraphs could only be justified by the political implications of putting Menard “on-air” duplicating Cervantes, both ready to “guerrear contra los moros o contra los turcos” (447). The independence and decolonization in North Africa and the Middle East, and the interest of France in qualifying its imperial vocation with the geopolitical euphemism Francophonie, advised erasure.
Michel Bouquet’s performance is exceptional. I would like to highlight the contrast between the monotonous, almost ritualistic style of reading the catalog of Menard’s works—when the actor goes to what could be considered a “gray diction”—and the transition towards an affective and intimate tone, when he reads: “Paso ahora a la otra: la subterránea, la interminablemente heroica, la impar” (446). This modulation is evident in the spectrogram generated by Audacity (Figure 1). In the area marked in a lighter color, Bouquet uses the affective style. He decreases rhythm—most prolonged silences—,and low the voice’s intensity —peaks do not exceed the previous fragment.
The aural advice of this reading reaches an even more exciting moment when Bouquet must play the two identical quotes: the IX chapter of the first part of Don Quixote and Menard’s similar fragment. The subtle differences in rhythm, volume, and tone that the actor achieves illustrate the thesis of Borges’s story almost much better than the text. The transduction from the textual to the aural—this Bouquet performance—shows “el contraste de estilos” in a better way than the text. It should not have gone unnoticed by Sarduy that Borges uses features associated with speech in his comparison between the two styles. The phrase may be precisely the same when it is written. Still, when Menard pronounces them—”extrajero al fin”—they suffer from the carelessness of someone who mishandles “el español corriente de su época”.
The producer must have guided the actor towards subtlety, because a reading evidently distant in tone or rhythm would not have achieved the same effect. Menard’s quote is just 0.200 seconds longer, and with subtly lower volume, but it is enough to prove Borges’s point. It is in the materiality of the aural where the possibility of Menard’s work is better understood: it is not a matter of copying or translating Cervantes’s work but of transducing it. This brief moment of Bouquet’s interpretation masterfully illustrates it. The voice recovers, like calligraphy, the performative character of creation. Let us listen to Cervantes and Menard reading their works again, now in unison.
Another exciting element of this broadcast’s thematic and aural decisions is that we can hear echoes of other works by Sarduy where Arabic and Spanish refract each other: “Juana la lógica”, De Donde son los cantantes, Flamenco. First, one more duplication: America as the Other of that Self—Spain—that is an Arabic otherness. Then, a metatextual strategy illustrated with the dramatized reading of chapter XXXII (Don Quixote I) and chapter IX (Don Quixote II) by Jean Topart. Those are the fragment where they discover the manuscript of El curioso impertinente and, later, the manuscript that we are reading, but writing in Arabic characters.
Both fragments are also based on transduction: the reading aloud of a manuscript and the translation as a kind of transduction. But, even more interesting, it is not the Catholic priest who can perform there but the “morisco aljamiado”. The Alcaná de Toledo, where that second scene takes place, has the same stereophony that Sarduy would later listen to in Tangier: “no fue muy dificultoso hallar intérprete semejante, pues aunque le buscara de otra mejor y más antigua lengua, le hallara”. Those crossroads where power fails to impose his monophony will be privileged areas for Sarduy in his vital and creative errancies.
In a sense, Sarduy presents himself as an avatar of Borges’s Menard or Cervantes’s Moorish: an alien. He is a foreigner in Paris and, for the first time, in this broadcast, he performs a translative-transductive act: He speaks French. However, if we listen carefully, we can notice he is not talking but reading. It is a fake “live” in which Sarduy’s answers to the anchor, Denise Centore, seem to have been previously recorded, creating an utterly unnatural effect.
This is the only broadcast where Sarduy reads his opinions. After six years in Paris, it is unlikely that the cause is distrusting his spoken skills in a foreign language. Less probably if we know the broadcast was recorded five days before. More likely, it is a strategy that simulates the fictional situations of Cervantes and Borges characters. It accentuates their alienation, their places on the tradition’s border. The reading provokes in us a reaction similar to that of Cervantes’ Moor: Translating Don Quixote from Arabic, he reads about Dulcinea del Toboso and laughs. Listening to Sarduy’s weird performance, we access the irony that connects the work of these three writers, and we laugh with them.
Musically, this tribute to Cervantes is much more successful than the program centered on Góngora that he will participate in years later. The producers used the work of Gaspar Sanz, master of the Spanish baroque guitar and composer of four dances celebrating Miguel de Cervantes that we can listen to in the broadcast [listen]. These pieces create a simple but effective transit between the voice fragments. There is no sound effect during the actors’ performance: the voices of Jean Topart and Michel Bouquet sustain the affective charge not only of the dialogue but the narration, as I exemplified before.
This will be a feature of Sarduy’s sonic imaginary: music is not the center but a piece in that tissue of earcons with complex rhizomes to diverse soundscapes. Neatly selected, the music is usually the most evident link to those soundscapes. Still, the other sound objects, particularly the vocal variations, lead to the key to his sonic imaginary. In Cervantes parmi nous stand out the transductive character of the writing, much more notable in manuscripts and performance of reading; but also the role of transduction in shaping Latin American modernity: “Nous disons que le thème du miroir, du reflet, est caractéristique de l’hispanité. Et c’est à lui aussi que peux se reconnaître cette autre hispanité qui se constitue au-delà de mer, en Amérique” (25’24”-40”).
