As a promoter of Latin American culture on French public radio, Severo Sarduy did not limit himself to a guest but a producer. In this role, he would have greater freedom when sounding those 18 broadcasts. In addition, he produced three pieces at the Atelier de création radiophonique: the French version of his own radioplay, “La plage”, one dedicated to William Seward Burroughs, and another, shorter, centered on Pierre Klossowski. Most of these broadcasts are from the sixties and are linked by a crucial topic at the moment: national and continental identities. Although these topic will not disappear from his works—Ex: the 5 broadcasts dedicated to the rumba or “Portrait d’Ernesto Sabato”—we will listen in his aural production the same diversification of interests and sources as in his writings.
“Littérature espagnole de l’Amérique du Sud” [link] was recorded on January 7, 1963 and broadcasted two days later. Sarduy co-produced it with Jacqueline Trutat, and the director was Georges Gravier. To offer this overview of Latin American literature, producers resort to the canon, then not so over showed but already popular, of the Boom: Borges, Carpentier, Asturias, Rulfo, and Neruda. Thus, the broadcast was an echo of what was beginning to happen editorially in Europe with Latin American writers, one of those replications that, by taking place in the mass media, contributed to consolidating that canon. Not surprisingly, the names of Roger Caillois and Claude Couffon—the Gallimard editor and the translator who would become director of publications of the Institut d’Etudes Hispaniques in 1966, respectively—appear in the credits.
In later productions—and evidently in his cultural criticism and writing—Sarduy will take distance from the boom. He will preserve only Borges’ work and move towards the canon’s margins: his masters Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piñera, and colleagues of his generation such as Basilia Papastamatiu, Luis Suardiaz, and Rolando Escardó. He included them in the roster of the three broadcasts he produced in November 1967 entitled “Poésie d’aujourd’hui en Amérique Latin” [link].
Let’s go back to his first radio broadcast. It shows a high sonic complexity, almost announcing the sonic imaginary that he would unfold in his writing. From the design of the opening credits, mounted on two musical sections featuring percussion that enclose a silence reinforced by the announcer’s two-second pause after stating: “première émission présentée par Severo Sarduy”. The modernity of this drum solo, an update of African percussion, point and counterpoint the collection’s exoticism, entitled—as the announcer affirms at the beginning and at the end—”Domain étranger”. Re-updates, de-contextualizations, underlining … those are the operations that Sarduy and Trutat follow in their sound design.
Unlike the readings of his own texts on other’s broadcasts [read Un livre des voix: Maitreya, Colibri, Cocuyo]—where a single actor catches attention using his voice—, the producers opt for a formula closer to the soap operas. They used a voice exclusively for the narration and others for the characters. This choice is more explicit in the passage of Week-end en Guatemala, by Asturias, where female and male voices converge and whose theatrical tones contrast better with the velvety voice of the narrator.
For Borges’s text—“El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan”— Sarduy chooses to begin where it reads: “El camino bajaba y se bifurcaba, entre las ya confusas praderas. Una música aguda y como silábica se aproximaba y se alejaba en el vaivén del viento” (Obras Completas 475). He juxtaposes to the voice that same melody “casi increíble: la música venía del pabellón, la música era china”. It is not difficult to connect his choices as a producer with what he was writing: De donde son los cantantes, and even with the small role of the Chinese character in the novel he has just published, Gestos. Particularly because the song he chose, “Throwing the Fishing Net”, recorded by the Chinese Folk Ensemble in 1958, is a Cantonese song, as most of the Chinese emigrated to Cuba but not at all Ts’ui Pen, the great-grandfather of Borges’ protagonist, “que fue gobernador de Yunnan”.
In the comment that follows the reading, the presenter insists on the orientalist connection and mentions Borges’s influence on Paz, Cortazar, Lezama, three authors with strong ties to that formula. Thus, Sarduy would not only be making his first act of literary criticism on this topic but preparing the ground to insert himself, with the novel he is writing, in that lineage. This act of criticism is based, on the other hand, on Borges’ criteria such as those used in “El escritor argentino y la tradición”, since he assures that in this fragment, there is a melancholy, modesty, and fatalism that are more Argentine than Gardel’s music.
It is not surprising then that the program continues with reading “Inferno, I 32” between musical brackets of the Sinfonía de Antígona composed by Carlos Chávez in 1933. The argument is consolidated: Latin American writers cannibalize and carnivalize global traditions; musicians, especially nationalists like the Mexican Chávez, did it too. And, of course, Antígona gives way to Carpentier, another cannibal and the most important Cuban musicologist to date, who had already described those processes in La música en Cuba.
At this point, Sarduy retakes advantage of the music to offer a veiled critical exercise: the passage from El siglo de las luces is introduced by a Quechua huayno interpreted by the Argentineans Graciela Pomponio and Jorge Martínez Zárate. This Quechua piece contributes to the aural complexity of the broadcast and the idea of the overlaps and displacements that make up Latin American identities. However, I consider that, as he would do 25 years later in the broadcast on Ecue-yamba-o [read Broadcasting Latin-American Literature from France Culture], Sarduy shows Carpentier’s solution as exotic, almost out of tune.
The next musical bridge between the Cuban and Miguel A. Asturias is the “Suite norteña serrana”, by the Argentine Ángel Lasala, performed by Pomponio, which does not soften that opinion. Lasala—along with his countryman Alberto Ginestera, whose “Pampeana III” also sounds in this broadcast— would be a kind of counterpart to Chávez and the Cuban composers that Carpentier admired, such as Alejandro García Caturla. Like Carpentier, Rulfo, and Asturias, those composers had used the indigenous and African heritage as a substrate for their most recognized concert works. As Sarduy says in the broadcast on Ecue-yamba-o, that formula is an avant-garde attempt, but naïve, a first solution to the identity conflict that does not interest his own generation.
Actually, Sarduy included the “Primera suite cubana” by García Caturla as a last musical section, introducing “Varadero” and “Quiero volver al sur”, two poems by Neruda. We should not overlook the role of errancy in this latest musical selection. Apart from Sarduy’s proposal for a new way of understanding identities, we should listen to the effects of nostalgia. Now, the music of the Cuban avant-garde, the Neruda’s images on a famous Cuban beach and exile, and Sarduy’s voice got together. Ending the broadcast, we listen to Sarduy’s voice reading in Spanish the first verses of each poem before the actors start reading in French. This is a passage with extraordinary acoustic complexity, not only because of the sonic mix but the affective charge that it transmits, particularly the voice of the producer, who has just completed his third year in Europe, becoming sound material.
It was 1963 and his first radio broadcast. Still, Sarduy was clear about his masters—Borges, Paz and Lezama—and how to explore identity without resorting to avant-garde primitivism, along the lines of “El escritor argentine y la tradición” and La expression americana. The confluence of Borges’s work with the Chinese sound object would become an earcon of his sonic imaginary. Likewise, the relationship between the Latin American musical and literary avant-garde was an earcon of the active imaginary in the reception of Latin American culture in the centers of power. Either conceived as a narrative and poetic renewal, or called boom, Sarduy starts drilling to provoke its bluff.
This broadcast has a duality that reproduces the delicate position of its young producer and, at the same time, announces the path he will take. It satisfied the expectations of the educated French public with a title like “Littérature espagnole de l’Amérique du Sud”. In addition, met the literary policy that links this station with Raymond Quenau’s Gallimard where Roger Caillois publishes those same authors in La Croix du Sud.* However, he also used the complicity between music and literature to propose a new way of reading the canon, of piercing it to introduce himself and those that he would begin to edit in Le Seuil, the editorial project that would replace Gallimard’s role in the construction of the Latin American canon from Paris in the next years.
*According to the Gallimard website, until this broadcast they had published, of those authors, Fictions (Borges, 1952), Légendes du Guatemala (Asturias, 1953), L’Ouragan (Asturias, 1955), Le partage des eaux (Carpentier, 1955), Enquêtes (Borges, 1957), Chasse à l’homme (Carpentier, 1958), Pedro Páramo (Rulfo, 1959), Le Siècle des Lumières (Carpentier, 1962) y Labyrinthes (Borges, 1962).
