46
PARTISAN REVIEW
language of
Three Trapped Tigers,
a work deeply lived by the author and his
characters, and a book whose language reveals the emotional center from
which it was conceived. The concept of translation that informs the whole
book is also valid for its pop vision. Because if there is something that
marks deeply the pop vision of the world it is precisely the concept of
translation. The pop artist transfers to his work the raw materials of
today, the language of the tribe, making a sort of translation which allows
(like a palimpsest) the recognition beneath the given text, of the subtext,
or intertext, of the original language. A book centered on that concept of
translation, structured freely around a collage of Havana voices,
Three
Trapped Tigers
is an open work, in the sense that Umberto Eco gives to the
expression . This not only situates it in the tradition of
Ulysses
but in the
more remote tradition of the
Satyricon,
one of Cabrera Infante's models.
Like the Latin work,
TTT
attempts to gather up the light of a society at
the point of extinction and does it by means of a collection of fragments
whose secret unity can only be found between the lines of the text. Its text
continues to mislead the best professional readers, as John Updike's re–
view in
The New Yorker
(Jan . 29, 1972) proved . That another writer
could be not only so wrong about the value of the book but also so
confused as to take one character for another, to miss its hidden plot, etc.,
etc., is excellent proof that the linguistic structure created by Cabrera
Infante does not only function on the literal level of his puns, palin–
dromes, parodies, and other cryptographic amenities. It also renovates the
art of reading.
Another central aspect of pop culture appears reflected in the work of
Severo Sarduy. With three novels published to
date-Gestos
(Gesture,
1962), From Cuba With a Song
(967),
Cobra
(972)-Sarduy has searched
for and found a synthesis of cultures which in some way reflect the Cuban
experience and his own . If on one level his work appears to comment
somewhat obsessively on the most recent structuralist trend (Sarduy has
lived in France since 1960; like Cowuar, he is also a French citizen); if his
links with Francois Wahl, Roland Barthes and the
Tel Quel
group are well
known, the roots of Sarduy the writer can be found in Lezama Lima's
poetic renovation realized in
Origenes
as well as in the Cuban master's own
works . Upon these Baroque poetics (which
From Cuba With a Song
illus–
trates with the long linguistic voyage of its third part), Sarduy sets out on
an investigation of the sources of present-day Cuban culture, which he
metaphorizes in the encounter of Chinese, African, and Hispanic con–
tributions. Already in
Corbra ,
the vision is internationalized, thus becom–
ing pop . The parodic collage of William Burroughs, the
Drugstore
of
Saint-Germain-des-Pres, the transvestism of Place Pigalle and the tantric
