Severo Sarduy was a Cuban writer who died of complications with AIDS in 1993. His poetry has rarely appeared in translation, but his literary oeuvre was vast and included the landmark novel From Cuba with a Song, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine in 1972. Hailed by Richard Howard as a writer who “has everything . . . so brilliant, so funny, and so bewilderingly apt in his borrowings, his derivations, as well as in his inventions,” Sarduy has impacted contemporary letters so much so that Gabriel García Márquez once called him the best writer in the Spanish language and Roberto González Echevarría deemed him one of the most important Latin American authors of the 20th century. His neo-baroque style has influenced such novelists as Alejo Carpentier, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Carlos Fuentes while his involvement in Parisian literary circles is responsible for first bringing One Hundred Years of Solitude into the French language. From 1960 until the time of his death, the poet lived in exile in Paris, where he worked with Roland Barthes, among many others, on the literary magazine Tel Quel.