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Almost Obscene
PRAISE FOR ALMOST OBSCENE:
You could not simply peer down from above, nor would you want to—to enter Raúl Gómez Jattin’s image world is to be on earth with your own bursting, breaking heart. Through this act of translation by Katherine M. Hedeen and Olivia Lott, new readers can encounter not only “loneliness and its causes,” no, not only verses of exhaustion and devastation, but also, somehow, a “whole wonderful life.” How sweet the sound. Almost Obscene assembles a queer companionship of rag doll children, papier-mâché lovers, the Sinú River, and most of all poetry itself, a “dangerous ceremony” Gómez Jattin chose to attend. I cannot wait to return over and over again to this open field, noisy with sorrow and joy, under constellations shaped by his divergent lines. “Poetry and love did this to me,” he writes, and poetry and love could do this to you, too, if you let them. Part manifesto, part self-portrait, this is a book of amazing grace in a maddening world. Gómez Jattin’s poems from the margins shift the very center. I am sheltered in the body of this work. OLIVER BAEZ BENDORF
After 82 years of the institutionalization of art and writing by the MFA, it is unsurprising that poets like Raúl Gómez Jattin and artists like Lee Lozano—that is, mad, confrontational, libidinal, and ultimately resistant to becoming disciplined subjects of their respective cultural worlds—are being recovered. After all, such worlds now seem encompassing, total. But we should be careful not to narcissistically narrate their recoveries, as if they were some wild Dionysian strain—“I WAS LIKE WEED but they didn’t smoke me”—brought in merely to refresh the sterile Apollonian greenhouse. On the contrary, they testify to economies and processes independent of the world and thus destabilize its tacit claims to omnipresence and omnipotence—“when we see each other you shoot me a quick ‘how’s life...’ / As if I still had use for one”; “The city dressed in lights waits for him and calls / The nice outfit will be dirty and ragged by morning.” Almost Obscene is an exciting addition to Colombian poetry in English and will help establish Gómez Jattin as an important voice in 20th-century poetry. ROBERT FERNANDEZ
Poetry does not make us well, but it can make us honest, so honest that it cannot be ignored. Raul Gómez Jattin's new work in translation, Almost Obscene, is a timely reminder of this, that he was here, that systems of oppression can never fully extinguish. His poems turn our gaze back to the material reality of the disenfranchised, of the wretched, suggesting with their tender, rough music that in these conditions lay a certain creative liberation. Always to be at the edge, of the mind, of the imperialist project, makes writing, makes living, impossible, tragic, this we know. But it is also a raging against alienation, the opposite of it. Gómez Jattin’s poems are anything but alienated. They are completely aware in their madness, in their language of love, demanding we see what is happening. There is life in this, then, and we will all be closer to the truth of ourselves, we will all be better, for having read him. VANESSA JIMENEZ GABB
BIOS:
Raúl Gómez Jattin (Cartagena, 1945-1997) was one of Colombia’s most outstanding poets—and one of the country’s most controversial literary figures. He spent most of his adult life between psychiatric hospitals, jails, and living as a homeless person. Through it all, he never stopped writing poetry or reciting it on street corners; his instantly-famous public readings drew hundreds of listeners. As a queer man of Syrian descent writing in a way that broke with his country’s tradition, his rightful place at the forefront of Colombian poetry has long been denied. In 1997, he was tragically killed by a bus. Almost Obscene is Gómez Jattin’s English-language debut. It includes work culled from his sporadic chapbooks, written from 1980-1997, showcasing a jaggedness of tone, approach, and mind space—precisely the unpredictability that made Gómez Jattin an uncomfortable presence within mainstream Colombian literary circles. Ranging widely in content and form, what unites these poems is the uninhibited expression of a marginalized poetic voice; a decolonizing queerness that challenges the heteronormative as it defies the West’s narrow definitions of queer poetics.
Katherine M. Hedeen is a translator, literary critic, and essayist. A specialist in Latin American poetry, she has translated some of the most respected voices from the region. Her publications include book-length collections by Jorgenrique Adoum, Juan Bañuelos, Juan Calzadilla, Antonio Gamoneda, Juan Gelman, Fayad Jamís, Hugo Mujica, José Emilio Pacheco, Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, and Ida Vitale, among many others. Her work has been a finalist for both the Best Translated Book Award and the National Translation Award. She is a recipient of two NEA Translation grants in the US and a PEN Translates award in the UK. She is a Mana...
You could not simply peer down from above, nor would you want to—to enter Raúl Gómez Jattin’s image world is to be on earth with your own bursting, breaking heart. Through this act of translation by Katherine M. Hedeen and Olivia Lott, new readers can encounter not only “loneliness and its causes,” no, not only verses of exhaustion and devastation, but also, somehow, a “whole wonderful life.” How sweet the sound. Almost Obscene assembles a queer companionship of rag doll children, papier-mâché lovers, the Sinú River, and most of all poetry itself, a “dangerous ceremony” Gómez Jattin chose to attend. I cannot wait to return over and over again to this open field, noisy with sorrow and joy, under constellations shaped by his divergent lines. “Poetry and love did this to me,” he writes, and poetry and love could do this to you, too, if you let them. Part manifesto, part self-portrait, this is a book of amazing grace in a maddening world. Gómez Jattin’s poems from the margins shift the very center. I am sheltered in the body of this work. OLIVER BAEZ BENDORF
After 82 years of the institutionalization of art and writing by the MFA, it is unsurprising that poets like Raúl Gómez Jattin and artists like Lee Lozano—that is, mad, confrontational, libidinal, and ultimately resistant to becoming disciplined subjects of their respective cultural worlds—are being recovered. After all, such worlds now seem encompassing, total. But we should be careful not to narcissistically narrate their recoveries, as if they were some wild Dionysian strain—“I WAS LIKE WEED but they didn’t smoke me”—brought in merely to refresh the sterile Apollonian greenhouse. On the contrary, they testify to economies and processes independent of the world and thus destabilize its tacit claims to omnipresence and omnipotence—“when we see each other you shoot me a quick ‘how’s life...’ / As if I still had use for one”; “The city dressed in lights waits for him and calls / The nice outfit will be dirty and ragged by morning.” Almost Obscene is an exciting addition to Colombian poetry in English and will help establish Gómez Jattin as an important voice in 20th-century poetry. ROBERT FERNANDEZ
Poetry does not make us well, but it can make us honest, so honest that it cannot be ignored. Raul Gómez Jattin's new work in translation, Almost Obscene, is a timely reminder of this, that he was here, that systems of oppression can never fully extinguish. His poems turn our gaze back to the material reality of the disenfranchised, of the wretched, suggesting with their tender, rough music that in these conditions lay a certain creative liberation. Always to be at the edge, of the mind, of the imperialist project, makes writing, makes living, impossible, tragic, this we know. But it is also a raging against alienation, the opposite of it. Gómez Jattin’s poems are anything but alienated. They are completely aware in their madness, in their language of love, demanding we see what is happening. There is life in this, then, and we will all be closer to the truth of ourselves, we will all be better, for having read him. VANESSA JIMENEZ GABB
BIOS:
Raúl Gómez Jattin (Cartagena, 1945-1997) was one of Colombia’s most outstanding poets—and one of the country’s most controversial literary figures. He spent most of his adult life between psychiatric hospitals, jails, and living as a homeless person. Through it all, he never stopped writing poetry or reciting it on street corners; his instantly-famous public readings drew hundreds of listeners. As a queer man of Syrian descent writing in a way that broke with his country’s tradition, his rightful place at the forefront of Colombian poetry has long been denied. In 1997, he was tragically killed by a bus. Almost Obscene is Gómez Jattin’s English-language debut. It includes work culled from his sporadic chapbooks, written from 1980-1997, showcasing a jaggedness of tone, approach, and mind space—precisely the unpredictability that made Gómez Jattin an uncomfortable presence within mainstream Colombian literary circles. Ranging widely in content and form, what unites these poems is the uninhibited expression of a marginalized poetic voice; a decolonizing queerness that challenges the heteronormative as it defies the West’s narrow definitions of queer poetics.
Katherine M. Hedeen is a translator, literary critic, and essayist. A specialist in Latin American poetry, she has translated some of the most respected voices from the region. Her publications include book-length collections by Jorgenrique Adoum, Juan Bañuelos, Juan Calzadilla, Antonio Gamoneda, Juan Gelman, Fayad Jamís, Hugo Mujica, José Emilio Pacheco, Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, and Ida Vitale, among many others. Her work has been a finalist for both the Best Translated Book Award and the National Translation Award. She is a recipient of two NEA Translation grants in the US and a PEN Translates award in the UK. She is a Mana...
- GenresPoetry
132 pages, Paperback
Published October 1, 2022
1 person is currently reading
68 people want to read
About the author
Raúl Gómez Jattin
14 books21 followersBorn in 1945, Raúl Gómez Jattin desultorily studied law for some years, became an actor, and left the stage to live and write poetry, a barefoot destitute even when, after publishing his first book and giving some readings, he became a fairly well-known poet. Of the theater he said that he loved using his body to express emotions; of poetry, that he tried to “achieve clarity, to show reality”. He was a true poète maudit, having received from poetry as he said, “madness, poverty and loneliness”; but, he added, also “idleness, a great happiness, and friendships”.
Homosexual love and even zoophilia have a sort profane sanctity in his poems (“The great religion is the metaphysics of sex”) because for him everything is part of that nature which he evokes in a pantheist delirium. One of the distinguishing features in his poetry is his love of the river Sinú, the valley and the mountains near the Caribbean sea where he was born and lived as a child, and from where – its fruits, its animals, its heat – he never seemed to get away. Its people, on the other hand, were the ‘arrogant’ multitude that wanted to instil in him “a truth not made to my measure”, a multitide far from whom he wrote – or rather “lit up” – his poems.
His first book, Poemas, was published when he was thirty-five years old, after a period of great suffering, in which he realized he was a poet. Marijuana gave “wings and air to [his] artistic imagination”. Eight years later, in 1988, he published his Tríptico cereteano (Ceretean Triptych), made up of three separate books: Retratos (Portraits), a series of portraits of friends, relatives and acquaintances; Amanecer en el valle del Sinú (Dawn in the Sinú Valley) an evocation of the Sinú valley; and Del amor (About Love), a look at the erotic world. He said that this book was like a novel, he being the main character in the plot, telling of his land and of what he had seen of his contemporaries.
After that, he published Hijos del tiempo (Sons of Time), a recreation of certain Greek myths and something of his own life story. It is a book, he wrote, dedicated to “death’s anguishing presence throughout the whole of life”. The last book published in his lifetime was a slim volume of short poems, Esplendor de la mariposa (The Splendour of the Butterfly) in which he announces his “flight to death”.
Of his last years he said that he had spent them “begging on the streets, sleeping on sidewalks or in parks, and spending more or less long periods of time in a series of psychiatric clinics.” He died under the wheels of a bus in Cartagena, in whose path he had thrown himself to end a sacrifice he had begun when he started writing his first poems. No other Colombian poet had laid himself bare – and consequently defied society – as much as he had.
Homosexual love and even zoophilia have a sort profane sanctity in his poems (“The great religion is the metaphysics of sex”) because for him everything is part of that nature which he evokes in a pantheist delirium. One of the distinguishing features in his poetry is his love of the river Sinú, the valley and the mountains near the Caribbean sea where he was born and lived as a child, and from where – its fruits, its animals, its heat – he never seemed to get away. Its people, on the other hand, were the ‘arrogant’ multitude that wanted to instil in him “a truth not made to my measure”, a multitide far from whom he wrote – or rather “lit up” – his poems.
His first book, Poemas, was published when he was thirty-five years old, after a period of great suffering, in which he realized he was a poet. Marijuana gave “wings and air to [his] artistic imagination”. Eight years later, in 1988, he published his Tríptico cereteano (Ceretean Triptych), made up of three separate books: Retratos (Portraits), a series of portraits of friends, relatives and acquaintances; Amanecer en el valle del Sinú (Dawn in the Sinú Valley) an evocation of the Sinú valley; and Del amor (About Love), a look at the erotic world. He said that this book was like a novel, he being the main character in the plot, telling of his land and of what he had seen of his contemporaries.
After that, he published Hijos del tiempo (Sons of Time), a recreation of certain Greek myths and something of his own life story. It is a book, he wrote, dedicated to “death’s anguishing presence throughout the whole of life”. The last book published in his lifetime was a slim volume of short poems, Esplendor de la mariposa (The Splendour of the Butterfly) in which he announces his “flight to death”.
Of his last years he said that he had spent them “begging on the streets, sleeping on sidewalks or in parks, and spending more or less long periods of time in a series of psychiatric clinics.” He died under the wheels of a bus in Cartagena, in whose path he had thrown himself to end a sacrifice he had begun when he started writing his first poems. No other Colombian poet had laid himself bare – and consequently defied society – as much as he had.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 20, 2025
In their afterword, the translators state that they selected poems to show gay poetry without the shadow of US influence. A noble aim. Almost Obscene reflects a complex author. Rather like Dambudzo Marachera, Jattin fell between all stools. He was an apolitical playwright when plays had to be political. And an unconventional poet when poetry had its set tradition. Jattin possessed an unusual definition of "discipline". It did not indicate a daily routine -- his chaotic life and mental illness --prevented that. For him, "discipline" was a state of total focus when writing called. This volume contains some of his most intense sexual poems and conclude with the complete El libro de locura and his engagement with schizophrenia. Dazzling.
August 13, 2023
i don’t remember how i found it, where i first heard, what sparked me enough to hunt it down through interlibrary loan, but oh god—immeasurably grateful this book has landed in my life. some truly tremendous poetry here, to say nothing of the man behind it.
most striking to me was the closing sequence, taken from his chapbook “the book of madness,” which details his final days experiencing homelessness and psychosis. and then to close with such a searching, heartening interview!
tremendous work, tremendously edited. sought my own copy to own immediately.
most striking to me was the closing sequence, taken from his chapbook “the book of madness,” which details his final days experiencing homelessness and psychosis. and then to close with such a searching, heartening interview!
tremendous work, tremendously edited. sought my own copy to own immediately.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews