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 mindspace—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.
From the Translators’ Note:
As translators, the great question has been: what to do with the almost obscene? Ironically, the ideas such a description conjures up are far from the reality of these poems. Indeed, much of Gómez Jattin’s work is not “indecent” in ways we might expect. Here, instead of an abundance of avant-garde experimentation or pornographic imagery, there is a sometimes disproportionate amount of overly simplistic sentimentality: commonplace, cliché, greeting-card, ordinary. To this degree then, Gómez Jattin’s poetry is undeniably obscene; it is just de trop.
Our translations lean into the overmuch, aiming to privilege volatility instead of any kind of stability and to showcase a jaggedness of tone, approach, and mindspace, precisely the excessiveness and unpredictability that made Gómez Jattin an uncomfortable presence within conventional Colombian literary circles. In turn, we aspire to challenge narrow U.S. notions of queerness and the imperialist impulse to brand them as a global phenomenon.
Bringing Gómez Jattin’s work into English has been an urgent task. Everything about this poet and his poetry is underrepresented. Translating him into English is, in part, about what’s going on here. It is about representation––widening it, challenging it––especially with regard to conversations around queerness, race, intersectionality, and mental illness as well as the imperialist view of literature from Colombia. But it is also about what’s going on there, in the poet’s home country, where Gómez Jattin’s work is rarely anthologized, virtually out of print, and rendered a literal footnote in a 600-page history of Colombian poetry. To translate him into English is to continue his fight for recognition, for a place for the perpetually out-of-place. It is to begin to right and write his legacy.
Katherine M. Hedeen and Olivia Lott
Almost Obscene
If you’d like to hear what I say to my pillow
your face blushing would be enough
They are words close like my own flesh
It feels the ache of your cruel memory
Do you want me to tell you? You won’t use it against me some day? I say:
I’d kiss that mouth slowly until it turned red
And then to your sex the miracle of a hand going down
at the most unexpected moment to brush against it
as if by chance the same intensity swaying the sacred
I’m not wicked I just want to make you fall in love with me
I’m trying to be honest sick as I am
to fall under the curse of your body
like a river fearing the sea but always dying in it
Serenade
Come to the window love
the sky’s sparked a fandango
in its distant bend And it’s not so cold
In the trees wind sets a moan to music
It sounds like you tuned in to my pleasure
looks like you leaning over my face
whispers signs to me along the way
“Not yet” or “Hurry up I can’t wait”
Come to the window and stop being scared of your father’s Colt 45
I’ve brought my own
Can’t you hear me? Don’t you want our love
to last one more day beneath the stars? Like gods
Didn’t you slip your old man some Valerian in his coffee
so he’d fall asleep and leave us to what’s ours?
I begged you like that and you had nothing to say Later on
I found out they’d sent you off on vacation to Paris
days before So you’d forget about me The town
poet The one who’d earned a sad
reputation as a fag from your beloved body
Don’t forget none of that matters to me
It’s just jealousy Just nonsense from your old man
and his boring friends pussy tormentors
and from those fake friends of yours who like my dick
Don’t forget that love’s worth more
than all of them put together We’ve even fought
against ourselves Our pleasure
has all the masculine beauty they’ve never known
On What I Am
In this body
where life grows dark
I live
Soft belly and balding
A few teeth
And me inside
like a convict
Inside and in love
and old
I decrypt my hurt with poetry
and the outcome is mostly painful
Voices announce: here come your sorrows
Voices crack: now your days are gone
Poetry is our one companion
Get used to her sharp edges
She’s all you’ve got
Translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Olivia Lott
Almost Obscene is available via the Cleveland State University Poetry Center.
