Last fall, Katherine Hedeen and Olivia Lott published Almost Obscene (Cleveland State University Poetry Center), a wide-ranging selection of poems from Colombian poet Raúl Gómez Jattin (1945–1997), introducing English readers to the poet for the first time.
Gómez Jattin’s poetry defies the contemporary impulse to categorize a book of poems or its poet in any straightforward fashion. A Colombian poet of Syrian descent, born in Cartagena, Gómez Jattin wrote from the margins of his literary culture on topics ranging from mental illness to homosexuality to drug use to Greek mythology; the distance between the poet’s life and his subject(s) often seems imperceptible.
I recently had the chance to interview both translators over a series of emails, during which we discussed the collaborative process of translating this book together, as well as the “deceptively simple” queer poetics of Gómez Jattin, and exactly where in the body his poems ‘live.’
M.L. Martin (MLM): Thank you, Katherine and Olivia, for making time to discuss this powerful and important book, Almost Obscene, which is out now with Cleveland State University Poetry Center. I’m always curious about how translators find and connect with their translation projects. How did you first encounter Raúl Gómez Jattin’s work? And what aspects of his work—and his biography as a marginalized queer Colombian poet of Syrian descent—did you wish to share with English readers?
Katherine M. Hedeen (KMH): I first heard of Raúl when I traveled to Medellín, Colombia in 1997 to attend the International Poetry Festival. He had been a good friend of Cuban poet Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, whom I was traveling with, and he had just died. It was big news at the festival. Raúl was a controversial figure in Colombian poetry, as you can imagine, and the rebel rouser organizers of Medellín’s poetry festival had supported him. I got to know his work through Víctor; which I found both compelling and heartbreaking. He had been on my list of poets I wanted to see in English translation. Fast forward to 2012. Olivia was a student in my literary translation course at Kenyon College. Back then, I’d assign each student a poet to translate, normally one who hadn’t been translated yet. I assigned Raúl to her. She loved the work and eventually her manuscript became her honors thesis in Spanish at Kenyon. At this point, the project was all hers. I had only been involved as her thesis advisor.
Olivia Lott (OL): Just as Kate says, Raúl was the first poet I translated, as part of her literary translation course and then honors thesis. The project took me to Colombia, where I taught English through the Fulbright Program and spent weekends and holidays traveling around the country to meet poets. My year there gave me time to read a ton of Colombian poetry and to get a sense of the literary scene. I always kept Raul’s work in mind. I was struck by how he was often excluded from national anthologies, and how even in Cartagena (the city where he lived most of his life) his work was difficult to track down in local bookstores. Through this experience I began to translate other poets, but I never abandoned the Raúl project, in part due to the possibility of “righting” his legacy through giving his work a second life in English-language translation.
MLM: I’m also very curious about the nature of your collaboration. Each a well-established translator of Latin American literature in your own right, can you share a little of how and why you decided to work on this book together? Can you share what that collaborative process looked like?
KMH: The nature of our collaboration depends on each project. For the Raúl project, Olivia brought me on at a point when, as she says, “she could only hear the poems in her own voice.” I was able to bring in a fresh perspective, a distinctive voice that I think made a difference. Raúl’s poetry is deceptively simple, making him a real challenge to translate. In this case, she turned her manuscript over to me and I began working on what were already quite developed translations.
OL: A few years after my time in Colombia, while I was working on my doctorate, I reached out to Kate to ask if she would be willing to collaborate as a co-translator. I had been working on the translations for years, and I had my versions so well memorized that it was impossible for me to see or hear the poems differently, to consider other possibilities for translation. Kate is an amazing translator—the best there is—and I knew she could make these poems shine in translation. So co-translation was, most of all, what I thought was best for the project, and for doing justice to Raúl’s poetry in English.
Regarding the collaborative process, as Kate says, I completed the first version of the manuscript, Kate then took over and reworked translations, and then we exchanged a few rounds of edits between the two of us. We’ve since done other co-translations, where the collaborative process looks different. In our case, it depends on the particulars of the project and we adapt our collaboration to it.
MLM: Well, as you say, “Raúl’s poetry is deceptively simple,” and that definitely comes through in your translation. We see this seeming simplicity in the titular poem: “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.” The diction and syntax here are straightforward, but there’s also something disarming in the confession of that first line; the speaker admits to their scheming to win over the beloved, and in doing so endears himself to the reader (if not the beloved). The next line brings another confession, of sorts; “trying to be honest” is not the same as being honest, but in fact seems to imply a failure or even a gradation of dishonesty. And yet, to admit openly to the attempt is itself honest. Deceptively simple indeed.
Can you elaborate on why it’s difficult to translate such “deceptively simple” poetry? How do you approach translating such a quality? What’s at risk of being lost? And how do you compensate for that loss, if it is unavoidable? It also strikes me that this openness and honesty, especially as we see it in this example, is very connected to the voice of the poems, which often feels quite frank, earnest, maybe even vulnerable. This seems to lend an immediacy to the felt reality of the poems, whether the poem focuses on sensuality, the circumstances of the poet’s life, or mental illness. Do you think about voice when you’re translating a poem? And if so, how might that affect the choices you make?
KMH: These are both excellent questions. Thank you. I can only speak from my experience of translating a lot of poets from Spanish into English, poets who come from many different eras, countries, traditions, and who write varying kinds of poetry, from straightforward to highly experimental. Straightforward, for me, is always more of a challenge. Generally speaking, in Spanish, the language itself holds an emotional charge that, to my mind, can compensate for a lack of nuance in the actual words. I relate this to the beauty of Spanish assonance. (This isn’t always a good thing; I often joke that even the swear words in Spanish sound pretty.) And it’s one of the reasons I love poetry in Spanish. The warmth of it, el calorcito. Most of Raúl’s poetry falls into this category: honest, direct, earnest, and el calorcito helps to make it all poetry. I don’t really think of translation as a series of losses and compensations, but rather as two (or more) discourses bouncing off each other creating a new energy, a new force. So, in the case of Raúl, the emotional charge in the Spanish might seem trite or hokey in English. We actually tried to embrace that with our translation; we wanted to challenge what English can do, to bring a different energy to it, with Spanish as our guide. I think this is where you see the earnestness and tenderness of the voice in our translations; it’s coming from us not abandoning the emotion of the Spanish. It’s there right below the surface.
OL: I love your description of the confessional tone as “disarming.” I think that’s exactly it, and it’s what makes Raúl’s poetry so captivating and heartbreaking. And everything you outline is spot-on. The challenge for translation is exactly as Kate articulates it: getting each line just right, in the context of many other possibilities that make the voice different than the voice that draws us into the Spanish. Translations that we ended up reworking sometimes made the voice feel cold or distant. So the bulk of the editing process consisted of little changes that made a huge impact. Just in the poem you’re referencing (“Almost Obscene”), two examples: the addition of “just” in “I just want to make you fall in love with me” and the choice of “I’m trying to be honest” instead of “I want to be honest.” Each verse of each poem had to be treated with such care. And I will echo Kate that we most needed to focus on writing poems in English, that worked fully in English, the same poem as the Spanish that is simultaneously a different poem, and to allow ourselves the poetic license that comes with that task.
MLM: El calorcito also makes me think of the sensuality of Gómez Jattin’s poetry. As the title and cover of the book suggest, some of these poems are very sensual, if not downright hot. I’m wondering about how you translate sensuality, but in particular I’m thinking of how the specific sounds of a language informs sensuality.
Looking at just one example, from “Navel Moon”:
Letting loose your body against mine Mad
like a foal in prairie fire
Spilling your words on my knowledge
like a poison to heal absence
Recalling things used and forgotten
with a bright wondrous flight
The passage is very sensual in English, but I’m also imagining what the passage sounds like in Spanish, and thinking of how the Spanish words take shape in—and give shape to—my mouth in a very specific, sensual way. That sensuality seems to take a different shape, quite literally, with the English words. This perhaps has a lot to do with assonance, as you mention, in each language, and that warmth, or el calorcito. And in fact, I hear a lot of assonance in this passage, as well as internal rhyme and alliteration. Can you perhaps speak to where in the body Gómez Jattin’s poems live? And where in the body your translations live? How do sound and sensuality interact for you both with these translations?
OL: We certainly did think about sound and internal rhythm as we translated. As Kate mentioned, the assonance of Spanish creates much of it in the original. We had to think somewhat differently in English, allowing it to take on its own sounds and rhythms, to find that sensuality that is so central to Raúl’s poetics. In the excerpt you quote, I think the choice of gerunds (“letting,” “spilling,” “recalling”) rather than infinitives (“to let,” for example) do a lot of that work, making the reader linger on those words, those actions of desire with the lover.
We also paid attention to other moments in which we could heighten the consonance of the English. For instance, in “Navel Moon,” just above what you quoted: “Sea skips over stones and my soul’s got it wrong / Sun sinks into water and water is pure fire.” The “s” sounds create a unique rhythm in the English, which only shifts at the end of the two verses, with “pure fire.” It simultaneously emphasizes “fire,” which in itself heightens the poem’s sensuality. In this way I do think what you mention about the tongue, is one of the places where Raúl’s poems and our translations live.
KMH: Definitely the gerunds lend themselves to a flowing action as process, which counteracts the abruptness, the sharpness of English. I also love Olivia’s idea of the tongue being one of the places where Raúl’s poetry dwells, in both Spanish and English: erotic maker of sounds! It’s perfect. I do want to say, too, that for me, translations (of Raúl and otherwise) come from the gut (and perhaps the heart); the middle of the body, only moving up to the head a good deal later. So much of it is about intuition for me: the feel, the movement. Ultimately, I think that’s why these translations work in English; they come from el calorcito “south of our throats” (as the Cuban poet, Carilda Oliver Labra, would say).
MLM: You mention in the translator’s note that “Gómez Jattin wrote in a way that no Colombian poet has ever written before” and also that his poetry constitutes the first instance in the Colombian literary tradition of “an openly queer poetic subject.” Can you elaborate on what makes Jattin’s poetry unique within the Colombian literary tradition? What about his “openly queer poetic” in particular should English—and Colombian—readers appreciate?
OL: We’re mostly referring to content. The themes of his poetry—including drug use, mental illness, madness, homelessness, unauthorized sexualities—mark contrast with the Colombian poetic canon. There’s an uninhibited queerness to his poems: they sometimes hide the genders of the speaker and lover, and other times they are explicit about love and sex between men. And because Raúl wrote about these topics, he was often taken less seriously as a “poet.” Large publishing houses and university presses, especially when Raúl was writing in the 1980s and ‘90s, tended to dominate the Colombian literary scene. There was a general lack of alternative venues (like small presses), so it was tough to earn recognition without abiding by the tastes and expectations of those with publishing power. These material factors might also explain why Raúl was so famous for spontaneous public readings of his poetry in Cartagena.
Despite it all, Raúl never stopped writing poetry, a poetry of the taboo, autobiographical themes I just mentioned. There’s a rawness, an honesty, and an urgent need of poetry that is both captivating and heartbreaking. Queerness is at the center of that, and all of it is what we should appreciate.
KMH: Olivia pretty much sums it up. I would add that one of the major reasons we persisted with this project despite an incredible amount of setbacks is precisely because Raúl’s “openly queer poetic” challenges United States-centric notions of queerness, which are exported and then reflected back to us, conveniently affirming our uncomplicated cultural superiority and progressiveness. Raúl’s poetry at the very least complicates, if not defies, any preconceived notion a United States reader would have of what Latin American or Colombian queerness is.
MLM: I’m drawn to this idea you mention of the “uninhibited queerness of his poems,” especially in the context of such a wide range of themes. As you mention, Gómez Jattin tackles these subjects, none of them easy to write about, with an openness that feels both daring and vulnerable. The poems never feel belabored or didactic, despite these heavy topics, but rather more like a direct transmission of the poet’s experience onto the page. That’s not to say that the poems don’t employ artifice, but rather that the metaphors and imagery seem to enter these poems somewhat effortlessly. This sprezzatura, if I can call it that, or this immediacy, has a distinct effect on the reader, to which one of the poems itself alludes.
“I Defend Myself” seems to me a kind of ars poetica of sorts, and in it, the poet seems to allude to his own natural talent for poetry, the sensitivity it requires, and even the effect it has on the reader.
Before devouring his thoughtful innards
Before insulting him with words and gestures
Before knocking him down
Credit the madman
His clear talent for poetry
His tree branching out of his mouth
roots tangled in the skyIn his sensitivity painful like birth
we are laid bare to the world.
In those first three lines, we get a glimpse of the dangers that such a poet as Gómez Jattin, who tackles taboo subjects like the ones you mention—drug use, mental illness, madness, homelessness, unauthorized sexualities—might face. The penultimate line also alludes to the “sensitivity painful like birth” required to write such a poetry. But the reversal that occurs in the final line is what I find most compelling, about this poem, and about Gómez Jattin’s poetics; it’s not the poet, but rather the reader who is “laid bare to the world” by this poetry. The immediacy of his poems—the sprezzatura, vulnerability, and openness with which he writes on these myriad subjects—makes the reader themself vulnerable to the experiences transmitted on the page. And indeed that was my experience of reading these poems—their openness opened me, made me vulnerable to the raw experiences contained there. Because the experience of translation is so deeply entwined with reading, I’m wondering if the process of translating these poems “laid” each or either of you “bare to the world” in some way, and what consequences that might have had, on the translator and the translation. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on this poem, and if you also view it as an ars poetica. Lastly, I’m wondering if there is a poem in the collection that speaks to each of you as a kind of translator’s ars poetica—an ars translatio, if you will.
KMH: You highlight vulnerability and I would say it is a key aspect of translating Raúl’s work. If the poet takes risks how not to do the same as a translator. One of the things that fascinates me about the artists I most admire is how they embrace risk for the sake of their art. They are fearless. It is something I struggle with. I want desperately to be fearless, but I’m too scared. I mean, I sometimes think it’s why I’m a translator. Translation can mask artistry, and that is sometimes really convenient. Translators can hide behind the artist’s work; we can justify our choices by saying we are merely replicating what the original text says. Translating Raúl’s poetry has challenged me to be vulnerable and fearless at once and I think you can see that in the book. This translation could have gone different ways. It could have exotified the voice or it could have cooled the poetry down; it could have attempted to close things off a bit or to show some restraint. But I don’t think it does. Olivia and I decided to “lean into the overmuch” (as we say in the translator note). We took that risk. We tried to be as fearless, as vulnerable as Raúl.
“I Defend Myself” is an excellent example of an ars poetica, and there are others as well: “On What I am,” “Portrait,” even “Cereté, Córdoba” or “The Worshiping God.” One of the aspects of Raúl’s poetry that stands out to me (and I think this is also a wider trend in Latin American poetry) is that being a poet cannot be separated from other parts of who he is. Poetry is intimately tied to the way he is in the world and it is his salvation. Personally, I believe something similar. And because of that I don’t really see a separation between an “ars poetica” and an “ars translatio”; for me, they are one in the same: the art of poetry.
OL: Absolutely. Vulnerability and bravery come together in Raúl’s poems, and I do think it creates a unique relationship between poet and reader—or, in our case, poet and translators. It requires a total submission to the text, in a very honest way. And, as Kate perfectly describes, we made a conscious choice to represent this element of Raúl’s work as openly and rawly as possible.
MLM: Thank you both for this wonderful discussion. Finally I wonder if you might be able to share what other translation projects are on the horizon for you. What collaborations or individual works should we keep an eye out for?
KMH: Thanks for this wonderful conversation! As for new projects, we’ve just received the wonderful news that another book we translated together, The Roof of the Whale Poems, by Venezuelan neo-avant-garde poet Juan Calzadilla, has won the Wisconsin Poetry Series inaugural translation prize. The book should be out this fall. I’m sure there will be many more collaborations. We work very well together. As for other work, I’m very excited about Poetry’s Geographies, an experimental anthology of poet-translators based in North America and the UK, which I co-edited with Welsh poet Zoë Skoulding. It’s just come out in the US with Eulalia Books, and in the UK with Shearsman Books. I’m also looking forward to seeing my translation of Cuban poet Víctor Rodríguez Núñez’s midnight minutes out next year, as well as Burning the Losses, by Spanish poet Antonio Gamoneda soon after, with Action Books.
OL: Thank you, ML, for such a thoughtful reading of Almost Obscene! Yes, the Calzadilla book is the next big collaboration on the horizon. It was a huge honor for me to work with Kate on that legendary book. I’m also working on the translation of the Salvadoran poet Lauri García Dueñas’s El tiempo es un texto indescifrable / Time is a Cryptic Text. We published an excerpt of it with Asymptote last year, and now the manuscript is nearing completion.
Olivia Lott is a translator and literary scholar. She is the translator or co-translator of Juan Calzadilla’s The Roof of the Whale Poems (U Wisconsin P, 2023), Raúl Gómez Jattin’s Almost Obscene (CSU Poetry Center, 2022), Lucía Estrada’s Katabasis (Eulalia Books, 2020), and Soleida Ríos’s The Dirty Text (Kenning Editions, 2018). Her translations have earned recognitions from the Academy of American Poets, PEN America Literary Awards, University of Wisconsin Press, and Words Without Borders. She holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies and is a specialist in the 1960s in Latin America, poetry and poetics, the neo-avant-garde, and translation studies. Her scholarly writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from PMLA, Revista Hispánica Moderna, and Translation Studies. She is visiting assistant professor of Spanish at Washington and Lee University.
Katherine M. Hedeen is a prize-winning translator of poetry and an essayist. Her latest book-length publications include rebel matter by Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, Book of the Cold by Antonio Gamoneda, and Almost Obscene by Raúl Gómez Jattin. She is a managing editor for Action Books. She is based in Havana, Cuba and Gambier, Ohio, where she is professor of Spanish at Kenyon College. More information at: www.katherinemhedeen.com
M.L. Martin is an interdisciplinary poet and translator, whose collection of ekphrastic prose poems, Theater of No Mistakes is available now from Anhinga Press. Their poems appear in Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, The Fiddlehead, Interim, Massachusetts Review, PRISM international, and elsewhere. Their work in translation aims to revise the critical interpretation and reception of the enigmatic Anglo-Saxon poem known as “Wulf and Eadwacer,” and to recover this radical female text to the feminist and experimental canons to which it belongs. Their translations appear in Arkansas International, Brooklyn Rail In Translation, Black Warrior Review, The Capilano Review, Columbia Journal, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review Online, The Literary Review, and elsewhere. An editor for Asymptote, with grants from Bread Loaf, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and Tulsa Artist Fellowship, they’re the founder the Translation Now! symposium. Find them online at M-L-Martin.com.
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