The title of the collection of poems by Raúl Gómez Jattin almost obscene (2022) is already a provocation. While former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s 1964 dictum on obscenity (“I know it when I see it”) is still valid, obscenity relies on literal or figurative visuality – something (sex , dirt) entering the scene that should be hidden. Yet Stewart’s quip also reveals another important aspect of obscenity: it is a When. Considered along this temporal axis, it is difficult to think of obscenity as having a terminus, a place where it ends, a hard boundary beyond which it does not exist. In this sense, the “almost” seems constitutive of obscenity, such as it is on the edge of something – of being seen, of being pushed out of sight – and brings us to the edge excitement or rage, imitation or prohibition. (Necessarily, the word edge is itself obscene, deriving as it does from Old French for a measuring rod used to claim territory – or else a penis.)

The poems of Almost obscene — by turns agile, charming, intimate and dark, precarious and hypnotic like the flame of a candle – have long been rebuffed; now, thanks to translators Katherine Hedeen and Olivia Lott, they’re back in sight. The Colombian poet Gómez Jattin (1945–1997), their author, was of Syrian origin; he was also queer, mentally ill, often incarcerated and, since he lived on the streets, literally adjacent to upright city life. As its translators note,

During all this time, he never stopped writing poetry or reciting it on the street corner; his instantly famous public readings attracted hundreds of listeners. In 1997 he was killed by a bus. It remains unclear whether it was an accident, suicide, or, as the poet’s close friends claim, an orchestrated act of social cleansing.

Human Rights Watch has described the decades-long campaign of social cleansing in Colombia as “the serial murder of members of a social group with the aim of ‘cleansing’ or ‘imposing order’ on a criminal population or unsightly” by vigilante groups – with police involvement, government encouragement and the tacit promise of impunity. Outrageously, this violent end to Gómez Jattin’s life is dubbed by members of the literary establishment which, according to Hedeen and Lott, excluded the poet from anthologies, reviews and other accounts of Colombian poetry.

almost obscene opens with an irresistible one-liner, an agile touch of Gómez Jattin’s magnetic, confident tone – “I was a weed but they didn’t smoke me.” While local icons of village life are affectionately greeted by the poet — a donkey, a childhood friend — Beauty and Death are also close friends; they blow portals for themselves through the poet and recur in and as poems. “BEAUTY TOOK ME OVER”, a brief poem begins,

just like you’d take a boat 
or a city 
From its captive pleasure 
my ordinary life 
trembling These poems sobbing 

For me it is one of the most obscene poems of almost obscene, obscenely candid about her devotion to and devastation by Beauty. The resulting poem cannot be endured; he tries to shout, but fails, caught up in the whirlwind of his final continuous verb.

In the first collections collected here, friends and villagers recalled from the poet’s youth have the ephemeral attraction of flames while Death, Beauty, Poetry, Love and even Life have the permanence and action cosmic of stars. Often Gómez Jattin moves from one register to another in the same poem:

The folks from my village 
say I’m a dangerous 
wretched man 

And they’ve got a point 
Dangerous Wretched 
Poetry and love did this to me. 

The cautious nostalgia that Gómez Jattin evokes around his interactions with “people” in these early books seems to me to be nostalgia for the category of humans he might have expected to like as well, but now realizes that ‘he must put aside. It tends towards something else, towards Death, towards poetry. Towards becoming obscene.

In the middle books, Gómez Jattin’s poems tend toward what might more properly be called erotic; while remaining brief, these take a more bodily hold on the page. Male bodies are ecstatically present in this sequence, and the stanzas serve as tenderly constructed weight-bearing vessels for rendezvous. Throughout the sequence, the lovers find themselves in sailboats, hammocks, and even, deliciously, the number eight:

We live in the eight Dual infinity 
of two universes Circle 8 
Like two twin stars 
Two eyes. Two asses close 
Two testicles kissing 

Here, where the infinity sign of death is temporarily reversed so earth(l)y lovers can physically meet, a strange cosmic canopy briefly and triumphantly unfurls. The joy is unmistakable, and the quirkiness of that joy is distinct, which, as Hedeen and Lott convey in their afterword, led to these poems and the poet being excluded from the project of a (hetero-)national Colombian literature. But their brilliance is inextinguishable, returning from the land of the dead via the bizarre English route – additional obscenity.

Even so, the joy of these erotic lyrics is not unmixed. Death, Solitude and Poetry remain the companions of these bedfellows, and the metaphor of “poison” often arises like the one that capsizes the poem and the fragile skiff of love. The decline is often steep.

[...] There goes 
my illusion of a shared future body to body
the fatal facts of our story and the time we won’t get back 

flow over me like a glass of sexual poison 

These are Gómez Jattin’s most assured poems – seductive, alert, infectious, and lovingly translated by Hedeen and Lott. But the poems’ own swirling, flowing constructs, with clauses and phrases coming together across enjambments and caesuras, indicate that the lovers’ union, and the poems that are their cradles, cannot last. a long time.

The fatality long figured in the work of Gómez Jattin rises to flood his final work, published posthumously, The book of madness, which appears here in its entirety, translated with scintillating, chiseled gravity by Hedeen and Lott. Many of the first lines of this stunning hallucinatory sequence are hyper-deliberate in situating the poem within a series of thresholds and adjacencies of the “real world”: “ENTERING THE BATHROOM BETWEEN HER BEDROOM AND THE MOTHER’S ROOM”, HER AND SEE THE POLICE LIEUTENANT. Others establish supernatural coordinates: “DARK WIZARDS HAVE ENTERED MY BRAIN.

This lively convergence of the “real” world and the beyond creates an unbearable oscillation, which, like a fit of vertigo, makes the “wretched artist” prone and powerless. The emblems and preoccupations that occupied his earlier poems reappear here saturated with sinister intent, in a space that is both claustrophobic and exposed. Family characters are sadistic and spectral, death and God are fickle as lovers, dark wizards and white wizards pursue their noxious courses, even benevolent friends and strangers simply lure him to friendly thresholds where he suffers ejection and humiliation. Amid this diabolical melody, the artist’s mother haunts the poems most intensely, sometimes portrayed as tenderly maternal – “Hijo, how did you sleep?” – other times aristocratically ignoring his pleas and, most often, attacking him with arachnoid venom:

I AM YOUR MOTHER LISTEN TO ME IN YOUR MIND 
When you were born I sold you to the devil I feed on you 

No figure can truly eclipse the mother in this phantasmagoria – not even Death, who also belittles her son’s gender by calling him “daughter” and “sissy.” A Freudian reading presents itself of course – the mother attacks the son-artist, devouring his virility by treating him “like a little girl”, while even Death is implicitly emasculated, made to ventriloquize his attack.

But gender issues have been more fluid in this work than it was possible to support this reading – one of the first poems attests to this: “I speak of a woman and a man / Broken by a tender virility. My soul overwhelmed / by a femininity hardened to art. Here we see two types of claims being made against heteronormativity binaries. First, the speaker pretends to be just “about” a woman and a man – not completely either, bordering on both. Next, Gómez Jattin blurs the stereotypical qualities of masculinity and femininity, making the former tender, the latter hard. The neologism “femininity” evokes this fusion of gender boundaries; even language itself must bend – beautifully – before that edge.

In this context, while the terms “daughter” and “sissy” are used by mother and devil to belittle the speaker, what is most devastating is how these epithets reduce the sense of permissive fluidity that gave flexibility and discovery to the work of the poet. so far. He can no longer take shelter in the tender queer paradises that are so temporary, the humble hammock, the intimate number eight. If, as he reports, this assault leaves him “powerless”, it is because this cruelty, whether it comes from a sister, a brother, from God, from Jesus or from this icon of care, Mother , is a parody of help or care. It’s reverse assist – the kind of relentless, hard-hitting reversals that characterize the edge of madness.

Yet such mocking and predatory behavior is not just the way of demons, but the way of the “real” world. The urban world around this visionary space is made of hard edges. The poems show the artist asleep on benches, parapets, the pavement and in the middle of the ruins, bullied by children, exploited by prosperous friends. The last line of The book of madness shows him a threshold which he is not authorized to cross, ventriloquizes his prohibition: “This gentleman cannot enter without shoes.” This ban ends his last poem, just as the ban on social cleansing would have ended his life.

The book of madness is one of the most indelible sequences of poetry I’ve read in a while – it came to me in a dark place and it was shining like a flame behind glass at night – or maybe the dark part flame that feeds on the air and darkens the darkness. This unbearable and ineffable link where light meets darkness is the border between reason and madness, life and death, darkness and obscene. Certainly, these hallucinations were intolerable for Gómez Jattin, just as his own existence was intolerable for the society to which he was adjacent. After all, the cast of unreal and grisly torturers who prey on the “wretched artist” in this sequence feel like avatars of the real forces that banished Gómez Jattin and pushed him out of sight, even in the pregnant with death. While The book of madness cannot be interpreted as triumphant, the publication of almost obscene can be read as a triumph for Gómez Jattin, hard won by Hedeen and Lott. Through their principled intervention, not only Gómez Jattin’s own incandescent obscenity, but the annihilating obscenity of family, police, state, church, and censorship come to light.

almost obscene by Raúl Gómez Jattin, translated by Katherine Hedeen and Olivia Lott (2022), is published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center and is available online and in bookstores.