Almost Obscene: On Translating Raúl Gómez Jattin with Katherine M. Hedeen & Olivia Lott
Katherine M. Hedeen and Olivia Lott are the translators of Raúl Gómez Jattin’s Almost Obscene, an expansive posthumous collection of poems by one of Colombia’s most eminent and transgressive voices, published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center in October of this year. Clarissa Jones of the Poetry Center spoke with Katherine and Olivia about Jattin’s work, his life, and the joys and challenges of bringing a book of Jattin’s poetry into English for the first time.
Can you talk a little bit about what brought you both to this project?
Olivia Lott: This project began 10 years ago when I was an undergraduate student in Kate’s literary translation course at Kenyon College. For the final project, she assigned each student a poet to translate, all of whom were previously untranslated into English. Raúl Gómez Jattin was mine. I translated a selection of 15 poems for the course, but I didn’t want to stop. I ended up translating his complete works for my senior honors thesis, with Kate as the director of the project. This experience led me to the Fulbright Program in Colombia. I lived there for a year, and I taught English classes in a town called Tunja and traveled around the country as much as I could to meet poets and learn more about Colombian poetry. By the time I returned to the U.S. and began a doctoral program in Hispanic Studies, I was determined to publish the Raúl project. But when I went back to the manuscript, I noticed that my translations just didn’t quite do Raúl’s work justice. Since I’d been working on them for so long, I had my versions too entrenched in my memory to deeply edit them. Plus Raúl is a deceptively tough poet to translate. I needed a translator-poet of Kate’s caliber to come on board. Luckily, she accepted my invitation and we began editing the poems and formulating the book manuscript. Then there was the question of the copyright, which took several years to identify and then negotiate. The Poetry Center’s support and, in particular Hilary Plum’s assistance with this last step, was essential in getting this book over the finish line. After so many years, it is truly a dream to see Raúl’s work in English finally in print.
What is the collaborative process in translation like? How is it different from working alone?
Olivia Lott: It varies a lot across each project and each group of collaborators. In the case of Almost Obscene, because it didn’t begin as a collaboration, Kate and I mostly worked independently. I completed the first version, Kate deeply edited, and then we went back and forth a few times until finalizing the manuscript. I learned so much from studying Kate’s work on the manuscript; working on this project throughout these years became a type of “translation school” for me. It was a really cool experience, and I think the book benefitted from our creative collaboration.
Katherine M. Hedeen: I’ll echo what Olivia has said about how each project is different. In that sense, it is difficult to generalize. I’ll add, too, that to my mind all art is collaborative. All artists work alone at some point and all of them ask others for feedback, often incorporating those changes into their art. That is collaboration, even though we may never openly acknowledge it as such. Olivia and I made the decision to recognize each other. Translation lends itself to the idea of collaboration because most people don’t think it’s really art anyway; after all, it’s not “original.” I almost exclusively work in collaborative situations and it is in great part to fuck with the idea that art is individual and happens in a vacuum.
How did you select which poems appeared in the collection?
Olivia Lott: We had two main criteria for selection. First, we wanted to feature a representative sample of Raúl’s work. This meant including a fair number of poems from each of his books, and especially his most well-known poems and the ones that we liked the most. Second, we wanted our selection to showcase the range of his poetics–both in terms of form and content. We chose to present the poems in chronological order, as we believe that the narrative arc that is clear across the collection is particularly compelling and impactful.
What were the inherent challenges in translating a piece like this? Were there some that were unexpected? What was the most difficult poem in the collection to translate? What made it difficult?
Katherine M. Hedeen: Probably the most difficult aspect of translating Raúl is that his poetry is highly emotive and sentimental. In my experience as a translator of poetry, rendering a love poem into an English that I am convinced of is infinitely more difficult than translating an experimental poem. Sometimes it feels like love just works so well in Spanish. In English, it can come off as being cliché or cheesy. Leaning into the overmuch (as we call it in the translator note) has been one of the great challenges and lessons of translating Raúl’s poetry.
You do an incredible job of keeping the language both colloquial and mystic, keeping the magic of poetry in this everyday language. Can you talk a little bit about how you were able to keep that balance in translation?
Katherine M. Hedeen: Thank you. It took a lot of work, actually. We went through so many drafts of this book; as Olivia mentioned earlier, the project is 10 years old. What a poetry translator does is not really any different than what any other poet does. Once you have the basic text translated into English, it’s about crafting that text into poetry. Inspiration and influence are a big part of that craft for me (as it is for many other writers). Inspiration in the sense that there are aspects that I can’t explain; like with all poetry, it just happens. That’s the magic. Influence in the sense that I am reading all the time, poetry written in English and poetry translated into English. A friend on Twitter a few days ago mentioned that one of the Raúl translations would pair well with a Frank O’Hara poem and it got me thinking that his was, in part, the tone we were looking for: intimate, immediate, everyday. At the same time, what Raúl does in his poetry is so unique, so groundbreaking, we wanted to honor it. Translating poets like him is just as much about adding to and altering poetry in English as anything else.
Jattin’s work has a distinct tone, and the tone shifts as you get into his later work. How did you work with the text in order to keep that tone consistent, and make his own artistic shifts noticeable in a new language?
Katherine M. Hedeen: I don’t think I have an adequate answer to this question; I wish I did. My response is that I follow the poetry.
Olivia Lott: I echo Kate here. I think the key is to really sit with each poem, to think about what each poem needs individually to become a poem (the same, but also different) in English. A final step is to read through the manuscript as a book, and think about how the poems fit together, or are in tension with each other. In general, our approach to Raúl’s poetry was to allow these tensions to exist between and among each section.
Which is each of your favorite poem in the collection? Which was your favorite poem to translate? Are they the same?
Katherine M. Hedeen: It’s hard to pick just one. I’m a fan of the poems from On Love and The Book of Madness. The former is really where we see Raúl’s radical queer poetics solidify. The poems are so full of heartache, so full of tenderness. I love “Our Hammock, “The Last Shot in the Milky Way,” “Serenade.” As I mentioned earlier, these were also the most difficult to translate because of how much emotion there is in them. English does feelings differently than Spanish does. We had to work a lot to find a balance between leaning into that emotion while also trying to ensure that the tone was genuine and serious, not trite. As for the latter, I’d never translated anything like The Book of Madness before. I don’t think I’ve even read anything like it before. Perhaps that is why I am so drawn to those poems.
Olivia Lott: I agree with Kate. The Book of Madness… whoa. We decided to include the full translation of this book because of how heartbreaking and visceral it is. The book offers a glimpse into Raúl’s mindspace while he suffered from psychotic episodes. It was difficult to translate precisely because we wanted to be sure to do these poems justice.
I also love the poem “Almost Obscene,” because it embodies so many aspects of Raúl’s poetry. The “almost” in the title does a lot of work; it compels the reader to question what has been labeled “obscene” and what, in contrast, has been deemed socially normal or acceptable. The space of “almost” becomes a queer space in itself, to reject heteronormative limitations. It is for this reason, too, that we chose to title the book after this poem. In so doing, our title also questions how Raúl’s work has been written off in some circles as “obscene” and, thus, unworthy of attention.
The reader gets a real sense of time and place in these poems. How were you able to convey that sense to readers unfamiliar with both?
Katherine M. Hedeen: I don’t think we did much. We let the poetry do the work. Any reader who picks up this book will be willing to go where Raúl goes. That is the charm of it.
Olivia Lott: In general our approach was to allow jaggedness, tensions, tone-shifts, form-shifts to coexist across the collection. I think this is also true in terms of time and space. We didn’t want to insert any explanations or additional context into the poems themselves.
What is something you wanted to include in the book but were not able to?
Katherine M. Hedeen: I wish we could have had Raúl for longer, in part because we could have had more poems to include in the selection. As it is, this collection is quite comprehensive and has been a long, long time in coming. It is still unbelievable to us sometimes that it is actually out.
Olivia Lott: For us, Almost Obscene is very representative of Raúl’s work. As Kate mentions, Raúl only wrote between 1980 and 1996, and our edition encompasses most of these poems. It’s likely that he wrote or recited others that didn’t make it into print, but we do believe our edition represents well the range of his poetry.
Is there anything we didn’t touch on that you’d like to discuss about this book or the process of working on it?
Katherine M. Hedeen: Just to reiterate that Raúl’s poetry is unlike most. He was an outsider, often painfully so, and as such his work challenges notions of queerness, madness, poetry itself in powerful, meaningful ways. This poetry has a lot to say; all we have to do is listen.
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 Managing Editor for Action Books. She resides in Ohio, where she is Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College. More information at: www.katherinemhedeen.com.
Olivia Lott is the translator of Lucía Estrada’s Katabasis (2020, Eulalia Books) and the co-translator of Soleida Ríos’s The Dirty Text (2018, Kenning Editions). Her translations have earned recognitions from Academy of American Poets, PEN America, and Words Without Borders. She curates the Poesía en acción Blog through Action Books and regularly reviews and writes essays on poetry in translation. She holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies from Washington University in St. Louis and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at Washington and Lee University. Her scholarly writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from PMLA, Revista Hispánica Moderna, and Translation Studies.
Clarissa Jones is a writer and NEOMFA poetry candidate from Vermillion, Ohio. She received her BA in History at Heidelberg University, and her work has been published in Green Blotter, Sink Hollow, and The Courtship of Winds.