Odetta in Babylon and the Canada Express

Gregorio Kohon was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He has publishedfour books of poetry in Spanish:Puntos de Partida (1963), Ebrio Sale el Sol (1967), Odetta en Babilonia y el Rápido a Canadá (1968)El Estilo del Deseo (2008). His novel Papagayo Rojo, Pata de Palo (2003) was a finalist in manuscript form for the 2001 Fernando Lara Prize, and was published in English as Red Parrot, Wooden Leg in 2007. He moved to England in 1970, where he studied and worked with R. D. Laing and his colleagues in the anti-psychiatry movement, qualifying as a psychoanalyst of the British Psycho-Analytical Society in 1979. From early 1988 to December 1994, he lived in Australia, where he co-founded and directed The Brisbane Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies. He has edited and published a number of books on psychoanalysis, many of which have been translated into French, Italian, Polish, Swedish, Portuguese, German, Spanish and Japanese.

Translated by Gregorio Kohon with Toni GriffithsIntroduction by Gwen MacKeithBearing the unmistakable imprint of its time, as a voice in a chorus of writers from the counterculture of 1960s Argentina, Gregorio Kohon’s celebrated 1968 narrative poem is a masterful tale of a life lived on the edge, a transient life of odd jobs, moving around, impermanent homes, shared rooms, crashed parties, whole nights spent in bars and cafés, sleeping rough, surviving from one moment to the next. Through the protagonist’s anchorless lifestyle we encounter weird, haunting and ubiquitous characters who exist on the margins of society. Inferior social and economic positions are given special focus and special status. We bear witness to the people of an underworld – mad-men, prostitutes, spiritualists, the suicidal – and we hear what they have to say. There is flight and escape but the escape is as much psychical as physical, through altered states of mind brought on by the heady mix of sex, alcohol, marijuana – and by the power of music.