Candelario Obeso


Candelario Obeso was a Colombian poet. He is known as a precursor of the Poesía Negra y oscura in Colombia.

Life

He was a mulatto, born of a white hacendado and a black maid in Mompox, Colombia on 12 January 1849. He studied at Colegio Pinillos de Mompox. In 1886 he obtained an scholarship to do his higher studies at Colegio Militar de Bogotá, and a year later he entered the Universidad Nacional de Colombia where he started engineering, law and political science, but due to economical struggle, he was unable to graduate from any faculty. 
He had several jobs during short periods of time. Due to his friendship with influential personalities of the time, he was named consul in Tours, France and national interpreter in Panama. He also worked as a school teacher in Sucre and municipal treasurer of Magangué.
He faced racial discrimination and economical struggle. He fell in love with a white high-society lady who rejected his poems on love and she soon got engaged to a rich man. Heartbroken, he shot himself in the chest and died in Bogotá a few days later.  His remains are in the cemetery of Mompox.

Legacy

He is known as the precursor of the Poesía Negra y oscura in Colombia, a literary style that focused on describing the daily activities performed by the Colombian black communities. He wrote his narrative in the first person and using the language the Afrocolombian communities spoke. An example of this is his first book of poems, Cantos Populares de mi Tierra, published by Imprenta de Borda in 1887.
He also wrote La familia Pygmalion, Lectura para ti, Secundino el Zapatero and Lucha de la vida.
He translated into Spanish Shakespeare’s Othello, and works from Víctor Hugo, Byron, Musset, Longfellow, Goethe and Jonathan Lawrence.