The Great Zoo: A Bilingual Edition

by Nicolás Guillén, Aaron Coleman (Translator)

Overview

A fantastical collection of poems by revolutionary Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén presented in a Spanish-English bilingual edition.
 
Born in Cuba to parents of African and European ancestry, Nicolás Guillén worked in printing presses and studied law before moving into Havana’s literary scene. A virtuosic maker and breaker of forms, Guillén rose to fame by transforming a popular form of Cuban music into poetry that called attention to the experience of Afro-Cuban people, and he continued to interweave his artistic and political commitments as he traveled the world.
 
Originally published in Spanish in 1967, The Great Zoo is a humorous and biting collection of poems that presents a fantastical bestiary of ideas, social concerns, landscapes, phenomena, and more. The “animals” on view in this menagerie include the Mississippi and Amazon Rivers, clouds from different countries, a singing guitar, a temperamental atomic bomb, blue-pelted police, a hurricane, the KKK, and the North Star, among many others. Translated by Aaron Coleman with a keen understanding of the contexts of colonial racialization, oppression, and exoticism, this bilingual edition stands as a testament to Guillén’s carnivalesque vision.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226834795
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	10/02/2024
Series:	Phoenix Poets
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.55(d)
Language:	Spanish

About the Author

Nicolás Guillén (b. 1902, Camagüey, Cuba; d. 1989, Havana) was a prolific poet, writer, and activist. He is the author of more than ten collections of poetry, including Motivos de son, and the first English-language anthology of his early work, Cuba Libre, was translated by Langston Hughes.


Aaron Coleman is an assistant professor of English and comparative literature in the Helen Zell Writers’s Program at the University of Michigan. He is the author of the poetry collection Threat Come Close, winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and the chapbook St. Trigger, selected for the Button Poetry Chapbook Prize. Coleman has received fellowships from the NEA, Fulbright Program, Cave Canem Foundation, and American Literary Translators Association. His poems and essays have appeared in publications including the New York Times, Boston Review, and Callaloo.
 

Table of Contents

Introduction: Nicolás Guillén, Maker and Breaker of Forms

AVISO / NOTICE
EL CARIBE / THE CARIBBEAN
GUITARRA / GUITAR
ESCARABAJOS / BEETLES
LA PAJARITA DE PAPEL / THE LITTLE PAPER BIRD
LA OSA MAYOR / THE URSA MAJOR
EL ACONCAGUA / THE ACONCAGUA
LOS USUREROS / THE MONEYLENDERS
LOS RÍOS / THE RIVERS
SEÑORA / LADY
Al público: AVIO-MAMUT / To the Public: AIR-MAMMOTH
LA SED / THE THIRST
EL HAMBRE / THE HUNGER
INSTITUTRIZ / HEADMISTRESS
LAS NUBES / THE CLOUDS
LOS VIENTOS / THE WINDS
EL TIGRE / THE TIGER
CICLÓN / HURRICANE
AVE-FÉNIX / PHOENIX
LYNCH / LYNCH
EL CANGREJO / THE CRAB
GÁNGSTER / GANGSTER
KKK / KKK
LAS ÁGUILAS / THE EAGLES
MONOS / MONKEYS
PAPAYA / PAPAYA
LUNA / MOON
TENOR / TENOR
POLICÍA / POLICE
EL CHULO / THE PIMP
RELOJ / CLOCK
AVISO: GRAN ZOO DE LA HABANA / NOTICE: GREAT ZOO OF HAVANA
ORADORES / ORATORS
EL SUEÑO / THE DREAM
GORILA / GORILLA
TONTON MACOUTE / TONTON MACOUTE
BOMBA ATÓMICA / ATOMIC BOMB
LA ESTRELLA POLAR / THE NORTH STAR
SALIDA / EXIT

Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

★ 01/20/2025

First published in 1967, this brilliantly inventive collection from Cuban poet Guillén (Yoruba from Cuba) takes the reader through “a great zoo” that “was created/ for natives and foreigners/ and the pride of our nation.” Each of the collection’s 39 poems corresponds to one of the zoo’s “specimens,” including real-life animals (“Beetles,” “Gorilla,” “Monkeys”) as well as natural phenomena (“The Winds,” “The Clouds”), human figures (“Gangster,” “The Pimp”), astronomical objects (“Moon”, “The North Star”), and intangible subjects (“The Dream,” “The Hunger”). Several poems display an interest in race and Blackness, as in “KKK” and “The Rivers,” where “the Mississippi with its Blacks” and “the Amazon with its Indians” are compared to “serpents... coiled up on themselves.” The poetic voice is often understated and lighthearted (“The papaya./ Vegetal/ animal./ It’s not true/ that it’s familiar with original sin”), though it moves, at times, into rich figuration (the clouds “that announce the Evening Star” are “like serpents in flames”). With wit and irony, Guillén, a major figure in Latin American poetry whose parents were of African and European ancestry, toggles between seeing and being seen, spectator and spectacle, transforming familiar parts of the world into objects of observation. Readers will be wowed. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Coleman’s pitch-perfect translation comes to us at just the right time, with its themes as relevant now as when the book was originally published in 1967. Through The Great Zoo, a guide describes what is being held captive in each cage, including a series of archetypes, places, abstractions, and things—moneylenders, the Caribbean, Ursa Major, orators, atomic bombs, etc. The cages allow for interrogation of destructive, racist, and absurd colonialist ideologies, and these poems vibrate with the possibility of an uprising, the dismantling of order. Adeptly echoing Guillén’s sly discourse around race, Coleman recovers a work by one of the most important Hispanophone writers of the twentieth century.

Rosa Alcalá

"Coleman has written a splendid translation of Guillén’s canonical book of poems. Redefining concepts such as creature, culture, capture, and menagerie, the poet and translator work with a deceptively light touch. Guillén’s vivid clarity, ingenuity, and musicality find their match in Coleman’s translation. Originally published in 1967, El gran zoo/The Great Zoo is as fresh and inventive today as it is politically hard-hitting."

Marguerite Feitlowitz

"Welcome to the menagerie of Guillén, where you stroll between cages showcasing beetles, tigers, giraffes, and phoenixes, but also the moon, a hurricane, and the whole Caribbean Sea. Hunger is 'An animal all fang and eye.' In his whittled-down, knife-sharp, yet always playful and often humorous language, Guillén takes on the police, the KKK, the Tonton Macoute, the unspeakable horror of a lynching, the 'barbaric danger' of the atomic bomb. You are left mulling over your own place in viewing these displays. Coleman's dazzling, idiomatic, and musical Afrodiasporic translation (his phrase) brilliantly gives fresh life to these essential poems. The Great Zoo invites English-language readers to discover the power and humor and wordplay of Guillén’s poetry, which stands shoulder-to-shoulder with that of the major Latin American poets of his moment like Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, César Vallejo, Oliverio Girondo, Julia de Burgos, Pedro Mir. Coleman's deft translation of this crucial collection is superb—and its arrival is an occasion to celebrate." 

Rachel Galvin

The Great Zoo might evoke medieval bestiaries, or Borges’ fantastical bestiary, or even Neruda’s charming verse bestiary. But Guillén's hybrid humanimal/object-concept bestiary is a masterwork unto itself. Set in a hemispheric zoo, perhaps the Zoo of the {surreal and hyper-real} militarized Americas, each page takes us inside a cage where among the creatures we find: rivers, thirst, anthropomorphic hurricanes, police, money-lending bird-like things, and tiger-humans. Published in 1967, these poems could not feel more contemporary. In tone they are  light and airy, yet the stakes could not be higher. Among the zoo’s inhabitants are the 'unsolvable problem' of the Ku Klux Klan; the atomic bomb; and 'the Yankee, taken back from Vietnam.' Good colonial prison that it is, The Great Zoo is a vector of nationalism, racist dehumanization, and imperialist violence. That it manages to also be funny as hell speaks to both Guillén's fiery vision, and Coleman's daring and dynamic translation. It’s no easy thing to translate humor amid the existential and colonial crises of the Americas. This is a powerful and important book.”
 

Daniel Borzutzky

The beings held in Guillén’s Great Zoo stare at us through the bars of these pages. The tiger insists it's not a metaphor. The hurricane is just two days old. And the North Star, acquired at massive expense, is melting; the zookeepers can only stuff its growing voids with cotton. Coleman has an unerring ear for the black humor in this tender and bleak natural history; he makes Guillén's haunting 1967 bestiary very much a thing of our present.

Esther Allen

"I give public genuflection to the editors who revivified the University of Chicago Press’ Phoenix Poets series, which brings such exciting collections like this work in translation out into the world."

Literary Hub - Ishion Hutchinson

This is a tender warning for those entering The Great Zoo, a sparkling property built by the Caribbean poet Nicolás Guillén: Be careful. You may enter in search of both beauty and social justice, but the pleasures of these poems may tempt you to never leave.

Nancy Morejón

Step into The Great Zoo, Guillén’s masterful poetic menagerie, brought to vivid life in this bilingual edition. Guillén transforms social and political realities into a fantastical array of creatures. Each poem cages beauty and terror, humor and indictment, with Guillén’s wry voice illuminating complex legacies of colonialism, race, and violence.
 
Coleman offers readers a new vantage point on Guillén’s enduring brilliance, weaving a legacy of Afrodiasporic translation that spans continents and centuries. Coleman's work is a living, breathing experience, an invitation to confront and dream alongside the animals that haunt Guillén's human zoo.

Achy Obejas

Guillén’s The Great Zoo is an overlooked masterpiece of Cuban and Afro-Caribbean poetry and a global meditation on empire where human and animal bodies blur (our own reading bodies included). Coleman’s luminous translation honors the eccentricity and fire of Guillén’s poetics as well as its complex Afro-diasporic resonances. Guillén’s bestiary is both an irreverent performance and an ethical proposition, using radical sound and imagery as part of a decolonial counter-history where what was dismembered is relinked and where poetry demands the power ‘to show the whole picture.’”
 

Urayoán Noel

The Great Zoo is pure sui generis: quintessential verse by one of Cuba’s greatest poets. Coleman deftly brings all the humor and irony, all the searing social critique of this uncommon bestiary to a new English-reading audience. Yet he does so much more. In translating this iconic voice, Coleman heeds John Keene’s call to decenter hegemonic perspectives about Blackness and Black people, giving us a ‘truer and fuller sense’ of the Black diaspora and offering up a way to reconfigure ‘the world, our neighbors, our sisters and brothers, and ourselves.’ The Great Zoo is a true gift.

Katherine M. Hedeen

"The Great Zoo by Nicolás Guillén, translated by Aaron Coleman from Spanish contains mostly pithy poems that create in-jokes with themselves, a world of systemic critique told only through and with great pleasures of language. The zoos and greatnesses occur at every level and kind, and they are loud, fun, true. How is seeing shaped by messaging, by guarding? Guillén points to the ironies and ends of authority, of the dishonesty of the zoo or museum, with an anger that amplifies humanity."

Poetry Northwest

With a dexterity and verve that guides the reader right into the heart of the text, poet, scholar and translator Coleman provides us with an invaluable English passkey into the great Afro-Cuban poet Guillén's witty, trenchant, speculative, and revelatory collection The Great Zoo. This ‘zoo’ is anything but what we might expect; it is, rather, a tiny yet expansive tour through Cold War-era Cuba, the Caribbean and the US and rest of the West. Guillén is at his most humorous and acerbic in these poems, melding the metaphysical, historical, and critical, reminding us throughout that 'The Zoo . . . imparts what is important; no more, no less.'"

John Keene