Nicolás Guillén (1902–1989) was a prolific Cuban poet, journalist, and activist. Born in Camagüey to parents of African and European ancestry, 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. Guillén received the Lenin Peace Prize, the International Botev Prize, and Cuba’s National Prize for Literature. In 1961, he was named National Poet of Cuba. He authored sixteen poetry collections, including Motivos de son, Sóngoro cosongo, West Indies Ltd., and El son entero. The first English-language anthology of his early work, Cuba Libre, was translated by Langston Hughes.
Judges’ Citation
The Great Zoo by Nicolás Guillén is one of the masterpieces of Latin American poetry. Originally published in Spanish in 1967 and translated by Aaron Coleman with a subtle understanding of the contexts of colonial oppression and exoticism, this bilingual edition remains a relevant commentary on our times.
The Great Zoo by Nicolás Guillén is one of the masterpieces of Latin American poetry. Originally published in Spanish in 1967 and translated by Aaron Coleman with a subtle understanding of the contexts of colonial oppression and exoticism, this bilingual edition remains a relevant commentary on our times. The Great Zoo seeks to integrate history, society, nature, and dreams into the territories of this singular park. It is not only an atypical bestiary of nonsensical and imprecatory zoography, not only a humorous book of fables with strange morals, but also a surprising essay of social criticism that mocks the taxonomic and classificatory pride of man pretending to gather, in cages, the living complexity of nature. The zoo’s fauna comprises ideas, emotions, phenomena, anthropomorphized animals, and men who are animals; the descriptions of the species are masterpieces of suggestion, working on our imagination with great force. The book, entertaining and moving, is simply beautiful.
Selected poems
by Nicolás Guillén
It’s melting helplessly,
the North Star.
Ten million, or even more,
tons every day
(ice, cold light, gas)
waste away from the frame
of this immense animal.
You will see,
if you look just over there,
how our team of conservators
keeps putting puffs of cotton
in the empty spaces.
But this won’t be enough,
and within four centuries at most,
navigators will have
to blindly feel their way across the sea.
What responsibility!
The animal that costs us most,
and the one we can conserve the least.
Copyright © 2024, Aaron Coleman translated from the Spanish written by Nicolás Guillén, The Great Zoo, University of Chicago Press
The North Star
the Spanish written by Nicolás Guillén
- Poetry Foundation Profile
- Introduction: Nicolás Guillén and “The Great Zoo”
- El Son Entero: Read by Nicolás Guillén Biblioteca Nacional Digital