Introduction: Nicolás Guillén and “The Great Zoo”

Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista was born at two in the morning on July 10, 1902, in the Camagüey province of east central Cuba. Both of his parents, Argelia Batista y Arrieta and Nicolás Guillén y Urra, were of African and European ancestry. At age fifteen, Guillén—the oldest of six siblings—suffered the sudden loss of his father, a liberal political figure, who was assassinated by government forces for protesting electoral fraud. As a young adult, Guillén was immersed in the island’s politics and burgeoning print culture. He worked at printing presses in his hometown of Camagüey and in Havana, where he moved to study law after graduating high school. The young writer eventually left behind his legal studies, finding his way instead into Havana’s literary scene.

Guillén’s best-known poems first appeared in 1930 in Diario de la marina, one of the country’s leading newspapers. Published as a suite titled Motivos de son—which I might translate as “motives of son” or “motifs of son”—they were both a roaring success and a scandal because they flouted the expectations of traditional poetry. Indeed, Guillén was a consummate maker and breaker of forms. The innovative poet rose swiftly to fame as he transformed the popular Cuban musical form of the son into a poetic form that called attention to the experiences of Afro-Cuban people and broke racial taboos.

Guillén continued to transform language and music throughout his career. At times, he crafted poems born of Cuban slang and song, while, in other moments, he satirized the supposed objectivity of journalistic and scientific writing. Through it all, Guillén traveled the island and the world, interweaving his artistic and political commitments to build a body of work admired by readers around the globe. Returning to the island in 1959, after spending much of the fifties in exile, he was hailed as the national poet of revolutionary Cuba. Guillén’s life spanned nine decades of the twentieth century before he passed away on July 16, 1989. His singular poetics evolved with his changing world—but his under-examined masterpiece, El gran zoo (1967), defies expectations even today.

Swerving from the hilarious to the harrowing, The Great Zoo (University of Chicago Press, 2024) explores an uncanny menagerie of ideas and social concerns. Each poem is a cage in this literary exhibit, and the “animals” we encounter include the Mississippi and Amazon Rivers, the North Star, clouds from different countries; they range from a hurricane to the KKK, the police, a guitar, and a dream. The Great Zoo also shines light on a turning point in Guillén’s career—in these pages, the poet dons another voice and form entirely. With new concision, Guillén conjures the dynamic conversational voices and musicality of his early poems. Through the conceptual frame of the zoo, the poet also manages to cultivate an innovative space to further engage the social concerns in both his epic and elegiac poetry of the fifties. The clever music of The Great Zoo moves in camouflage as it carries us through parodies of zoological language. I found myself equally stunned by Guillén’s wry humor and his image-driven descriptions—how they come together to upend a colonial history that has exoticized and demeaned living beings put on display for the sake of human whimsy.

Guillén’s awareness of the devastating consequences and conundrums of (neo)colonialism extends outward from his native Caribbean. The form of this zoo is not left to be read as an innocuous or arbitrary bestiary. Here, Guillén makes clear that the zoo’s absurdity and violence is symptomatic of the fraught history of Worlds Fairs and zoos. The Great Zoo stresses the imperialist desire to try to capture and define what is or isn’t savage, to decide what is or isn’t (in)human(e). The poems of this collection speak to colonial violence throughout the past and present in locations around the world, whether that be in Gaza, Darfur, the United States, or anywhere else the machinations of power have wreaked havoc in people’s lives.

As a poet I’ve learned so much from Guillén’s forms—how the momentum of music can propel a collage of images and how images can resound with their own luminous music:

Se descongela sin remedio
la Estrella Polar.
Diez millones, y aún más
diarios de toneladas
(hielo, luz fría, gas)
pierde de su estructura
este inmenso animal.
—From “LA ESTRELLA POLAR”

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.
—From “THE NORTH STAR,” tr. by Aaron Coleman

These poems bear facets like diamonds: an image or phrase catches light and turns again and again in enjambed lines, revolving from humor to sorrow to absurdity to wonder. I wonder what we might learn if we listen carefully to Guillén’s imaginative but frighteningly real bestiary—to the roars and howls of its animals, to the clank and rattle of its cages, and to the underwater thump of the Caribbean within its aquarium. Guillén’s humor shimmers here, in its darkness and in its lightness, as his poems wink at the world. These poems do indeed bite, dream, and sing.

Living between languages myself as a translator, a poet, and a child and student of the African diaspora, I’m astounded by how these poems open new vantage points and possibilities for contemporary audiences. To read Guillén across the diaspora, as he speaks out against colonialism and anti-Black violence, bears witness to Blackness beyond any single language, history, or country. To read his poems in translation in the United States today traverses political, geographic, linguistic, generational, and poetic boundaries.

I’m humbled and honored to follow in the footsteps of other Black poets translating between Cuba and the United States. This longer legacy includes the work of none other than that elder statesman of the Harlem Renaissance, James Weldon Johnson, whose edited anthology The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922) included his own translation of the nineteenth-century Afro-Cuban poet Plácido (Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés). Another forerunner in this lineage is Langston Hughes, who, along with the Howard University professor Ben Frederic Carruthers, produced the first English-language collection of Guillén’s poetry, Cuba Libre (1948). Through the work of translation, we discover new ways of speaking our own languages: the imagination and craft of one writer finds new form in the imagination and craft of another.

This fall’s forthcoming bilingual edition of The Great Zoo offers readers the opportunity to locate themselves in relation to Guillén’s source poems and my translations. The far-reaching themes and emotional intensities of The Great Zoo open myriad pathways for visiting Guillén’s carnivalesque vision. I’ve highlighted this legacy of what I call “Afrodiasporic translation” because I’m curious about translation’s role in priming us to look backward and forward at the same time. I want to widen our gaze so that we see a diasporic constellation of translations—all while we dwell in the fantastical nature of Guillén’s great zoo. The creative experiments of poets and translators, occurring between languages and locations, signal the vital potential of translation to shape the past, present, and future of the African diaspora.