To the Public: AIR-MAMMOTH
Translated By Aaron Coleman
(Note at the foot of a photo, 3½ meters high and
2 meters wide, on display in the open air of the Great Zoo.)
It wasn’t
the ruins of a small propeller plane,
as they had in the beginning believed.
It was the skeleton,
dry and abandoned, of a baby mammoth,
having died somewhere in Siberia
and been discovered by a backpacker.
The prop plane is a mechanical being,
and a great intellectual proved
that the skeleton had tusks,
an animal with more than enough credentials
to be in the Great Zoo.
But considering how here
only living beings are admitted,
they’ve set down this simple information
with a photo of the quarry,
called air-mammoth in an eclectic manner,
to avoid any other discussion.
Translated from the Spanish
Notes:
This poem is part of the portfolio “Nicolás Guillén: Maker and Breaker of Forms.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the September 2024 issue. The poems in this folio come from The Great Zoo by Nicolás Guillén, translated by Aaron Coleman (University of Chicago Press, 2024). El Gran Zoo © 2023 by Nicolás Guillén, first published in 1967. Translation © 2024 by Aaron Coleman. Reprinted by permission of the University of Chicago Press and the Estate of Nicolás Guillén. All rights reserved.
Source: Poetry (September 2024)