You cannot imaginehow these winds carried on last night.They were seen,eyes gleaming,tailpieces stiff and long.Nothing could knock them from their paths(not prayers, not promises)through a makeshift shack, a solitary boat,and a plantation;through all these necessary thingsthey so thoughtlessly destroy.Until this morning, when they brought them back, tied up,taken by surprise,dawdling lovers,as they wandered lost in thoughtalong a field of dahlias.(Those ones over there, to the left,sleeping in their boxes.)LOS VIENTOSUsted no puede imaginarcómo andaban estos vientos anoche.Se les vio,los ojos centelleantes,largo y rígido el rabo.Nada pudo desviarlos(ni oraciones ni votos)de una choza, de un barco solitario,de una granja,de todas esas cosas necesariasque ellos destruyen sin saberlo.Hasta que esta mañana los trajeron atados,cogidos por sorpresa,lentos enamorados,cuando vagaban pensativosjunto a un campo de dalias.(Esos de allí, a la izquierda,dormidos en sus cajas).
THE WINDS
Feature Date
- December 18, 2024
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- Translation
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Reprinted with permission from The Great Zoo by Nicolás Guillén, translated by Aaron Coleman, published by the University of Chicago Press.
El Gran Zoo © 2023 by Nicolás Guillén c/o Indent Literary Agency, LLC.
Translation © 2024 by Aaron Coleman. All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
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 a poet, translator, educator, and scholar of the African Diaspora. He is the author of Red Wilderness (Four Way Books, 2025) and the translator of Nicolás Guillén’s The Great Zoo (University of Chicago Press, 2024). Coleman’s other poetry collections include Threat Come Close (Four Way Books, 2018), winner of the GLCA New Writers Award, and St. Trigger (Button, 2016), selected by Adrian Matejka for the Button Poetry Chapbook Prize. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem, the Fulbright Program, and the American Literary Translators Association. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in publications including The New York Times, Boston Review, Callaloo, and Poetry Magazine. Aaron is an assistant professor of English and Comparative Literature in the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan.
"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."
-Ishion Hutchinson, Literary Hub
"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
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