The Great Zoo/El Gran Zoo

by Nicolás Guillén

Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Spanish by Roberto Marquez. In this collection, Guillen's vision of life as a widespread and diverse menagerie remains as potent today as when it was first published. Guillen's poetry draws on chilling realities and the absurd to fashion a zoo of natural and humanmade wonders alongside a wealth of social and political issues.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista was a Cuban poet, journalist, political activist, and writer. He is best remembered as the national poet of Cuba.

Guillén was born in Camagüey, Cuba. He studied law at the University of Havana, but he soon abandoned a legal career and worked as a typographer and journalist.

His poetry was published in various magazines from the early 1920s and his first collection, Motivos de son, appeared in 1930. West Indies, Ltd., published in 1934, was Guillén's first collection of poetry with political implications.[2] Cuba's dictatorial Machado regime had been overthrown in 1933, but political repression in the following years intensified. In 1936, with other editors of Mediodía, Guillén was arrested on trumped-up charges, and spent some time in jail. In 1937 he joined the Communist Party and made his first trip abroad–to attend a Congress of Writers and Artists in Spain. During his travels in the country he covered Spain's Civil War as a magazine reporter.
Guillén returned to Cuba via Guadeloupe. He stood as a Communist in the local elections of 1940. The following year he was refused a visa to enter the United States, but he travelled widely over the next twenty years – in South America, China and Europe. Guillén's poetry was increasingly becoming imbued with issues of cross-cultural Marxist dialectic. He was prevented by the Batista government from entering Cuba in 1953, but was welcomed back by Fidel Castro after the revolution, becoming appointed president of the Unión Nacional de Escritores de Cuba–the National Cuban Writers' Union–in 1961. He also wrote some evocative and poignant poetry highlighting social conditions, such as "Problemas de Subdesarrollo" and "Dos Niños". He was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize in 1954, which was later renamed for Lenin under de-Stalinization and also the Laureate Of The International Botev Prize in 1976. He was the inaugural winner of Cuba's National Prize for Literature (1983).

Nicolás Guillén died in 1989 at age 87 and was buried in the Colon Cemetery, Havana. His nephew was experimental Cuban filmmaker Nicolás Guillén Landrián (1938–2003).

Reviews

[Lindsey Z · Rating 2 out of 5]

The intentionality and concept of this collection--an extended analogy to critique the inhumanity of a variety of government actions, people, and events through history in the Caribbean and beyond--did not live up to its very flat execution. These poems sadly didn't do a whole lot for me. Maybe they are too cunningly simple for my tastes.

[Javier Ponce · Rating 4 out of 5]

El poemario de Guillén ofrece un fresco y agradable giro al bestiario tradicional, pasando de una genial lectura de lo no-animal mirado desde el binomio humano-animal de zoológico, pero después se desplaza a ser una crítica social-política de Cuba y del clima político de la época.

[Jógvan Helge · Rating 3 out of 5]

asken ankommer i desember

[Esforçonulo]

3.5*

curto seco e divertido.

[Jaime · Rating 4 out of 5]

Había leído antes este libro y me había parecido bueno, aunque no era mi favorito de Guillén, pero lo he releído en estos días, junto a mi hija de 8 años --que lo ha disfrutado muchísimo--, y he sentido recién, con toda claridad, en qué radica la fuerza de estos poemas. Cada uno es una pequeña obra maestra, una entidad en sí misma, que genera empatía a la vez que preguntas, y que va formando ese pequeño universo tan imperfecto que es nuestra sociedad, ese gran zoo.

[Karlo Mikhail · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very thin book, brief but a total knockout. The zoo here satirically brings together absurd and all too real creatures fashioned after political and social conditions and issues: from the atomic bomb, to hunger, the police, the eagles (of imperialism), and other more mundane objects that represent larger realities. Quite witty. And the puns don't hold punches.

[Alexander Theofanidis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Χάνει το 5ο αστεράκι μόνο και μόνο γιατί από τις 270 σελίδες, σκάρτες 50 είναι ποίηση του Guillén.
Πέρα από αυτό, την ποίηση δεν τη βαθμολογείς, δεν την καταλαβαίνεις, δεν την εξηγείς. Ή τη νιώθεις, ή σε αφήνει αδιάφορο.

Υ.Γ. Στα θετικά η εικονογράφηση και η παρουσία των πρωτότυπων δίπλα στις μετφράσεις