The Great Zoo and Other Poems

by Nicolás Guillén, Robert Márquez (Translator)

Acclaimed by Pablo Neruda as "a great plebeian, a poet of the people, crystal clear yet full of wisdom," Nicolás Guillén has long been recognized as one of the foremost poets of contemporary Latin America. The pre-eminent exponent of a black poetry in the Spanish-speaking world, he has been of seminal importance in creating a specifically Cuban cultural identity, which has earned him the designation: national poet of Cuba.

Apart from a collection made in 1948, Guillén's work has been unavailable in English until now. This collection, which includes all of El gran zoo and thirty-four additional poems, offers a panoramic view of a poetry covering over thirty years, a career rich in human insights and lyric beauty, in which we see the poet moving progressively beyond the limited Cuban context to embrace the Caribbean and Latin America, and finally the idea of a Third World of the oppressed.

Genres: Poetry

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1973

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

[jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

the late nicolás guillén (1902-1989) was a cuban poet. "guillén, a mulatto, has been regarded as the major exponent of black poetry in the spanish-speaking world. but his thematic scope is wide, and although primarily known as a poet of folk rhythms, black and popular themes, he is also recognized for his humor, for his artistic refinement, for the sensitivity of his love ballads, and for the compassionate poignancy of his political and revolutionary verse." (from the translator's introduction)

the great zoo and other poems (patria o muerte!) is a bilingual collection spanning four and a half decades of guillén's work. the poems featured in the book exhibit a modest stylistic range (as his writing evolved throughout the decades), yet seem to work better as a whole then they do individually. the poems contained within the great zoo (el gran zoo) were published in 1967 and concern themselves with the cuban revolution. "by then the revolution was an irrevocable fact of history, and from the perspective of that particular reality guillén's witty little book treats the reader to an ironic interpretation of the contemporary- and particularly the capitalist- world which is now considered part of cuba's bleak pre-history. guillén therefore takes his audience on a tour of a symbolic zoo and introduces a mosaic of characters, animal, mineral, and vegetable, which reveal to the reader-tourist a vision of the universe in microcosm." while these poems are perhaps not as powerful as some of those written by his revolutionary compatriots, they do offer a unique perspective of cuban culture in transition.


the airplane

when this age has passed
and all our human documents
have been consumed by the flame of centuries;
when the key to all our current progress
no longer exists
and with the patience of the ignorant
man has to begin again,
then vestiges
of our dead civilization will appear.
what will the naturalists of the future say
faced with the skeleton of an airplane
unearthed on a plain
or on a mountain top,
rusty, fossilized,
monumental, incomprehensible, strange?
they will no doubt be
very much amazed
and will classify the airplane
among the specimens of an extinct fauna.

[SLH · Rating 3 out of 5]

My favourite poem of the collection is "Propositions on the Death of Ana"

[Mills College Library]

861 G958p 1972