Aaron Coleman on The Great Zoo
City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco welcomed Aaron Coleman to discuss his translation of The Great Zoo by Nicolás Guillén with Achy Obejas.
About The Great Zoo
Born in Cuba to parents of African and European ancestry, Nicolás Guillén worked in printing presses and studied law before moving into Havana’s literary scene. A virtuosic maker and breaker of forms, Guillén rose to fame by transforming a popular form of Cuban music into poetry that called attention to the experience of Afro-Cuban people, and he continued to interweave his artistic and political commitments as he traveled the world.
Originally published in Spanish in 1967, The Great Zoo is a humorous and biting collection of poems that presents a fantastical bestiary of ideas, social concerns, landscapes, phenomena, and more. The “animals” on view in this menagerie include the Mississippi and Amazon Rivers, clouds from different countries, a singing guitar, a temperamental atomic bomb, blue-pelted police, a hurricane, the KKK, and the North Star, among many others. Translated by Aaron Coleman with a keen understanding of the contexts of colonial racialization, oppression, and exoticism, this bilingual edition stands as a testament to Guillén’s carnivalesque vision.
Aaron Coleman is a poet, translator, 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 Book, 2018), winner of the GLCA New Writers Award, and St. Trigger (Button, 2016), selected by Adrian Matejka for the Button Poetry Chapbook Prize. He is an assistant professor of English and comparative literature in the Helen Zell Writers’s Program at the University of Michigan.
Achy Obejas is a writer, journalist and translator. She is the author of five books of fiction and has translated Junot Díaz and Wendy Guerra, among many others. She is from Cuba and lives in California.