Published in Issue 63.4: Fall 2024
You can purchase our Fall issue here
This nocturnal butterfly
glides over our heads
like a vulture over a carcass.
(Our model specimen
exhibited here is the everyday dream.)
Nevertheless,
management promises by year’s end,
or even sooner, maybe,
a choice parcel of dreams
as many for men as for women.
Five boxes of tsetse flies
were ordered the day before yesterday.
From The Great Zoo by
Nicolás Guillén
Translated from the Spanish by
Aaron Coleman
Purchase our Fall 2024 issue, available in print and digital forms.
Nicolás Guillén (b. 1902, Camagüey, Cuba; d. 1989, Havana) was a prolific poet, writer, and activist hailed as the National Poet of revolutionary Cuba. 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 and Ben Frederic Carruthers.
Aaron Coleman is a poet, translator, and scholar of the African Diaspora. He is the translator of Nicolás Guillén’s The Great Zoo (University of Chicago Press, 2024) and the author of Red Wilderness (Four Way Books, 2025), among other titles. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem, and the American Literary Translators Association, Coleman is an assistant professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan.
