The great zoo : a bilingual edition /
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English Spanish |
| Language Notes: | Parallel text in Spanish and English. |
| Published: |
Chicago :
University of Chicago Press,
2024.
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| Series: | Phoenix poets.
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| Item Description: | Originally published in Spanish in 1967, The Great Zoo by the Afro-Cuban poet Nicola̹s Guille̹n (1902-1989) is a wry political project structured as though a fantastical bestiary of ideas and ideologies. Parodying the perceived authority and objectivity of zoological grammar, the poems present taxonomic-imagistic descriptions of caged entities in the voice of a dispassionate zoo tour guide explaining to the reader-as-visitor what appears inside each enclosure. These captive inhabitants include the Mississippi and Amazon Rivers as transmogrified snakes, a winged, singing guitar, clouds from around the world, a temperamental atomic bomb; blue-pelted police and a bloodthirsty KKK. Newly translated by Aaron Coleman with a keen eye toward histories of colonial racialization, oppression and exoticism, this bilingual edition of The Great Zoo establishes a creative mode in which the authority of language born of racial-colonial regimes in the so-called New World is critically, at times even comically, exposed and rewritten. |
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| Physical Description: | ix, 84 pages ; 25 cm. |
| ISBN: | 9780226834795 0226834794 |