Read an Interview with Poet and Translator Aaron Coleman
To celebrate new Phoenix Poets books, we’re introducing Phoenix editors, poets, and translators through a series of short interviews. Here, we spoke with poet and translator Aaron Coleman, whose new translated bilingual edition of Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén’s The Great Zoo was recently published. In this interview, he discusses his relationship to poetry and to the Spanish language, reflects on how living abroad helped him deepen his understanding of the African diaspora, and shares what excites him about The Great Zoo.
Tell us a little about yourself and your relationship to poetry.
I think I first found my way to poetry through sound: through hip hop as a kid and sitting in the pews of the church in Detroit where my mom sang in the choir. Hearing them practice the intonations of fragments of song verses and really calling on their entire bodies and emotions as they practiced and as they performed. My relationship to poetry was also born in the cyphers with my boys as we grew up, freestyling for fun and just feeling this wondrous potential in language; this sense of how language feels ancient and alive and evolving all at the same time.
Growing up, I didn’t really feel like capital “P” Poetry was something that could be a part of my life. I loved playing sports, too, and I think that as a young black man a lot of social forces normalized that but disregarded reading and writing for fun—reading and writing as a way of getting to know myself and learning to express myself. Then there was this moment in my mid-teenage years when my family had one of those month-long free cable trials of HBO and I came across Def Poetry Jam—I remember how my mind lit up as I watched folx of all backgrounds really reveling in the possibilities of language to express the complexity of their lives. I started writing down my freestyles and revising them after I fell in love with that show (and Andre 3000 of Outkast’s album, The Love Below). A few years later, after I found the courage to step away from my football team in college, I enrolled in one of Diane Seuss’s poetry classes at Kalamazoo College. And her mentorship in those early years (and still!), followed by poets like Jericho Brown and Mary Jo Bang and Carl Phillips really helped to deepen my commitment to poetry as an intergenerational community of shapers of language, really pushing the boundaries of what language can do and say. While studying abroad then living and teaching abroad in places like Cáceres and Madrid, Spain, and Durban, South Africa, poetry was a huge part of finding community for myself. I’m always grateful for what we can learn from exploring creative writing and the arts in classrooms and community workshops, in eclectic spaces with educators and teaching artists of all kinds that are doing important work around the world. Poetry has really become, in so many ways, both a harbor and a launch pad to really push myself and explore my own life, history, and community.
These days I feel a good pull between both reverence and playfulness in poetry. And as my relationship to the Spanish language has moved around the diaspora, from Spain to Chicago to Cuba to my partner’s family in Colombia, my Spanish has grown to encompass linguistic elements from all these places that have been so formative for me as a poet, translator, and Afrodescendant person moving around the diaspora. I’ve grown deeply interested in the ways that black peoples around the world have taken the colonial languages that were forced on us and reimagined the possibilities of those languages; we’ve repurposed those same European languages as tools to reconnect with black folx in other locations of the diaspora. So I’m always thinking about translation’s role in vivifying relationships across the African diaspora more broadly. I’m endlessly curious about how translation allows us to see similarities and differences across the diaspora at the same time, in each of our languages. Translation can help us see the uniqueness of blackness in different languages, places, and time periods.
What made you excited to work with translating this poet’s work?
The dark humor of The Great Zoo. Man! That and it’s intricate musicality. And how those elements work, striated in the tension between the concision of most of these poems and their expansive sociopolitical implications. Guillén’s poetics feel in many ways very different from my own and I wanted to learn from his humor and concision, from his wisdom and from the uniqueness of the sound systems in his poems. Translation Studies folx often return to Gayatri Spivak’s quote, “Translation is the most intimate act of reading,” and I really feel like I learned so much from entering into this intimate relationship with Guillén’s poetry.
And those experiences living abroad that I mentioned earlier, those years led me to a deeper and more careful consideration of the realities of the African diaspora. I got to know black folx from all over the world, people from Africa but also people whose families had lived generations in different countries across the Americas and around Europe, all over the Atlantic world. And in my research, I explore the reasons that black US Americans have decided to live abroad and what living abroad has represented for so many of us. So that led me to approach Langston Hughes from that angle and his relationship with Nicolás Guillén.
But specifically: The Great Zoo! This later and less explored collection by Guillén, decades after his most famous poems of the 1930s and published in Cuba in the same year that dear Langston Hughes passed away, really blew my mind. In this book Guillén claims the authority to take the touristic and zoological language of the zoo and use it as a structure to examine (neo)colonial histories and his contemporary realities of Cuba, the Caribbean, the Americas, and really the entire world.
Do you see your work in a conversation with a community/communities of other translators or poets?
That’s one of things I really love about The Great Zoo. Guillén’s crafted a book and built a world that speaks to so many different communities of translators and poets and thinkers. For those who are interested in considering the meaning of the Americas, of the Caribbean and hemispheric Americanness: in Guillén’s engagement with sociocultural issues, the long and short of capital “H” History, the natural world and its enigmas, this book creates space to wonder about how all these issues and stories intersect and interact. For those that love the musicality of language, those roused by dark humor and the absurd, for those intrigued by world-building and conceptual book forms, there’s just so much to wonder with across these pages. And as I’ve mentioned earlier, I’m so interested in relationships between black writers and black translators, and in my own research—mentioned briefly in my introduction to The Great Zoo—there’s a legacy of black writers like Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson translating AfroCuban poets like Guillén and Plácido (Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés). So I certainly feel like this book is in conversation with the international and multilingual Afrodiasporic communities of Cave Canem, the Furious Flower Poetry Center, and other similar organizations. But even more broadly, I hope this bilingual edition speaks to the many different conversations between poets who live and work and love between not just Spanish and English, but all languages—all stories of diaspora and migration.
Anything else you’d like us to know?
It’s an honor and a delight to reintroduce this book to the world with the support of the Phoenix Poet Series and University of Chicago Press. I’m so excited about Jolanda Insana’s Slashing Sounds, translated by Catherine Theis, and Jonathan Thirkfield’s Infinity Pool. I’m grateful for the space the series has created for poetry in translation while cultivating this conversation with all the poetry published in Phoenix Poet Series.
In translating this book that was first published in 1967, I thought so much about the cataclysmic sixties in relation to our contemporary moment. I think we can learn so much by returning to Guillén’s brilliance as we grapple with so many overlapping crises today.
Aaron Coleman is an assistant professor of English and comparative literature in the Helen Zell Writers’s Program at the University of Michigan. He is the author of the poetry collection Threat Come Close, winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and the chapbook St. Trigger, selected for the Button Poetry Chapbook Prize. Coleman has received fellowships from the NEA, Fulbright Program, Cave Canem Foundation, and American Literary Translators Association. His poems and essays have appeared in publications including the New York Times, Boston Review, and Callaloo.
The Great Zoo is now available from our website or from your favorite bookseller.