Full Description
Who were the poets of Mexico in the days of Aztec splendour? What were the poems of a culture so different from our own? In this first English-language translation of a significant corpus of Nahuatl poetry, an expansion of "Trece poetas del mundo azteca", Miguel Leon-Portilla was assisted in his rethinking, augmenting and rewriting by Grace Lobanov. Biographies of 15 composers of Nahuatl verse and analyses of their work are followed by their extant poems in Nahuatl and in English. The poets - 14 men and one woman - lived in the central highlands of Mexico and spoke Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, Tezcocans, Tlaxcalans, and several other chiefdoms. These authors of "flower and song" (a Nahuatl metaphor for poetry, art and symbolism) lived during the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries. Sources for the poems included indigenous "codices", "books of songs" now unfortunately lost, and renditions of them preserved by the Nahuatl oral tradition, which survived the Spanish Conquest and were recorded by several young natives in two manuscripts.With this volume, readers in English are given access the some of the first pages of pre-Columbian literature, along with the "faces and hearts" of those who composed them centuries ago.
