Fifteen Poets of the Aztec World

These selections from two great manuscript collections of Nahautl verse from the 100-year period surrounding the Spanish conquest of Mexico indicate the high intellectual achievement of the Meso-American culture. Imagery is vivid and sophisticated: in one work, a foaming vortex of chocolate being stirred suggests a flower, and this composite image leads to an effusive paean to eroticism. The poets, we learn, were frequently kings or military captains of satellite principalities to the Aztec capital; the survival of many (and often lengthy) odes or elegies in oral folk traditions for more than a generation after the Conquest gives evidence of the integrity of that hierarchical society. However, a more than superficial sense of the rhythm and rhetoric of the poets is denied the reader who does not know Nahuatal, for though Leon-Portilla ( Endangered Cultures ) provides full Nahuatl transcriptions of all poems, along with the English translations, his profuse introductory material touches only briefly and none too skillfully on textual analysis, preferring the surer--and, indeed, fascinating--approach of dwelling on historical and biographical context. (Oct.)