A Song of Flowers: Ni Xochitl, Ni Kuikatl

A Song of Flowers: Ni Xochitl, Ni Kuikatl by Mardonio Carballo is written in a dialect of Nahuatl spoken in the poet’s home state of Veracruz, Mexico, translated here by Adam W. Coon. In the opening poem, Carballo invites the reader into an enticing sequence: 

Flowers are echoes from the earth, starting from its core and self-replicating.

Echoes. Near-perfect geometries that complete one another. Paradoxical replicas of primeval fire. Small igneous particles that take the shape of petals then repeat themselves until they form a flower, and also its sap.

For Carballo metaphor suggests not a likeness but something more, a total identification of things as distinct as flowers and echoes. The poem later asserts: “Earth is the original flower,” before insisting that “We are the reflection of the earth in Tezcatlipoca’s mirror.”

The layout of these poems and translations evokes this sense of mirroring; the Nahuatl poems or poem sections appear, at times, above their English translations, with the Nahuatl justified right at the center of the page and the English justified left at the center of the page, so that the two appear to meet at an imaginary vertical line. The effect is of two reflective worlds. Coon writes that Carballo advised him to use periods to indicate the polysemy of certain Nahuatl words. Thus, for example: “Moon.Music”, “Sun.Bird”, “love.trash.” The dot acts as a hinge on which the word can swing from meaning to meaning.

Now from afar a sea is heard within a conch shell.
Truly I’m heart.pressed because I can’t kill my love.refuse

For Carballo, the realm conjured in reflections spins, also, on an erotic charge; in one poem “Xiloxochitl plantain pistils bursting / that burning youth / plays his sex,” and, in another:

Her bud gives off an aroma
she does not fret over
   others’ blind eyes,
she bursts.