This is a contextual translation of the fourth song in the sixteenth-century, Nahuatl-language anthology called Cantares Mexicanos. The ninety-one songs of this manuscript were transcribed in colonial New Spain—hence they look back, from that vantage, at the precolonial world of the multiethnic, multilingual, geopolitically complex central valley of Mexico (aka Anahuac). In these songs the difficulty and humor of politics and social worlds reflect not just Spanish and Mexica conflict; they also reveal that a broader world of Mesoamerica filled with nuances of Tenochcas, Texcocans, Tlaxcalans, Huexotzincos, Azcapotzalcans, and others still confidently encompassed the singers’ memories and imaginations. For the most part, the singers’ names have been lost to time—although in his book Fifteen Poets of the Aztec World, Miguel León-Portilla does a magisterial job of speculating on some possible identities, while also evoking the milieu in which these musical works were carried from heart to heart and performed amid drum tap and dance (in later days, often in hiding from Spanish authorities). To get at their context and music, which is my aim, John Bierhorst’s erudite literal and annotated translation of these songs is also helpful. This one in particular is about a singer who gets drunk on the sensation of his singing, finding himself thirsting for the delightfully poisonous narcotic of more song, every day, like one who pursues pure love in the smell of morning dew or a sense of psychic peace with a morning beer.
Read the poem this note is about, “Cantares Mexicanos.”
Edgar Garcia was born in California to a family of Central American extraction. He earned an associate degree from Chaffey Community College, a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD from Yale University. He is associate professor of English at the University of Chicago and works in the fields of indigenous and Latinx studies, American literature, poetry and poetics, and environmental…