Where There Is So Much Color

Poems of the Aztec Peoples by Edward Kissam
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book of poetry translated from Nahuatl (the language spoken by the Aztecs and others) is interesting and entertaining, but it's not (IMO) like other poetry you might read for pleasure. "Exotic" as a modifier has gotten a bad reputation, tending to indicate paternalism or condescension, but in the less judgmental way--meaning "outside my experience" or something like that--there's no denying that these verses feel exotic to a Western mind.

Some of it is the unfamiliar culture it comes out of, naturally, but no little part comes from the setting and the natural world that gave birth to it. We find references to jade, emeralds, turquoise, and obsidian; macaws, quetzals, herons, and hummingbirds; vanilla, corn, tobacco, and chocolate; jaguars, deer, and rattlesnakes; gongs, drums, and tortoise shells; and mountains, oceans, caverns, and canyons. Images are filled with weapons and references to war on the one hand and flowers, butterflies, rainbows, and feathers on the other. Add in the names of towns, gods, and kings that are little known to most of us, like Tenochtitlan, Anahuac, Nezahualpilli, Cacamatl, Ayocuan, Huitzilopochtli, and Xochitquetzal, you feel like you're looking in on a colorful, vibrant, exciting land which owes nothing to our own. These are people like us--but their world isn't like ours.

It is amazing and a bit disorienting. Beauty sits right alongside cruelty and ugliness, poetry and flowers right next to ritual bloodletting and human sacrifice.

I found it hard to read these poems as just poems, looking for the beauty in them, enjoying them as art. They are too culture-bound to let me sample them that way. This is poetry that makes sense in the context of its own world but is very hard to connect to ours. What I mean is that I don't see me here very much. But there are striking lines and images that are still fantastic, and they're all over these pages:

Blue birds, black birds, come
where the tree of blossoms grows--
its precious clustered leaves!
Come dark birds, blue birds,
and you, green quetzal!
You come from Nonohualco,
the land by the water,
precious birds of Ipalnemoani.
You are his creatures. Come!

Here, in the house of moss,
spread like a flower
is the head-dress of the blue bird.
He came to contemplate the dawn.
All your birds are waking.
The gold tzinitzcan preens,
the red quechua, the blue bird
who screams the dawn.
Their morning
wakens you.

And here is the beginning of a love song:

I am scattering
different kinds of flowers.

Here I come to give you songs
to make your head spin, flowers,
as I smile at you.

I come from where the water
gushes out of the earth.
I've come to offer you songs,

flowers to make your head spin.
Oh, another kind of flower
and you know it in your heart.

I came to bring them to you,
I carry them to your house,
on my back,

uprooted flowers,
I'm bent double with the weight of them
for you.

Flowers, the translators tell us, sometimes refer to sacrifice and blood, often refer to poetry and language, and just about as often refer just to flowers. But it might be all of them at once.

Beauty and blood.

There's a lot to love here, but it's a little hard to enter in the poetry in a personal way. So I'll just stand as close as I can and peek over, taking in all the color.

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