Poems and micro-essays intertwine in this poetically attuned adaptation of the mid-sixteenth century Nahuatl-language Cantares Mexicanos
Cantares is a multipart engagement with the poetics and history of the colonial and Indigenous Americas, oscillating between poetry and essay in a structure of repetitions derived from Mesoamerican poetics. Edgar Garcia reimagines the Cantares Mexicanos, a sixteenth-century anthology of Nahuatl songs from Central Mexico, and brings these songs to life not just as historical documents, but as music, to give presence of thought to their historical layers and complexities. His adaptations evoke the sound and texture of the sixteenth century, blending Indigenous and Baroque traditions, exploring themes of translation, adaptation, race, and historical memory. The collection moves between poetry and scholarship--between poems and micro-essays. The essays provide commentary and historical context about the colonial soundscape of Central Mexico. At the same time, the poems emphasize the songs' sonic, spiritual, and poetic dimensions.
The Cantares emerge from a time of cultural collision--after the arrival of the Castilians but still rooted in older, Indigenous worldviews. These songs are not nostalgic or idealized; they reflect crisis, survival, and creativity. Garcia's work draws inspiration from the Popol Vuh, the K'iche' Maya creation story, which begins in colonial darkness and still insists on the possibility of light. Through these adaptations, Cantares becomes a meditation on history, imagination, and the power of art to endure and create in the face of loss.
[sample poem, includes poem and mini essay]
CRISIS
Is there dragon fruit
or humming jade
for little birds
in shady colonnades?
Is there any multitude
for the displaced and dead retinues?
Subdued, like mountain ruins
in diamond lakes, they say:
"It sort of hurts to speak.
I think I have a sore throat.
You're probably sick.
Mask up if you go out."
I see them thus in masks:
prattling hummingbirds, barking geese,
quetzals in the guise of old lords,
whippoorwills in white sheets.
They cover the city
in search of things to eat.
Ancient landscapes hardly exist any longer. They've retreated to a future time. History comes at you that way in a world made by the hands and minds of countless bodies now dead. Ghostly heralds, and it's not only humans. Our sidewalks are made of mineralized animal bone; the air is the sighed carbon dioxide of trees long gone. When the Cantares were put to paper in the mid-sixteenth century in colonial New Spain their world--the world of the Mexicas, Texcocans, Tlaxcalans, Huexotzincos, Azcapotzalcans, Tarascans, and others, many dead who took with them the knowledge of their world--must have felt absent from their cities, whose streets were then an emotional compression of memory, forgetting, imagination, and wish. Some called to the old gods, others to the new, or even both at once, while still others addressed the crisis directly with acts of magic. The songs themselves, the Cantares, were understood in this spectrum of liability. Those who helped to circulate them, singers and the patrons of singers, could be imprisoned or killed for promulgating the wrong gods and wrong magic. The songs were as potent with the touch of these gods and this magic as an idol, ceremonial bundle, or ritual act. They were like ghosts uprooted waiting to be planted again.
EDGAR GARCIA is associate professor of English at the University of Chicago, where he is affiliated with the Program in Creative Writing. He is the author of Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis, Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography, and Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu.
