WEBVTT

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Thank you so much for that
lovely introduction, and to you

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all for being out, and to
the hosts for having me.

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I'm gonna read all new work.

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And the new work is a collection
of translations, adaptations,

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re-imaginings of a 16th century
book of Nahuatl language songs,

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called The Cantares Mexicanos.

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And this anthology put to paper
in the mid to late 16th century

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takes place in a world
between worlds, insofar as it

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was a world already
being given over

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to the processes of colonialism,
while still trying to look back

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to a pre-colonial time.

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So although it's written
in the Nahuatl language,

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a lot of its contexts are both
post-colonial and pre-colonial,

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indigenous and non-indigenous,
colonial and Mexica.

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And we learn from
this collection

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how complicated
being between worlds

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is, how this moment was
full of both remembering

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and memory, but also
imagination, wish, fantasy,

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and forgetting.

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So I'm going to read
some, I call them poems,

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but they're actually
songs: Cantares.

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And my aim with the
translation and adaptation

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of these cantares is to return
to them their songedness,

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to return to them, to give back
to them their musicality, which

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I feel has been lost in
their extant translations.

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So I'll read these.

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I'll read you some of these.