Thank you so much for that lovely introduction, and to you
all for being out, and to the hosts for having me.
I'm gonna read all new work.
And the new work is a collection of translations, adaptations,
re-imaginings of a 16th century book of Nahuatl language songs,
called The Cantares Mexicanos.
And this anthology put to paper in the mid to late 16th century
takes place in a world between worlds, insofar as it
was a world already being given over
to the processes of colonialism, while still trying to look back
to a pre-colonial time.
So although it's written in the Nahuatl language,
a lot of its contexts are both post-colonial and pre-colonial,
indigenous and non-indigenous, colonial and Mexica.
And we learn from this collection
how complicated being between worlds
is, how this moment was full of both remembering
and memory, but also imagination, wish, fantasy,
and forgetting.
So I'm going to read some, I call them poems,
but they're actually songs: Cantares.
And my aim with the translation and adaptation
of these cantares is to return to them their songedness,
to return to them, to give back to them their musicality, which
I feel has been lost in their extant translations.
So I'll read these.
I'll read you some of these.