Flower, Song, Dance: Mayan and Aztec Poetry

Winner of the 2014 Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translation from the Texas Institute of Letters.

In pre-Colombian Mexico, song and dance were vital components of daily life. However, all that is left of this vast tradition of lyrical verse are fewer than 200 poems, most contained in three codices written just after the Spanish conquest. In this new translation, David Bowles employs the tools of English verse to craft accessible, powerful versions of selected songs from the Aztec and Mayan civilizations, striking a balance between the features of the original performance and the expectations of modern readers of poetry. With full-color illustrations, a thorough glossary and insightful introduction, 'Flower, Song, Dance' brings a neglected literary tradition to life for the 21st-century.

"At last! A translation of Aztec poetry done not by an historian, a linguist or an anthropologist, but by a poet. In this volume, David Bowles captures the heart and the soul of the Nahua poets, and carries them safely across the narrow bridge swinging far above the perilous waters of translation. This book transports us to the living, breathing world of the Aztecs, and covers the mundane and the beautiful, the tragic and the sensual. The broad range of themes in the selected poems is refreshing and often surprising, creating newer, more humane, and more realistic dimensions to our understanding of this ancient culture. Such poems as 'Tempted by a Priest,' 'Where Songs Begin,' 'The Answer to Doubt,' 'To Kiss Your Lips by the Wooden Fencepost,' 'Brotherhood,' and 'For Travelers along the Road just before Daybreak' remind us that we cannot claim to know 'American' Literature unless we have satiated our poetic appetite at least once at the banquet table of this volume."

--Carmen Tafolla
Poet Laureate, City of San Antonio