Nagualli: "Poem to be Recited Every 8 Years While Eating Unleavened Tamales" (Aztec), trans. Anselm Hollo

Friday, March 2, 2012

"Poem to be Recited Every 8 Years While Eating Unleavened Tamales" (Aztec), trans. Anselm Hollo

the flower

my heart

it opened

at midnight

that lordly hour

she has arrived

Tlaçolteotl

our mother

goddess desire

in the birth house

in the flower place

on the day called ‘one flower’

the maize god is born

in the vapor and rain place

where we go angling for jewel-fish

where we too make our young

soon day red sky

quechol-birds in the flowers

down here on earth

you rise in the market place and say

I am lord Quetzalcoatl

let there be gladness among the flowering trees

and the quechol-bird tribes

who are the souls of the brave

may they rejoice

hear the word of our lord

the quechol-bird’s word

‘your brother whom we mourn

will never be killed again

never again will the poison dart strike him’

maize flowers

white and yellow

I have brought from the flower place

see there is the lord of the jewel land

playing ball in his holy field

there he is the old dog god

Xolotl

now go look if Piltzintecutli

lord fertility himself

has yet lain down in the dark house

in the house where it grows dark

o Piltzintli Piltzintli

yellow feathers

you glue all over yourself

on the ball-playing field you lie down

and in the dark house where it grows dark

here comes a merchant

a vassal of Xochiquetzal

mistress of Cholula

(heart o heart

I fear the maize god is still on his way)

a merchant a man from Chacalla

sells turquoise spikes for your ears

and turquoise bands for your arms

the sleeper the sleeper he sleeps

with my hand I have rolled him to sleep

here

the woman

here

am I

here

asleep

1 comment:

Edgar GarciaMarch 5, 2012 at 6:52 AM
Alcheringa editors: "Anselm Hollo’s English version, after Eduard Seler, Gesammelte Abhandlungen (1904), II, 1059-1061. Sahagún wrote: “Thus was respite given the maize every eight years. For it was said that we brought much torment to it—that we ate it, we put chili on it, we mixed salt with it; it was mixed with lime. As we troubled our food to death, thus we revived it. Thus, it is said, the maize was given new youth when this was done.” Tlaçolteoltl (Our-Lady-of-the-Bunghole, mother of Lord Fertility) was the patron deity of this renewal."
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about | co-curators

Here uncoils a collective psychogeography of the Americas—a personal exploration of indigenous poetics and epistemes. With a specific focus on Nagualism, the native American practice of self-splitting and metamorphosis, this collective project (executed as a continuous exchange between its collaborators) confirms that metamorphosis is a rapid, ongoing process without beginning or end, an antinomous exchange of excess in limitless operation. So while we post here, a chattering seed grows suddenly to a green stalk while a stone or mountain teems with personhood and animacy; and we match that overflow with overflow. Thus do we redistribute cosmic energy. Its first transfer long preceded our arrival; but we continue the exchange, the extension which is likewise our rootedness. To a great extent, this is simply a record of the personal reading habits of its co-curators, Jose-Luis Moctezuma and Edgar Garcia.

Jose-Luis Moctezuma is a californiano and a current doctoral student at the University of Chicago. His studies focus on technologies of the image in poetry, cinema, and literature. His work has been/will be published by Berkeley Poetry Review, PALABRA, Cerise Press, and MAKE Magazine. He is an editor and writer at Hydra Magazine.

Edgar Garcia's poetry, translations, and essays have appeared in a number of publications, including Antioch Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Big Bridge, Damn the Caesars, Exit 9, Jacket2, Los Angeles Review of Books, MAKE Magazine, Mandorla, Sous les Pavés, and Those That This: Arts Journal. Author of Mayan Texts: A Galactic Birth Canal (Burnt Water Booklets, 2010) and Boundary Loot (Punch Press, 2012), he was also formerly a writer and editor at Hydra Magazine. An anthology that he has co-edited titled American Literature in the World is forthcoming from Columbia UP. In 2015 he completed a Ph.D. in American Literature at Yale University and began as Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar and Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago.