Flower and Song
Poems of the Aztec Peoples
The brilliant Aztec poetic tradition would have all but vanished after the Spanish Conquest in 1521 without the friars who painstakingly transcribed and preserved the poems in the years that followed. In this new edition of their translations, Edward Kissam and Michael Schmidt – two poets who spent formative years in Mexico – give us powerful echoes of the lyrical and philosophical songs, the songs of rejoicing, sorrow, ritual and war, the laments made by Nezahualpilli and others as the end of their empire approached, and the epics of myth and legend. Their introduction is a distilled account of the background to the Aztec empire, its way of life and its fall, to the role of poetry in Aztec life and to how the poems were preserved.
About the author
Edward Kissam, born in Florida in 1943, spent his formative years in Mexico. He studied at Princeton and at Magdalen College, Oxford, before returning to graduate studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His collections of poems are "The Sham Flyers" (1969) and "Jerusalem and The People" (1972). Since 1970 he has lived in Sonoma County, California and works at JBS International on a variety of applied research issues related to education in developing countries. He is the author (with David Griffith) of "Working Poor: Farmworkers in the United States".
Michael Schmidt FRSL, poet, scholar, critic and translator, C107was born in Mexico in 1947; he studied at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford, before settling in England. Among his many publications are several collections of poems and a novel, The Colonist (1981), about a boy's childhood in Mexico. He is general editor of PN Review and founder as well as managing director of Carcanet Press. He lives in Manchester.
Michael Schmidt FRSL, poet, scholar, critic and translator, C107was born in Mexico in 1947; he studied at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford, before settling in England. Among his many publications are several collections of poems and a novel, The Colonist (1981), about a boy's childhood in Mexico. He is general editor of PN Review and founder as well as managing director of Carcanet Press. He lives in Manchester.