Cantares Mexicanos

Anonymous

2 ideas

1. Flower and song as paired metaphor

   Nahuatl poetics often names one thing by pairing two images, and 'in xochitl in cuicatl' (flower, song) jointly means poetry, art, and the durable meaning a person can make. Because flowers wilt and songs end, the phrase builds transience into the idea of art: what survives is made from perishable things.

2. Mourning Tenochtitlan in inherited poetic forms

   Some of the songs lament the fall of Tenochtitlan, mourning a destroyed city and its people with the imagery and structures of the older song tradition. Grief for a catastrophe gets carried in the forms the defeated already owned. That borrowed structure lets the laments keep their force even through a disputed translation.

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