Trece poetas del mundo azteca, first published in 1967, has remained in print for more than a quarter of a century. Such has been its popularity in Mexico. Now expanded from 13 to 15 poets, it appears in English in an enlarged and revised edition.
Miguel León-Portilla’s reworking of this book reflects ideas he has continued to develop over time. It also represents a response to the challenges from two different quarters, one a general questioning of the historicity of texts that has recently preoccupied historians and anthropologists. Part of this distrust has to do with the redaction of texts from oral tradition. When what was transmitted through memorization and performance is committed to the page, does the resulting text lose not merely certain dimensions but authenticity itself? León-Portilla applies himself to this question, examining the role of books in Mesoamerica before the introduction of European alphabetical writing and setting forth his methodology for certifying his 15 poets as real historical figures and the authors of the texts he presents. (He readily admits that most of the poems in the corpus of Nahuatl poetry cannot be attributed to any particular author.)
The other challenge is that of recent activity in the field, specifically John Bierhorst’s translation-with-commentary of one of the major manuscripts (Cantares mexicanos: Songs of the Aztecs, 1985). Bierhorst’s controversial vision of the circumstances and content of the poems is profoundly at odds with that of León-Portilla and his mentor, Angel María Garibay. León-Portilla uses this new edition of his book to set forth his objections to Bierhorst’s analyses and to reassert his understanding of Nahuatl poetry.
Disagreements with translations notwithstanding, Bierhorst’s transcription of the Cantares is meticulous. Anyone with a scholarly interest in the topic must read Fifteen Poets with Bierhorst’s transcription at hand, since the transcription preserves the verses’ original organization, whereas Garibay and León-Portilla dispense with that in favor of dividing the text into lines based, for the most part, on perceived semantic parallelism. León-Portilla has also modernized and regularized the orthography to make the Nahuatl easier to read. A scholar must have the original at hand, either Bierhorst’s transcription or the rare Peñafiel photographs (Cantares en idioma mexicano: reproducción facsimilaria del manuscrito original existente en la Biblioteca Nacional, 1940).
Fifteen Poets must also be read in conjunction with another 1992 book, James Lockhart’s Nahuas After the Conquest. Lockhart’s chapter 9, “Forms of Expression, has a section on “Songs” (pp. 392-401), by which Lockhart means what León-Portilla calls poems. Lockhart’s focus is on the formal organization of the verses, an emphasis complementary to León-Portílla’s concern with philosophy and expressive content.
