One of the most beautiful poems I know, this anonymous Nahuatl lyric gives instructions to the speaker/singer’s mother on how they should be mourned through a fine balance of vulnerability and resilience:
Nonantzin ihcuac nimiquiz,
motlecuilpan xinechtoca
huan cuac tiaz titlaxcal chihuaz,
ompa nopampa xichoca.
Huan tla acah mitztlah tlaniz:
-Zoapille, ¿tleca tichoca?
xiquilhui xoxouhqui in cuahuitl,
techochcti ica popoca.
A short film version is available here.
The poem is often attributed to legendary poet-engineer-botanist-king Nezahualcóyotl though Nahuatl language and literature expert Patrick Johansson assures us this cannot be the case. According to Johansson it’s more likely that the speaker is a woman and certainly not a member of the nobility. When I was writing my ‘Tamaulipas Amergin’ sequence, a series of poems loosely inspired by Irish soldiers fighting in Mexico in the 19th century, I struggled to find an ending until, in a kind of lightbulb moment, I decided to finish on my translation of this short poem. Imagining these soldiers from places like Ballina and Clifden marching to almost certain death on the other side of the planet, I thought I could give them a chance to write something to send home, a farewell to their mothers. Nonantzin, in Nahuatl, is a diminutive form of the word ‘mother’. In Mexican Spanish it can be rendered as ‘madrecita’. For my translation, I quickly settled on ‘Mammy’. I tweaked the poem somewhat to make it feel more Irish, switching tortillas to bread. But it otherwise stays faithful to the original. Here is my version:
Please mammy when I die
Bury me under the kiln
And when you’re baking the bread
You can cry for me there
If a passerby asks
Missus why all the tears
Say the firewood’s still damp
And the smoke hurts your eyes
A film version of the full ‘Tamaulipas Amergin’ sequence is in production. The poetry world can move slowly. A few weeks ago, almost a year after the launch of Let the Dead, I finally got to launch the book in Mexico City at the Irish embassy. I took the opportunity to read Nonantzin in the original with translation (there is a video somewhere of me reading in Nahuatl but I won’t be sharing it). Many thanks to Ambassador Maeve von Heynitz and everyone at the embassy for bringing this circle of launches to a close. The book is strongly connected to Mexico so it was appropriate to find time to launch it in the capital. Was particularly enjoyable to reconnect with so many former students and colleagues.
Another review of Let the Dead was published, this time in Magma. The review paid particular attention to a section of the book named ‘Cocoon’. This was particularly gratifying to me as I found this sequence the most challenging to write. Here is an excerpt:
“It’s this willingness - fearlessness - that animates many of the poems here. A sequence called ‘Cocoon’ is a brilliant braiding together of different literal and metaphorical ways of thinking about death: as meat and its pleasures; as a clearer of space for our species and the fuel modern civilization relies upon; as playful companion; entropy too. It’s a startling run of poems powered by words that revel in their physicality…”
Many thanks to Magma and reviewer Rishi Dastidar.
In other news, I have some events coming up. As part of the Zeitgeist Irland 24 series of events in Germany I will be reading at Curious Fox bookshop in Berlin on 4th July at 8pm as part of a Banshee Press poetry showcase that will also feature Rosamund Taylor, Gustav Parker Hibbett and Jessica Traynor. If you are in or near Berlin please come along. It will be my first time in the city.
I was delighted to be announced as the Irish awardee of the Aodh Ruadh Ó Domhnaill Poetry Exchange. This will mean I will spend all of September in the beautiful city of A Coruña at the Residencia Literaria 1863. I hope this will give me the time and space I need to make serious inroads into my third book of poetry. I will be linking up with the Palabra Festival de Literatura y Cultura in the city of León in early September. More on that soon.
It’s been a while since I posted anything here, will attempt to write more regularly. Thanks for reading and please share.
As always, the best way to support me is to buy my book, available here from Banshee Press.