Le Chant des fleurs. Ni Xochitl Ni Kuikatl

An ode to nature, poetry and design. In a dizzying mix of art and literature, this book is a journey into the poetic land of Nahuatl, an exploration of the Song of Flowers.

It is complemented by an essay by Alberto Manguel on song and flowers in world literature. Accessible and demanding, the book is made to measure using natural, resource-efficient fibres, some of which come from maize and some from wine-growing.

In Nahuatl, a language spoken in central Mexico since the 7th century, poetry is described by a pair of metaphors, Ni Xochitl, Ni Kuikatl, ‘the flower, the song’. This term describes poetry as ‘an ephemeral moment of beauty and truth symbolised by the flower and the song. It is an elevation, an outpouring that is expressed. The flower reaches for the sky and the song soars into the air’.

At the heart of this still little-known literary continent, poetry is not the solitary activity of writing, turned towards beauty; it unfolds above all through song, and is intimately linked to the surrounding vegetation, to the flowers. The words and their associations are to be imagined as a floral bloom, the poem as a bouquet of words to be sung to the sky.

Introduction by Mardonio Carballo and Fernando Laposse.
50 poems by Mardonio Carballo.
Text by Alberto Manguel.
Translation by Patrick Saurin.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)