Selected poems of Nezahualcoyotl

Reprinted from Fifteen Poets of the Aztec World.
Edited and translated by Miguel León-Portilla, 1992

Written in the fifteenth century; originally collected in Romances
de los señores de Nueva España

The codices (singular: codex), or painted books, of the Aztec empire are renowned for providing historical and cultural facts. They were created to be "read" aloud by storytellers, or orators, who had memorized the stories and used the pictures and signs in the books to help their memory and to add details to their narrations (see Codex Borgia and Codex Mendoza entries). The books presented the key ideas and pictures that would help the reader, but they did not contain the narration itself because the Aztecs' writing system could not reproduce their full spoken language.