SOURCE: "Cardenal's Treatment of Amerindian Cultures in Homenaje a los indios americanos," in Renaissance and Modern Studies, Vol. 35, 1992, pp. 52-74.

In any examination of the ways in which the Americas have been perceived, and of the struggle to make sense of the continent and come to terms with the effects of cultural change and conflict, the range of images of its indigenous peoples found in literature is an obvious area for scrutiny. How have these been treated, and how has their 'treatment' helped to shape our present-day awareness of the identities of different Amerindian cultures? 'Treatment'—as used in the title of this article—is not merely a matter of 'attitudes' or 'views expressed', but also a matter of the 'modes of representation' which a writer employs (starting with his choice of genre, but including such stylistic features as rhetorical devices, register, symbolism, and tone). Hitherto, more critical attention has been devoted to the treatment of indigenous peoples and cultures in prose fiction than in poetry, yet poetry can offer different kinds of insight. It should be read in the light of its original context, however, and the reader must guard against the rash but common assumption that 'historical' poetry can safely be read as 'history' (thus, absurd though such an assumption would seem to the historian, many Latin American readers have taken Neruda's Canto general to be a reliable account of what did actually occur). It should also be stressed that some of the most revealing 'insights' which poetry can offer will be insights into things quite different from the alleged 'realities' which it ostensibly presents.

The Amerindian poems of the Nicaraguan poet-priest Ernesto Cardenal (1925-) are a case in point: whereas the title of his Homenaje a los indios americanos (first published in 1969, but later expanded) appears to promise a eulogy of things Amerindian for their own sake, one must never forget that he is above all a Spanish-American 'committed poet'—indeed the foremost one since Pablo Neruda. His determination to change the world around him, and to change his readers so that they should contribute to its improvement, is always uppermost: consequently, although much of the source-material of Homenaje is historical, archaeological, or anthropological, the subtext of all its poems is focussed on the present and the future, whatever their overt topic. Cardenal's basic approach to the cultures he depicts can, therefore, only be properly understood when studied in the light of the social and political context in which the poems were written, just as their changes of attitude and focus require to be examined in the light of a series of shifts of interest linked to major changes in the poet's life.

Cardenal came from a wealthy upper-class Nicaraguan family, firmly opposed to the Somozan dictatorship. During the early 1950s, after a period studying in Mexico (1943-47) and another in New York (1947-49), Cardenal—like many of his fellow-students—became involved in Nicaraguan revolutionary politics (notably in an abortive plot to bring down the first Somoza which ended with the detention, and slaughter, of some of the poet's closest friends in 1954). This period also saw the production of his Epigramas, whose clandestine circulation brought him immediate fame, as well as the writing of Hora 0 (Zero Hour). Both the gift for curt aphoristic turns of phrase perfected in the epigrams and the more expansive 'documentary' techniques of Hora 0 were to be further exploited in Homenaje, only a few years later. But this collection might never have been written had Cardenal not experienced a religious conversion in 1956—the first of three major turning-points which were to determine both the course of his life and the direction taken by his revolutionary poetry.

His conversion led him to enter the Cistercian Abbey of Gethsemani, in Kentucky, in May 1957. Cardenal's period at Gethsemani proved decisive for the genesis of Homenaje for two reasons. On the one hand, the novice-master was Thomas Merton, who convinced him of the Tightness of Gandhi's doctrine of non-violence—without any diminution of his revolutionary zeal. Cardenal's commitment to non-violence was to last until the events of the late 1960s convinced him that 'civil disobedience' could never succeed against a tyrannical regime, and it coloured his approach to Latin American history throughout the formative years of Homenaje. On the other hand, his poetic imagination was fired by Merton's fascination with pre-Columbian cultures—an interest which deepened after he left Gethsemani, because of ill-health, in August 1959.

Cardenal's decision to leave the Trappists was the second turning-point, exposing him to new influences and directing his vocation away from monasticism towards religious action in the world. After a year and a half in Mexico with the Benedictines in Cuernavaca—where the earliest poem of Homenaje was composed—he went on to complete his training for the priesthood in Colombia at the seminary of La Ceja, near Medellíin, from 1961 to 1965. Significantly, his years as a seminarist coincided with the time of ferment when the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) was at last committing the catholic church to the promotion of social justice, freedom, and the defence of human rights. In Latin America, these issues acquired increasing prominence with the rapid rise of 'liberation theology', and they loom larger in Cardenal's thought and writing as Homenaje progresses. The third turning-point came six months after his ordination, when he founded the small community of Nuestra Señora de Solentiname on a remote island in Lake Nicaragua early in 1966, and this was where the greater part of Homenaje was written. The establishment of such a religious commune, untrammelled by any monastic rule yet able to bring its spirituality to bear on society through its influence on individuals in the outside world, had been in his mind ever since he was a novice under Thomas Merton, and Merton remained Cardenal's spiritual guide until his death in December 1969, only a few months after the publication of the first edition of Homenaje.

It is within this framework that Cardenal's poetic development must be viewed. His poetic techniques are quite as revolutionary as his politics, and rather more surprising because they have an English-language source: although his concerns and thought-patterns are firmly Spanish American, he discarded the stylistic influences of Rubén Darío and Neruda—which had dominated his adolescent verse—when he discovered the poetry of Ezra Pound while studying in New York. Pound's influence was already apparent in the taut satire of the Epigramas, but all his later poetry has also exhibited four further Poundian features: total rejection of metaphor, the highly selective use of documentary sources, collage, and an air of extreme (yet only apparent) objectivity. This elimination of overtly subjective elements became enshrined in the poetic doctrine of exteriorismo, which Cardenal has defined as

a poetry made out of elements taken from the external world. Inferiority expressed through images taken from the external world surrounding us. A poetry made out of events, persons, and things. This poetry can include everyday realities, anecdotes, and the proper names of people and places … and also dates and numbers when required.

He praises Pound's poetry for its directness, describing it as being made up of 'the contraposition of images, of pairs of things which are either dissimilar or similar, but which produce another image when they are placed beside each other—a device which Ezra Pound had compared to the structure of Chinese ideograms but which Cardenal equated with the way film-shots are handled in the cutting-room. Pound's impact brought about a technical renovation of Cardenal's vernacular inheritance in much the same way as the impact of Italian Renaissance poetry on Garcilaso—four centuries earlier—had revitalized Spanish peninsular lyric poetry at the beginning of the Golden Age.

Cardenal's poetic revolution differs from Garcilaso's, however, in that the latter's merely involved renewing the poetry of one Romance language by cross-fertilization from another, whereas what Cardenal learnt from Pound proved to be the first positive contribution made by any aspect of North American English-language culture to the growth of Spanish-American poetry. This unexpected benefit is the more paradoxical given Cardenal's Latin American distaste for the generality of North American social and political attitudes, including that 'cultural imperialism' which most Latin American intellectuals believe to be a conscious feature of United States foreign policy. Beneath that Poundian surface, however, Cardenal's lines of thought remain much closer to Spanish-American tradition than the 'exterior' of his poetry suggests, as will be apparent throughout the poems of Homenaje.

Besides their common exteriorista approach, these Amer-indian poems have numerous specific—and significant—technical links not only with Epigramas and Hora 0 (both written before his spiritual conversion) but also with important aspects of four of Cardenal's other poetic collections whose composition actually overlapped with that of Homenaje: a series of taut vignettes called Gethsemani, Ky., based on his spiritual notebook from Kentucky but only polished into poetry in Cuernavaca; a versified history of the conquest of Central America and its colonial aftermath called El estrecho dudoso (The Doubtful Passage), written during the second half of his period in Mexico; a slim pamphlet called Oración por Marilyn Monroe y otros poemas (Prayer for Marilyn Monroe and other poems, 1965), started in Cuernavaca but only completed in La Ceja; and the Salmos (first published in 1964), a sequence of twenty-five updated psalms all written in La Ceja, which overlapped both with Oración and with the first expansion of his Amerindian poetry.

What Cardenal's manner of proceeding in Homenaje takes over from his Epigramas is not just its penchant for aphoristic statement but also a marked tendency to make its major points by implication rather than by 'explicitation'. From Hora 0, besides the subtleties of documentary collage, Homenaje takes over the symbolic use of natural phenomena—plants, animals, the seasons, the cycles of reproduction and the agricultural year—whose implications in each specific context are normally left to the imagination of the intelligent reader: this update of the 'pathetic fallacy' became one of Cardenal's favourite techniques for the 'implicitation' of subtextual meaning, once it had been perfected (chiefly as a means of hinting at unstated spiritual feelings) in the tranquil meditative poems of Gethsemani, Ky. during his first few months at Cuernavaca. Similarly, El estrecho dudoso provided the model for his treatment of pre-Columbian cultures by handling an explicit 'chronicle' of past injustice in such a way that it would read as an implicit commentary on the modern world, while the satirical approach to modern culture used whenever Homenaje makes any explicit mention of western life and values was developed in some of the more ironic poems of Oración. Lastly, it was also at La Ceja that Cardenal began to experiment with prophetic utterance—a very significant mode at a certain stage in the development of Homenaje—by applying Old Testament texts to modern situations, not only in the Salmos but also in the longest poem in Oración: 'Apocalipsis', which is a forceful rewriting of the Book of Revelation as a vision of the aftermath of nuclear holocaust. Each of these various techniques and strategies is unobtrusively employed at one stage or another in the poetry of Homenaje, whose composition spanned many years, with changes of course or emphasis as time went by.

I spent much of the summer of 1972 in Solentiname, working with Cardenal with a view to establishing the documentary sources of all his poems to date (including those of Homenaje), as well trying to disentangle the order of their composition. The chronological issue was complicated by three things: firstly, his collections had not been published in the order of their completion; secondly, they had frequently overlapped in composition (not merely in the cases mentioned above); and, thirdly, he had often been engaged concurrently on drafts of various poems (his longer ones may be months in the writing, with much pruning and revising and frequent regrouping of their constituent 'units'). Thus the fact that the first Homenaje had not appeared till 1969 did not mean that all its fifteen poems were later than those in 'earlier' collections, nor was their sequence in the volume any help since they had not been arranged in order of composition—or even in the historical order of the situations they described.

As well as the original fifteen, we discussed both of the two additional poems included in the Chilean edition (Santiago, 1970). He was then already working on the early typescripts of "Sierra Nevada"—the first of two further poems added in the Barcelona edition of 1980, which includes all the nineteen Amerindian poems completed prior to the Sandinista revolution. Their arrangement within that collection: is relatively unimportant in the present context. What matters, rather is their order of composition (see below). In any event, Cardenal himself clearly regards the series as open-ended: since he ceased to be minister of culture, twelve new Amerindian poems have appeared—together with nine of the earlier ones—in a separate volume called Los ovnis de oro (Mexico City, 1988), and it is his expressed intention to bring all his Amerindian poems together under 'un nuevo titulo'.

For reasons of space, however, the present study must concentrate on Homenaje, placing particular emphasis on the poems composed between 1959 and 1968: nine of its nineteen texts were written during these ten years, and they show a steady development which brings up in turn all of the main critical issues raised by Cardenal's treatment of past and present Amerindian cultures. But it is impossible to understand either their stylistic evolution, or the progressive maturation of his attitudes towards those cultures, without relating these key poems both to the shifts in his career and to the nature of his other writings during the same period. The ten remaining poems of Homenaje will be discussed in far less detail, since they—and the new texts which joined the series in Ovnis—merely continue lines of thought and modes of treatment which had all made their appearance by the end of 1967, although there were to be various significant shifts of emphasis and coverage which cannot pass unmentioned in this study.

The earliest one of all was "Las ciudades perdidas" ("The Lost Cities"), a Mayan poem written within nine or ten months of Cardenal's arrival in Cuernavaca in August 1959, and something of a romantic digression from the two spiritual projects then engaging most of his attention ("Gethsemani, Ky." and the mystical prose meditations of Vida en el amor). "Ciudades" deserves the longest discussion, since it establishes the basic paradigm for Homenaje. It was completed before he tackled any serious historical research, such as would be required towards Estrecho (an 'epic' project suggested by José Coronel Urtecho only a few months later), and this may partly explain why a certain romantic nostalgia took priority over scholarly content. Back in Gethsemani, Merton had awakened his interest in the ancient Maya, and "Ciudades" was inspired by an article about the ruins of Tikal which Merton had pinned up on the noviciate noticeboard. Fascinated, Cardenal had looked further: "Ciudades" is chiefly based on notes taken in Gethsemani from Merton's copies of Thompson's The Rise and Fall of the Mayan Civilization (1954) and the much enlarged 3rd edition of Morley's The Ancient Maya as revised by Brainerd (Stanford, 1956). In the late 1950s, these were still the last word on the subject among non-specialists. Although their interpretation of Mayan history was soon to undergo a drastic revision, these volumes remained Cardenal's favourite source of archaeological information on the Mayan area—fleshed out in later poems by recourse to the thought and terminology of the Chilam Balam and the Popol Vuh.

Overtly, "Ciudades" seems merely the nostalgic evocation of a happier world, yet almost all its explicit statements contain some implied criticism of modern civilization—for instance its reference to there being 'no names of generals on the stelae'. It contrasts the ruins of Tikal (the earliest Mayan city), where the jungle animals once 'stylized in the frescoes' now roam, with an apparently idyllic past admired as much for the things which it—significantly—lacked (such as having 'no word for master nor for city wall') as for its 'progress in religion, mathematics, art, astronomy' or for the benevolent paternalism of its theocratic social structure:

Their cities were cities of temples …
Religion was the only bond between them,
but it was a religion freely accepted,
imposing no burden. No oppression.
Their priests had no temporal power
and the pyramids were built without forced labour.

There may perhaps be some small element of truth in this highly idealistic picture, though it is clear even from Morley that the development of a highly organized priesthood 'composed of astronomers, mathematicians, prophets, and ritualists, and, as it grew more complex, [also] skilled administrators and statesmen' must have replaced the poet's non-exploitative two-tiered Eden—if that ever existed—long before the building of Tikal, in the fourth century A.D. What Cardenal would seem to have done is to project onto such Classic Mayan cities the monastic values of shared work and prayer which he had encountered in Gethsemani, and which naturally also ruled the Benedictine priory at Cuernavaca where the poem was written (in the modern catholic church the 'communism' of the early Christians, which Cardenal so greatly admires, survives only in the monastic orders).

Accepting Morley's vision of the Classic Maya, such a projection was not beyond the bounds of credibility, and Cardenal's belief that even a high culture could once have been both peaceful and bloodless deepens his evident nostalgia. Since then, advances in the decipherment of Mayan inscriptions (together with the reinterpretation of Mayan iconography) have shown that even the Classic city-states were bloodthirsty: 'regionally oriented, dynastic and warlike' and full of monuments which were 'glorifications of individual kings' (rather than 'abstract representations of calendar priests'). How does this affect Cardenal's "Ciudades"? Had he wished to teach the 'historical truth' about the past by putting it into verse (Neruda's stated aim in much of Canto general) then anything which disproved the 'facts' would have 'falsified' the poem as history. But Cardenal was using the evocation of a certain social complex (which he then happened to believe had once existed) as the springboard for an implicit attack on present evils—and the relevance of the criticism is undiminished by the ahistoricity of the chosen spring-board. Long afterwards, Cardenal did actualize much of the idyllic vision of "Ciudades" in his own island commune, but here his glowing evocation of the early Maya performs the same function as the classical myth of the 'golden age' in Greco-Roman and Renaissance poetry.

Lines stressing the (presumed) absence of personality cults among the ancient Maya are directed at the Somozas, but their message also had a wider relevance in the aftermath of 'destalinization' (the worldwide repercussions of Kruschev's speech at the Twentieth Party Congress, in 1956, were far from over). Equally, the anti-militarist thrust had not only an immediate local relevance (coming so soon after the events of 1954 in Guatemala) but also a wider significance in the context of United States support for military regimes all over Latin America. Its vibrantly uncompromising tone was, however, also partly attributable to the recency of the poet's own conversion to nonviolence: the pacific 'model' which he conjures up reads like an answer to the petition 'Lord guide our feet into the way of peace' (one of the antiphons used to introduce the 'Benedictus' at morning prayer).

Cardenal's nostalgia was intensified by his fascination with the Mayans' cyclical notion of time—'They used the same katuns for past and future / in the belief that time was re-enacted'. While extremely conscious that 'the Pan American jet flies high above the pyramid' today (his one explicit reference to our modern world) he ends by asking 'will the past katuns one day return?'. This was no rhetorical question, and it has nagged him ever since. "Ciudades" also includes the first example of his delight in discovering Amerindian analogies for Christian beliefs or practices: 'They knew Jesus as the God of the Maize / and gave him simple offerings of maize, of birds, of feathers'. As well as being a 'gloss' on the past, this is an allusion to current rural Mayan syncretism, with peasant offerings to Jesus and the saints perpetuating those to the various gods who mattered most to farmers.

Cardenal wrote no more Amerindian poems for several years, until late in his time at La Ceja and after his background knowledge had been much broadened by the research for Estrecho in the libraries of Cuernavaca and Mexico City. He had also become much better acquainted with the heritage of Nahuatl poetry. The first two volumes of Garibay's bilingual Poesía náhuatl (1964, 1965) appeared while he was at La Ceja, where his interest in the past and present of the Amerindian peoples was also extended by direct contact with several 'primitive' communities (he paid two visits to the Cuna, also travelling in the Upper Amazon basin) and by research in the anthropological collections of Medellín and Bogotá. He was planning a book on primitive peoples which would explore the resemblances between primitive and Christian ritual, but soon dropped the project, feeling that such stress on ritual practices was out of step with the post-conciliar church—as well as with the kind of Christian community he now planned to establish (under Merton's tutelage) once he had been ordained. But none of this anthropological work was wasted, since his prose drafts were later reworked into poetry.

The La Ceja poems were "Cantares mexicanos (I)" and "Nele de Kantule", and he also began work on "Economía de Tahuantinsuyo". The phrase 'Cantares mexicanos' is an allusion to a famous manuscript in the National Library of Mexico, and "Cantares (I)" develops its implicit parallels between pagan and Christian beliefs through a reworking of lyric texts by the most famous of all pre-Columbian poets, Nezahualcóyotl (ruler of Texxcoco), who seemed to voice in Mexican terms the same sense of desengaño (a disillusionment provoked by the transience of earthly things) which overshadows Spanish Golden Age poetry and spirituality: 'Necklaces of shells or jade are scattered … / Even a temple pyramid / will crumble / We [poets] are here / to leave a few illuminated manuscripts / But will those who come after comprehend the Codex?'. The stock ubi sunt motif is applied to the reigns of Mexican rulers, and it is only in the final sequence that Quetzalcóatl's rebirth as the Morning Star is taken as a sign that he will 'bring me back from Mictlan' (land of the dead)—just as Christ's resurrection is the Christian's guarantee of immortality. But the main thrust of Nezahualcoyótl's faith in immortality was picked up only two years later, in "Cantares (II)"

The other Amerindian poem completed in La Ceja, "Nele de Kantule", is more positive. It grew out of his first visit to any non-Christian society, that of the Cuna Indians of the San Blas Islands (off the Caribbean coast of Panama), where he was welcomed into a peace-loving community whose pagan values seemed profoundly Christian and whose spirit of mutual cooperation was wholly at variance with our competitive society. He was told about the neles (wise men) the most famous of whom was Kantule, who had not only learnt the wisdom of his people but studied abroad, had led an Indian rebellion against the Panamanian government in 1925 (which won a guarantee of Cuna autonomy), and had wisely decided just how much 'progress' could be accepted without weakening the Cuna culture (he bought a motor vessel to service the islands, built schools and libraries, negotiated an agreement with the Americans governing conditions of employment for Indians in the Canal Zone, and obtained scholarships for his young men to learn such skills on the Panamanian mainland as could be of benefit to the community). The fact that he used his office to serve his people and not as a source of power, together with the continued strength of Cuna mythology and tribal wisdom, entranced Cardenal, and much of the poem is taken up with retelling the local Creation myth. Kantule's death-bed baptism is mentioned (almost incidentally), but what is stressed is that when the missionary told him that he would now see God, he replied 'I am already seeing God'. This visit to the Cuna showed Cardenal that perfect communities did still exist in the 'real world' and might even provide him with a viable model: his own foundation, on an island in the Solentiname Archipelago, may have owed almost as much to the example of the Cuna islanders as it did to Christian monastic tradition.

With "Tahuantinsuyo" we are back in another world, in more senses than one. Cardenal turns to the Incas, but since he had not yet been to Peru his knowledge of its past and present were both still excessively bookish (a disadvantage he had overcome by the time he wrote his second Inca poem). The Incas are praised above all for their moneyless economy ('since there was no money / there was no prostitution or theft', whereas modern Peru was corrupt, poverty-stricken, and inflation-ridden), but also because 'The heir to the throne / succeeded to his father's throne / BUT NOT TO HIS POSSESSIONS'. Furthermore 'Religious truth / and political truth / were a single truth for the people'. Yet Cardenal was not blind to the totalitarian aspects of the regime: after mentioning Neruda's name, to imply dissent from what he—erroneously—took to be uncritical praise of the 'socialist empire of the Incas' in the Alturas de Macchu Picchu, he says 'Not everything was perfect in the "Inca Paradise" / They censored history … / There were free motels … / but no freedom to travel'. Nonetheless, while 'there was no freedom / there was social security'.

Unlike "Ciudades", there is much explicit criticism of modern conditions (including a side-swipe at the stock markets, where futures drop on the forecast of good crops) but "Tahuantinsuyo" ends on the same note, enquiring whether the virtues of the pre-Columbian past will ever return. Stylistically it is much more experimental, with extensive temporal crosscutting, and making its impact chiefly by using cinematographic sequences of discontinuous 'shots' whose juxtapositions invite the reader to infer the meaning behind the 'collisional montage' (a technique exploited further in later poems). This distinguishes it as the product of a different poetic generation from that of Neruda's Alturas: conceptually, however, it lacks the depth of the earlier classic, and the name-dropping which invited the comparison was just belated juvenile bravado (in 1965 Cardenal was already forty, while Neruda was sixty-one and still at the height of his powers).

Cardenal returned to Managua in the summer of 1965 and was ordained on the Feast of the Assumption. He then went back briefly to Gethsemani (for the first time in six years) to discuss his plans for Solentiname with Merton, and on his return journey he visited the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico (his first visit to any indigenous North American people). "Tahuantinsuyo" was completed immediately afterwards, and in February 1966 Cardenal and two friends began clearing a space for their huts on the tropical island of Mancarrón. The abundant birdlife of the archipelago (with its striking seasonal changes) provides much of his best supporting and contrastive imagery thereafter, starting with one of the earliest poems he wrote in Solentiname: "Kayanerenhkowa". Its title means "The Great Peace' and it extends the scope of Homenaje to North America, describing the sixteenth-century 'League of the Five Nations'—the famous Iroquois Confederacy. But it was not completed until 1967, because establishing the settlement left scant time for poetry during their first eighteen months.

"Kayanerenhkowa" begins with the autumnal arrival of migrating birds from the States. Cardenal uses their journey to link back to New York's Central Park, and so to the United Nations, thus providing a backdrop for a meditation on an Amerindian 'League of Nations' which he views as authentic antecedent of the UNO: conceived—by a happy coincidence—on almost the same site, one afternoon when the Huron chieftain Deganawida 'camped on the banks of the Mohawk (New York) / sat down beneath a tree and smoked his pipe'. Historically, Deganawida's Pax Iroquoia—in which all were to 'eat the one beaver out of the one plate' and bury the hatchet forever—did not spell peace except between the five confederated Nations. To their neighbours, it meant a war 'characterized by frightfulness, the object of which was power and glory' (in Wissler's phrase). Cardenal, however, was inspired by those who admired the vision behind its organization (according to some authorities it even served as the model for England's ex-colonies to form their own confederacy), so what he evokes is only its 'Good News of Peace' and the absence of treachery among the Nations themselves. After an extended exposition of religious symbolism, he retells the foundation of the League in modern terminology, blames the recrudescence of war on the greed of the fur-traders, and contrasts the peaceful formations of migrating birds with those of military aircraft.

This time the concluding question is strictly modern: 'And where are the jet-planes going? / Do they fly / towards Vietnam?'. However profoundly Cardenal is moved by the symbolic aspects of Indian life and beliefs (those passages have great poetic beauty), his crosscutting between the past and the present is nonetheless directed at the contemporary world. Although there is no allusion to the war until that final question, he is as deeply troubled by Vietnam as Merton, who expressed his despair in a long letter to Cardenal as early as October 1966 and began publishing his own—far more explicit—denunciations of the war while 'Kayanerenhkowa' was being completed. It is characteristic of Cardenal that the poem's most immediate relevance should be an unstated moral, while even the positive nature of his response to Indian symbolism is something which the reader must infer from his objectively exteriorista exposition.

Over the next eighteen months, he wrote two further Mayan poems ("Mayapán" & "Katún 11 Ahau") and two more grounded in Nahuatl poetry ("Cantares mexicanos (II)" & "Netzahualcóyotl"). "Mayapán" and "Katún" overlapped, although "Katún" was probably the first to be completed, but "Mayapán" stands—both conceptually and stylistically—between "Ciudades" and "Katún" and should therefore be considered first. It is a longer and weightier poem, and caused a considerable impression when Cardenal read it aloud in Mexico in September 1967, when he went to attend the ordination of his brother Fernando (who later became well-known as the Jesuit architect of Nicaragua's literacy crusade, and subsequently Sandinista minister of education).

Set in the Postclassic age, "Mayapán" is concerned with the evils brought by militarism once the—unhistorical—'peaceful coexistence' depicted in "Ciudades" had given way to the values of warring city-states (values which, as we now know, prevailed far earlier than Cardenal supposed). Thus whereas in "Ciudades" there was 'no word for city wall', the very name of Mayapan means 'She who has walls'. Both poems use their Mayan precedents to comment on our times (either through the implicit contrast between a tranquil past and a fraught present, or by more overt parallels between two periods of decadence), but whereas "Ciudades" was also permeated by nostalgia for the supposed past, here the whole thrust is contemporary—Mayan decadence is chiefly a convenient basis for the present-day polemic.

The poem documents the decay of Classic Mayan culture, as art proliferates but the carving grows more crude—crosscutting between English and Spanish to compare the spread of skyscrapers to the multiplication of stelae ('el skyline de Tikal … / "Building Boom" en Guatemala y / "Estela Boom"…'). But at least Mayan urban spread did not consist of 'Commercial Centers / sino centros ceremoniales, Ceremonial Centers' whose only advertisements were the poems on the stones. Weapons multiplied (like modern armaments), palaces outdid the temples, there were even dynasties of tyrants. But the tyrants were ultimately overthrown and Mayapan was destroyed: 'MAYAPAN "SHE WHO HAS WALLS" FELL…. / In Katun 8 Ahau "Mayapan fell" / (says the CHILAM BALAM OF CHUMAYEL)'. Mayapan stands for the same things as Babylon in "Apocalipsis" but, since Mayan time is cyclical, there is an added twist. On this occasion, Cardenal accepts—at least for poetic purposes—that each 260-year katun will be repeated and that every "Katun 8 Ahau" sees parallel events. Thus, although the Katún 8 Ahau when Mayapan collapsed was specifically 'The Mayan Ides of March', the event must happen again—the prophecies of the Chilam Balam have still not lost their power.

After a collage of truncated texts from the Chilam Balam, Cardenal begins to speak without mediation, prophesying in the first person: 'I say that Mayapan will fall / In this katun walled Mayapan always falls' (the biblical echo of Jericho is clearly one of the intended resonances). The archaeological record suggests that Mayapan flourished for no more than about a katun—'Thompson says / 1200-1450 A.D.'—and Cardenal, rather tellingly, leaves it to the reader to work out that one has only to add 260 years twice over to reach 1970. Immediately after quoting Thompson's dates, the poem ends with a trick:

Cardenal's own text is, thus, itself the graven stone. This lengthy poem's three outstanding features are the linking of his earlier use of historical precedents to the Mayan notion of cyclical time, the poet's self-identification with the Mayan chilan (which lets him speak in the first person when applying the resonances of the Chilam Balam to our age), and the fact that—just as in "Kayanerenhkowa"—his Amerindian source-material is clearly being deployed primarily so that it may serve a topical Central American purpose.

"Katún 11 Ahau" discards the archaeology but continues the prophetic line, dealing with the present entirely in terms of the Chilam Balam. Cardenal's approach is slightly too enigmatic: not even many Nicaraguans know that 11 Ahau is the katun in which the conquistadores reached Mayan territory, so missing the title's 'message' that we live in a matching period (thus weeping 'for the books that were burnt' applies as much to Somozan censorship as to the destruction of the Mayan sacred writings by the Spanish church). The savage opening jeremiad switches at line 48 ('But the Katun of Cruel Men will pass') into a prophecy of better times, when the Katun of the Tree of Life is established and we no longer 'have to keep our voices low'. The abruptness of the central switch underscores the implied message that present evils portend changes for the better.

Despite the Mayan idiom, this Cardenal who speaks as a chilan is like an Old Testament prophet in his combination of 'denunciation' and 'annunciation' (denunciar and anunciar were the paired terms he used when we discussed the nature of his Salmos again, in San José de Costa Rica, just ten days before the Sandinistas entered Managua). When a seminarian, he had naturally studied the dual functions of prophetic writing, and he had already used them himself when updating the Psalms and the Apocalypse. At the end of "Katún 11 Ahau", however, the Mayan chilan is credited with more than purely prophetic powers:

The poem is itself just such a tablet, predicting a (political) eclipse which presages the downfall of Somoza.

It is no accident that the chilan is shown playing such a prominent part in society. This is the role which Cardenal has set aside for the modern poet-priest as the initiator of social change. Although not every item is applicable—not even Cardenal can 'set the days for rain'!—much of that catalogue applies to the social role he was already starting to assume as the Solentiname commune evolved, particularly in his prophetic-cum-paternalistic stance vis-à-vis the campesions who flocked to his Sunday mass and joined in the distinctly 'revolutionary' discussions of the scripture-readings. In this context, two further lines deserve particular comment: 'It is the time to build a new pyramid / upon the basis of the old'. At the end of each period of time, Mayan temples were rebuilt not by demolishing the earlier ones but by removing the superstructure and enclosing the earlier pyramid inside a larger and better one, on which the new altars were erected. The implicit moral is clear: our existing social structures should not be utterly swept away, because the core deserves to be preserved within the improved structure of a New Society. Nor was this New Society wholly intangible: its values had already taken shape at the micro level, in Solentiname.

The last two poems of this cluster were both Mexican: "Cantares mexicanos (II)" and "Netzahualcóyotl". "Cantares (II)" merely continues the earlier "Cantares (I)"—written in La Ceja—in a like-minded meditation on poetry and immortality, again reworking Nezahualcóyotl and providing another pagan parallel to Christian doctrine (one can see why Cardenal was happy to link them more closely when he later used them as the first two sections of an extended "Cantares mexicanos"); it needs no further comment here. Internal evidence suggests that it preceded "Netzahualcóyotl", but their composition may have overlapped. Whereas both of the original 'Cantares' are spoken in the first person by Nezahualcóyotl, the poem named after him is a praise-poem, and this panegyric—which is likewise inspired by Texcocan court poetry—is the last poem requiring detailed consideration on this occasion: while the ten remaining texts do indeed continue to evolve, they do so within the existing parameters.

"Netzahualcóyotl" is a complex celebration of a poet-prince who is also 'a Mystic, an Astrologer, a Legislator and an Engineer / [who] made verses, and also dikes / talking about bridges and new poetry'. It raises a wealth of points in its 541 lines, most of them propounded in eminently quotable form—but there are far too many such 'statements' for it to be possible to discuss all of them here. One important innovation is the shift from drawing simple direct parallels or contrasts (whether implicit or explicit) between the past and the present to exploring a major pre-Columbian confrontation between Good and Evil in ways which either imply or underline its presumed present-day significance (often achieving this with great economy simply by using terminological crosscutting between the two periods). Thus the 'Philosopher-King' was previously 'a guerrillero-King', who overthrew 'tyrants and military juntas', and who also disagreed 'with human sacrifices [because] that was not his [kind of] religion'.

Nezahualcóyotl built his pyramid to the Unknown God ('el Dios Desconocido') without images or sacrificial altars, opposite the pyramid of 'Huitzilopochtli-Nazi': Huitzilopochtli was the most bloodthirsty of all Aztec gods (at the dedication of whose temple in 1487 literally thousands of sacrificial victims had their hearts torn out) but, since that fact is common knowledge in Mesoamerica, Cardenal need only add the adjective to juxtapose the holocausts, and so—by implication—the regimes. Where the military destroyed books and rewrote history, Nezahualcóyotl imposed the death penalty on historians who knowingly travestied the truth, as well as on anyone accepting bribes. He also established compulsory universal education and fostered the arts: 'The Ministry of Poetry / open all day. That of War almost always closed'.

As both Lyons [in Ernesto Cardenal: The Poetics of Love and Revolution, unpublished doctoral dissertation, 1981] and Borgeson [in Hacia el hombre nuevo: poesía y pensamiento de Ernesto cardenal, 1979] point out, the act of describing Nezahualcóyotl as wearing blue-jeans—Cardenal's normal dress—contributes to the identification of the Philosopher-King with the modern poet. Those jeans are, however, part of a whole code of modern nouns: Nezahualcóyotl's fellow-poets are his cuates—pals—and his guerrilleros sang corridos like Sandino's followers. Nonetheless the identification is correct: Cardenal even makes Nezahualcóyotl say 'My ideology is Non-Violence'. Of course all this is anachronistic: Brotherston, speaking as an Amerindianist, describes Cardenal's response to Nahuatl lyrics as 'vitiated … by a reluctance to admit … the original context [of] the martial and homosexual rites that informed them as song'. But, while the observation is correct, that comment seems to miss the point of what Cardenal was actually doing.

His evocation of the Texcocan circle of artists and poets is partly an idealization of what Solentiname might become, and partly a vision of what the cultural elite ought to be like in the New Society. Cardenal has a somewhat 'two-tiered' view of an ideal world in which, while everyone should have the opportunity to realize his full potential (and the humblest campesino has unrecognized gifts), the upper tier consists of those who have already done so and now use their talents in the service of the pueblo in a mildly paternalistic way. Except for that principle of Non-Violence (an ideal which Cardenal dropped about 1970), this Texcocan court-circle bears a quite remarkable resemblance to the Sandinista directorate of comandante-poets: men with a middle-class background and a good education, determined to give all citizens the right to come up to their level, within the framework of an egalitarian constitution. But when he wrote "Netzahualcóyotl" Cardenal could not yet see how the Solentiname 'model' could be applied on a larger scale: setting up a viable commune was relatively easy (communes were multiplying throughout the western world) but to create a Latin American republic grounded in social justice and 'the option for the poor' was something different.

At first sight, it may well look as though Cardenal were merely projecting his picture of the modern world onto the pre-Columbian past in order to be able to transform it into a source of handy precedents. But perhaps there is also a kind of 'reverse process' at work: a process of 'rethinking' which can best be understood by referring back to the Salmos. The major part of the canonical 'hours' (the backbone of communal monastic prayer) consists of the antiphonal chanting of the psalms, and when Cardenal had first been brought into continuous contact with these in Gethsemani, he could only make them meaningful—as he was reciting them in choir—by mentally transposing them to our modern world, all of whose joys and terrors had their parallels in the Old Testament. The series of Salmos he later composed in La Ceja was merely a written application of this same devotional technique, and he described them as 'translations' (when we discussed them once more in San José in 1979). This whole process of what might be termed 'decontextualization' and 'recontextualization' comes quite naturally to anyone using the psalms in prayer. But it has a further consequence: intertextuality works both ways (for authors as for readers) and Cardenal rapidly discovered that the interplay of meaning between the 'old' and the 'new' was beginning to deepen his experience of both 'readings'.

The relevance of this reciprocal process to what he is doing in his historical poems would appear to be as follows: while he may well have begun by using his pre-Columbian sources chiefly as springboards for contemporary messages, by the time he writes "Netzahualcóyotl" he would seem to be reading them in the same way as the psalms: namely, not just seeking out their modern 'relevance' through the discovery of parallels but also finding the originals themselves enriched by virtue of the fact that such parallels enabled him—and other modern readers—to empathize with their creators. This way of apprehending pre-Columbian Nahuatl poetry is certainly anachronistic, and it will doubtless offend the purist (primarily concerned to uncover their original 'meaning', like an archaeologist who excavates a buried city). But it does make that poetry 'meaningful' to modern readers in the modern world, and—with the advent of 'reception theory'—this means that it is a 'reading' which has to be taken seriously by critics.

Furthermore, the reciprocal relationship between the old text and the new has an important linguistic dimension. Just as happens in the case of the psalms, the interplay between different levels of historical experience which underlines their situational parallels is linguistically reinforced by the ebb-and-flow of resonant associations between two very different linguistic codes of reference. In the case of the Salmos, the interaction lies between the often deliberately clichéd terms of Cardenal's modern Spanish, and the Latin of the psalms as he had experienced them in the pre-conciliar church. In the case of "NetzahualcóyotI" or "Mayapán", it involves the interaction between the modern vernacular idiom (which may include crosscutting between Spanish and the clichés of political or commercial American English) and the indigenous terminologies and registers of Nahuatl poetry and the Chilam Balam, as these have been absorbed by Cardenal through the intermediary of scholarly translations. The 'remote' documentary sources are, admittedly, not being read in their original language—in either case—, but one should recognize that using Amerindian prose or poetry in translation is, after all, really no different from using the Old Testament in Jerome's Latin!

No major new issues arise in the subsequent poems, although they all have points of interest. The next one he began was "La danza del espíritu", exploring the symbolism of North American ritual dances in the context of Tecumseh's vision of a peaceful Indian confederacy (in the first decade of the nineteenth century) and the brief-lived, late-nineteenth-century Ghost Dance cult predicting the coming of an Indian Messiah. It ends with a reminiscence of Cardenal's visit to Taos Pueblo in 1965. During the course of its composition he wrote two more brief Mayan pieces making prophetic use of the Chilam Balam: "8 Ahau" and "Ardilla de los tunes de un katú". In 1968, he composed his third North American poem—"Tahirassawichi en Washington"—about the symbols and rituals of the Pawnees. To my way of thinking, this is the best of Cardenal's North American poems.

The most recently composed of the fifteen poems in the 1969 Homenaje are the two shortest: "La carretera" (only 16 lines) and the 35-line "Milpa", the former a Mayan vignette, and the latter about a milpa (maize-field) near the ruins of Cobá. This quiet meditation has an echo of the scriptural grain of wheat that dies to bring forth fruit (John 12.24), which becomes a veritable topos in elegies for martyred guerrilleros (Cardenal had already used it himself both in Epigramas and in Hora 0), but there is a neat extension of this idea in "Milpa" which brings together many lines of thought from earlier poems: 'Beneath the earth the grains, step by step / one step each day, / are raising up the pyramid of the maize'.

Of those first fifteen poems, [one] concerned the Incas, seven were on Mayan topics, three were grounded in pre-Columbian Nahuatl poetry, three had North American themes, and only [one] concerns a contemporary Amerindian community—but it is noteworthy that Cardenal gave this one pride of place at the beginning of the collection. It has a double immediacy which does set it apart: firstly the vividness of direct and joyful observation, and secondly its 'contemporaneity'—dealing with a present which has a message for the future but scarcely any history. It is as exteriorista as the rest, communicating strictly through the coordination of external data, but the intensity of concealed subjective feeling (which is almost always present in these poems, though perhaps at its most urgent in the Mayan prophecies) is nearest the surface here—and only in this instance does one feel that the overt Amerindian subject is at least as important to the poet as its wider social relevance. The same distinction, both in meaning and in tone, between the 'historical' poems and those about 'contemporary' Amerindian peoples holds good throughout the body of his later Amerindian poems.

Both of those which were added in the 1970 edition were written shortly before his first visit to Cuba: "Marchas pawnees" links back to "Tahirassawichi" in its sources, and to "Kayanerenhkowa" in its crosscutting between the exploitative modern world and a wise traditional society (in which goods were bartered 'in an exchange which was not commercial but religious'). The second one, "Oráculos", was written some two months later, soon after the completion of his elegy for Thomas Merton. It is in the same Mayan prophetic line as "Katún", but with the addition of such explicitly revolutionary statements as 'The people will take over the Government [and] the Bank'. After Merton's death, Cardenal's stress on non-violence diminished, though he still proposed the Gandhian model in his earliest discussions with Carlos Fonseca at about this time. What proved decisive were, firstly, his visits to Cuba—which persuaded him that many things he had thought unattainable at the macro level could indeed be achieved (if only by an armed revolution which could bring about radical changes in the social order)—and, secondly, the growth of a Theology of Liberation willing to contemplate the waging of 'just wars' against tyranny. But none of this surfaces in the last two poems added to Homenaje. "Sierra Nevada", the one on which he was engaged when I was in Solentiname, and "Grabaciones" (completed in either 1972 or early 1973).

The former explores the spiritual world of the Koguis (in Colombia's Sierra Nevada). Cardenal was fascinated by the continued existence of a way of life which regards the world as a physical-cum-spiritual continuum ruled by an all-pervasive force of love (an idea he developed considerably further in his own non-Amerindian poems of this period). Although he never succeeded in reaching the Koguis, this poem has almost the immediacy of "Nele de Kantule"—perhaps because it was inspired by what he heard in person from an anthropologist who had lived among them (Reichel-Dolmatoff whom he got to know in Bogotá). This pursuit of present-day primitive societies was to be taken further in various of the new poems added in Ovnis, whereas 'Grabaciones de la pipa sagrada'—the fifth and last of his North American Indian poems—represents the end of quite a different line of thought.

Despite its title, it was inspired not so much by Black Elk's accounts of the rites of the Oglala Sioux in The Sacred Pipe (first published in 1953) as by the more historically oriented 'oral testimony' recorded by John G. Neihardt in Black Elk Speaks: although this had originally appeared as early as 1932, it unexpectedly turned into a 'current youth classic' during the 1960s, and Cardenal certainly first met it in Gethsemani. Just before the composition of "Grabaciones", it suddenly 'exploded into surprising popularity' once more when Neihardt was interviewed on television in 1971. "Grabaciones" is in many respects the most nostalgic of the five North American poems, and its placing at the very end of Homenaje highlights its seemingly positive response to the question posed in the final line of "Ciudades": there, Cardenal had ended by asking whether the past katuns would ever return; here, Black Elk closes the poem by saying 'The ball'—a ritual object standing for the universe (and for whose possession the players strove in a symbolic game which represented the course of man's life)—'will again return to the centre: / and they will be at the centre with the ball'. As these lines stand in the poem, they are the more resonant for having been left somewhat enigmatic. But their fuller implications would seem to require a knowledge of their original context in the closing paragraph of The Sacred Pipe:

At this sad time today among my people, we are scrambling for the ball, and some are not even trying to catch it, which makes me cry when I think of it. But soon I know it will be caught, for the end is rapidly approaching, and then it will be returned to the center, and our people will be with it. It is my prayer that this be so, and it is in order to aid in this "recovery of the ball," that I have wished to make this book. [My italics.]

Cardenal could have said as much of Homenaje, but it is characteristic of his preference for 'implicitation' over 'explicitation' that he does not spell this out, while his treatment of Black Elk's testimony is equally typical of his idiosyncratic (or even cavalier) handling of the written sources on which he depends for so much of the raw material of his poems.

The appearance of Ovnis in 1988 has altered both the historical and the geographical balance of Cardenal's coverage of Amerindian cultures but not the range of basic attitudes, nor has it pioneered any fresh stylistic approaches. It contains no further North American poems but extends the Mexican coverage by five items (four ancient and one modern): the expanded "Cantares mexicanos", two further poems about pre-Columbian Nahuatl poetry, an extended enquiry into all the meanings ever attached to either the person or the myth of 'Quetzalcóatl', and a 'snapshot' of an Indian girl today. There is one more Mayan item—his only poem to date about the life of present-day Mayan Indians (set in the highlands of the Quiché and with an ominously understated hint of a military presence)—and one further look at the Incas ("El secreto de Machu-Picchu"). This poem contains more—and far sterner—criticism of modern Peru than "Tahuantinsuyo" and, since the new poem (unlike its predecessor) is firmly grounded in personal knowledge of the Peruvian scene, it also has a greater feeling of testimonial immediacy.

Of the six other new poems, only one is historical: "La Arcadia perdida". This provides a very positive account of the Jesuit reducciones in Paraguay (a topic which I had myself brought to Cardenal's attention in Solentiname, in 1972, as an example of benevolent priestly paternalism not dissimilar to his own experiment). Its nostalgia is, however, countered by the depiction of the misery of a jungle tribe in Paraguay today…. The remaining four are all concerned with other present-day 'primitive' peoples: "Los yaruros" deals with a Venezuelan tribe which Cardenal had visited in 1977, now shrunk to a tragic remnant, while [another poem] is based on a similar visit to a Colombian coastal settlement (today dispossessed of its lands and reduced to 'just 250' individuals). The others, by contrast, take him back to his old friends the Cunas of San Blas, revisited with delight during his years as Sandinista minister of culture, where developers had wished to build a great hotel 'but Torrijos assured me "There will be no Hilton"'.

It is clear that the balance of Cardenal's interests had shifted quite considerably during the eight years between the Barcelona printing of Homenaje and the appearance of Ovnis (years which broadly coincided with his period in office as the Sandinista minister of culture—although much of the groundwork of some of the new poems dates back to before he left Solentiname in 1977 to go into exile). Ovnis does not only extend Cardenal's Amerindian coverage: more importantly, the main emphasis of the new poetry has moved away from his former preoccupation with the discovery of 'messages' in the past to giving at least equal attention to the anthropological description of today's endangered peoples, conducted in a substantially more 'documentary' mode. No less than six out of the twelve new texts relate to present-day Amerindian societies, where only one of the nineteen poems in Homenaje had done so.

Nevertheless, the two main conclusions to be drawn from the closer examination of the nine poems of Homenaje composed between 1959 and 1968 remain valid for the entire corpus of his Amerindian poetry: (1) while the Past is diligently—and often lovingly—explored in search of useful precedents and resonant prophecies, the poet's real concern has always focussed on the Present and the Future; consequently (2) it is only the present-day communities he represents which ever get treated primarily 'in their own right'—and it is therefore only in these cases that one could describe his treatment as helping to shape an accurate awareness of Amerindian cultures.

While it follows that one should never consult his pre-Columbian poems in search of 'accurate' history or archaeology, they deserve just as serious a scrutiny as the others with a view to understanding, firstly, the nature of their intended 'relevance' to the development of the society for which they were actually written and, secondly, the ways in which Cardenal makes use of literary means to his didactic ends—as well as simply to enjoy the poems as poetry!

They all come under the heading of 'The Poetry of Useful Prophecy' (coined by Ronald Christ in 1974). All of them are intended to be 'useful', and they are also all 'prophetic', in so far as Cardenal is invariably looking forward even when he seems to be merely looking back (as in "Ciudades"). He is always interpreting his sources like a priest in the pulpit, who seeks to apply his biblical texts to 'the cure of souls' and the curing of society itself. For, just as Scripture is traditionally read by Christians for the furtherance of Salvation, History (as it is interpreted in the light of Latin American liberation theology) is used by Cardenal to further the establishment of the Kingdom of God on this earth.