The texts we know today as Nahuatl poetry owe much to the invaluable work of Miguel León-Portilla, who has dedicated his entire life to studying Nahuatl culture from a wide variety of perspectives. Poetry has been one of his focal points, and several of his books are dedicated to it. Over the years, he has repeatedly confronted the same texts, always choosing to translate them anew rather than return to a previous version of his own, preferring to accept the challenge of the original each time. To arrive at this compilation of León-Portilla's translations, Coral Bracho and Marcelo Uribe, in collaboration with him, have sought out the best versions of the most representative and best texts, compared them, and assembled them, sometimes drawing on fragments from different translations.

Most of the texts in this anthology were constructed by him in Spanish, but to a certain extent also in Nahuatl, insofar as he extracted them from a corpus that does not always distinguish them as independent texts and in which, at least in its graphic expression, the notion of verse does not exist. Thus, not only is the versification in Spanish his, but also in Nahuatl, and is based on the particular sound and structure of that language.

The purpose of this book, in addition to presenting the texts in their original language, is to offer an approximate idea of ​​the poetic sensibility that permeated the Nahuatl gaze, in the most lucid literary moments of the translations by Miguel León-Portilla, the person who—without a doubt—has come closest, and with the deepest wisdom and the most refined sensitivity and intelligence, to the depths of the Nahuatl world.