What remains of the literature of the Aztecs? Texts in their language, Nahuatl, were collected in the 16th century by the Franciscan friar Bernadino de Sahagun (1500-1590) from the surviving indigenous wise men. It was not until the 1930s, however, that the texts received the serious attention of scholars. A collection of the work of 13 of these poets, accompanied by exuberant lithographs by two distinguished Mexican artists, Leonel Maciel and Luis Nishizawa, make up the exhibition, Thirteen Poets of the Aztec World, which opens next week at the Munster Literature Centre as part of the Sense of Cork festival.

The rediscovery of the poetry was led by Angel Garbay (1892-1967) with his History of the Nahuatl Literature and his three volumes of Nahuatl poetry. Garbay's pioneering work inspired many scholars from Mexico, the US, Germany, France, Spain and Holland to continue his researches. The American scholar Daniel Brinton, with the assistance of Faustino Chimalpopoca Galicia, was the first to publish in English a selection of these ancient Mexican chants with the title Ancient Nahuatl Poetry. Although contemporary scholars can point to deficiencies in this, credit must be given for the work as a first effort to alert the English-speaking world to the existence and richness of Mexican preHispanic literature.

Aztec culture was deeply embedded in the world of nature. As in most - if not all - ancient cultures, nature was perceived as controlled by the gods. Just as modern societies attempt to manipulate nature by means of science and technology, so ancient societies attempted to manipulate nature through appeasement of the controlling deities. Some of the controlling devices they employed were of a truly appalling nature, such as the rituals of the god Tlaloc, the god of mountains, rain and spring, which involved the sacrifice and eating of many children and infants still at the breast. Equally horrible were the ritual sacrifices to the god Tezcatlipoca, the Sun god, the most feared in the Aztec pantheon. He was the recipient of the still-beating human heart cut out of the victim's chest with an obsidian knife.

In imagining these darker aspects of Aztec life and culture, one should bear in mind that what lay behind them was not sadistic cruelty but the terrifying belief that the controlling deities of phenomenal nature had to be appeased or else the world, as the Aztecs knew it, could come to an end. What would happen, for instance, if Tezcatlipoca were displeased and decided not to appear again? We are talking of an Aztec apocalypse.

The more positive aspect of Aztec culture was the celebration of the gods of the earth's products. These celebrations involved music, dance and the singing of sacred hymns. The 16th-century friar, Diego Duran, offers the following description of these songs: "Among them were poets who composed songs . . . All their songs are composed with metaphors so obscure that hardly anyone can understand them, unless they are carefully studied and glossed in order to grasp their meaning. I have devoted myself to listening carefully to what they sing; the words and terms of the metaphors at first seem nonsense, but later, after comment by and consultation with others, they become admirable sentences."

What is truly extraordinary, given the ritualistic and communal nature of these compositions, is the fact that many of them can be attributed to individual poets. For example, one of the most important composers is now known as Nezahualcoyotl, who is the recognised author of some of the finest surviving poems in Nahuatl.

The rediscovery of Nahuatl poetry is, to say the least, analogous to the rediscovery, in the 19th century, of ancient Gaelic texts by scholars such as Kuno Meyers, Whitley Stokes, John MacNeill and others. Both collections of poems - the Aztec and the Irish - recall a pre-Christian age of fine literary culture which had been lost for centuries; one difference between them is that the Irish texts are all of anonymous authorship, whereas many of the Aztec poems are attributable. As the great Mexican Nobel Laureate, Octavio Paz, remarked on Sahagun's admiring response to the principles, customs and institutions of the Mexican Indians, the 16th century Spanish friar was quite aware that the indigenous world he had discovered was what we would nowadays call civilisation. Mexico, like Ireland, has been delighted to repossess a fine literary heritage that broadens and enriches what was for so long accepted as a culture limited by imposed boundaries of religion and language.

All of the poems at the heart of the exhibition have an astounding freshness and vitality that may owe something to novelty but more, I think, to an acute perception and appreciation of the natural world. Here, for example are some lines from Tecayehuatsin's

Let us sing:

The kettle drums of colour of jade resound, brilliant dew has fallen over the earth.

In the house of yellow feathers it pours down with force.

His son has come down, descended there in the springtime.

He is the Giver of Life.

And here is Cuacuauhtzin:

My heart craves for flowers.

That they be in my hands.

And here is Tlaltecatzin:

My heart is a precious reality,

I am, I am only a singer, but golden flowers I carry,

I have to abandon them,

I only look at my house, the flowers remain there.

Perhaps big jades, broad plumages are my juice?

But these 13 poets are never simply celebrating. Almost always there is a touch of melancholy, as if the acuteness of the appreciation of the natural world brings in its wake a painful reminder of human mortality and the consequent loss of that world. Death accompanies joy. The colonising Spaniards were quick enough to accommodate to their Catholicism the Aztec sense of mortality. And the more positive quality of joy in nature and natural forces they conveniently attributed to the Devil.

It can never be forgotten that the Aztecs were a warrior-people, and this aspect of their culture is also present in some of the poems, particularly in the chant of Nezahualpilli:

Our fathers are intoxicated, the intoxication of strength.

Let the dance begin

The owners of the wilted flowers have gone home, those who own shields of feathers, those who guard the heights,

Those who take prisoners alive are now dancing.

Defeated, the owners of the wilted flowers leave those who own the shields of feathers.

The reading of these 13 poems will be a delightful revelation to all readers of poetry in Ireland who get to see them. It seems to me that they read somewhat better in Spanish than they do in English, but even when the English is rather clumsy poetically, there is so much substance in the poems that they survive remarkably well.

Michael Smith is a poet, publisher and translator from Spanish.

13 Poets from the Aztec World opens at the Boole Library, UCC, on Friday, July 2nd. Phone 021-312955

The Sense of Cork Festival runs from Thursday until Sunday, July 4th. Information on 021-310597