The Mays of Ventadorn

by W. S. Merwin

Overview

“Merwin’s verse often gives the impression of language scavenged from the elements, its power reckoned only as its meanings assemble, phrase by phrase, against the white of the page. Simple astonishment, one of the rarest of all literary experiences, is the most potent outcome.” —The New Yorker

“Merwin’s skill is matched by his wisdom and his ability to connect a particular moment with something larger.” —The Washington Post

Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W. S. Merwin turns his mastery of language and powerful attention to the origins of twelfth-century Provençal troubadours. Merwin deftly blends personal anecdotes—his pilgrimage at the age of eighteen to visit Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth’s hospital, his purchase of an abandoned farmhouse in Quercy—with his exploration of Southern France’s rich history and linguistic heritage.

We sat in a tower of the old library building , a long room among the rafters, a kind of loft that had never been finished like the rooms on the floors below, so that our graceless attempts at giving voice to a few sounds and phrases of medieval French took place inside masonry that had been designed to resemble a fortified belfry or a keep with battlements.

A preeminent voice in American literature with a prolific career spanning over half a century, W. S. Merwin has received nearly every accolade available to an American poet including Pulitzer Prizes for his books Carrier of Ladders (1971) and The Shadow of Sirius (2009). He currently lives in Haiku, Hawaii.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556595462
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	01/15/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

A preeminent voice in American literature with a prolific career spanning over half a century, Merwin has received nearly every accolade available to an American poet including Pulitzer Prizes for his books Carrier of Ladders (1971) and The Shadow of Sirius (2009). He currently lives in Haiku, Hawaii.

Read an Excerpt

In the light between rains, on a morning late in spring. the wooded hillsides, the squat stone farmhouses, the barnyards, and the tall, shell-gray, isolated ruins on the ridge appeared to be standing in a single shadow. The ruins were all that was left, by the end of the twentieth century, of the château of Ventadour (or, in its original Occitan, Ventadorn) in the volcanic foothills of the massif central , in southern France. In its youth, early in the twelfth century, the château had been the home of Bernart de Ventadorn, one of the greatest of the troubadours. Most of the older pictures of the ruins and of the nearby village appear to have been taken in winter. The trees, from a time just before ours, stand like cracks in the walls, and all the colors are depths of sepia, or black and white washed to gray. The human figures, whose originals had long since departed by the time I saw their likenesses, stare at the then-visible camera with fixed disbelief, far away in the knowledge that the picture of them, even as it is being taken, belongs to another life, and that they will never see that glass eye again. And in fact their pictures, and odds and ends of their lives and of the light around them at those moments, turn up years later in attics and old bookstores and are pored over by strangers who do not know who they are or were and will never know anything more about them. The bare limbs of the big trees reaching over them, and over the roofs, have been taken away during the time between us, and some of the roofs and walls too, so that the place itself, in a period no greater than a couple of generations (traversed by one war, out of earshot, or perhaps two) has become all but unrecognizable, dark against its grainy sky. But when I recall the ruins and the country around them, almost always from somewhere else, often from another part of the world and of the calendar, I am sure to see them, at least to begin with, as I did the first time I approached them, in the cool, veiled light of spring, the new leaves fully open, shining with rain, the white stars of stitchwort and blackberry, and the brilliant yellow gorse and broom flowers shining against the rough, mossy walls along the lanes, their colors glowing in the overcast daylight. I was not thinking then, as I have since, of how long I had been on my way to that glimpse of the jagged shards of ramparts and towers standing by themselves on their steep hilltop, and so I did not recall that it had been in the spring, too, that I had taken one of the first definite steps toward them, though I had no idea of that at the time. It was in Washington, D.C., at Easter, during one of my last years as a student. I was visiting a college friend in the city, and while I was there I telephoned St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, and to my surprise learned that I would be allowed to call on Ezra Pound and that he was willing to see me. On a morning of bright sunlight, one of the first warm days of spring, I took the bus across Washington to the hospital. I had with me not the worn volume of Pound’s own Personae with its spare stick-portrait of Pound by Gaudier-Breszka on the rough-textured yellow jacket - at the time that would have seemed to me embarrassingly obvious. Instead I was carrying John Peale Bishop’s Collected Poems. In it, the few pages of his little-known but superb translations included two versions of poems by troubadours, one by Bertran de Born, and one of Jaufre Rudel’s most famous songs, about a love for someone far away, in the spring. I realize now that Bernart de Ventadorn must have known Jaufre Rudel’s poem by heart in his youth, from having heard it sung at Ventadorn, and its theme is woven through all his own poems and what we can deduce, however dubiously, of his life. The title, which (when the poem was printed) was the first line, Quan Lo Rius De La Fontana, gave me the first words of Provençal (or, as we have come to call it, Occitan) that I had heard, or imagined I had heard. The translation was, after all, a translation, but it brought a suggestion of the whole tradition, which seemed like an invitation. When the thin fountains are again Clear streams and sunlight interfused, When flower of the wild rose is seen, And nightingales upon the bough Smooth and renew with changed refrain Their sweet songs, I too must begin Sweetly to rearrange my own.

Editorial Reviews

Merwin’s conception of poetry is devotional in its service to other languages and cultures. Mays of Ventadorn is not only a story about troubadours handing down their songs through the ages, but about how poetry itself seems to engineer twists of fate in the lives of its acolytes” —The New York Review of Books "One of the finest senior U.S. poets stunningly evokes in prose the fabled romance and dark beauty of southwestern France. Seemingly channeling the troubadour spirit of the region, Merwin paints broad, but strikingly detailed, landscapes with his words, using language itself as a main character. He intermingles his personal experiences in the region with the songs of twelfth-century troubadours, illustrating superbly the flexibility of time in the historical cocoon of this ancient and endlessly resurrected locale. Often the prose sounds like poetry, and few other travel writings could aspire to the miraculously transporting quality of these crystalline sentences. The reader feels the restorative effects of this region and its poetry on Merwin, and cannot help but be touched. Like the songs of his troubadours, this little book soothes the soul while keeping the senses wide awake."—Booklist, on Mays of Ventadorn

From the Publisher