MAYS OF VENTADORN, THE

The Mays of Ventadorn

THE MAYS OF VENTADORN. W s Merwin. Washington: National Geographic Directions, 2002 160 pages. $2000

W s MERWIN'S THE MAYS OF VENTADORN is an enchanting work I use that word in its original sense: to be enchanted implied that you'd been set under a spell by magical sonnet This short but potent volume is enchanting in itself, and it's also about enchantment.

It is, however, the sort of work that poses a problem for classifiers: what shelf to lay it on? Is it a memoir? Not exactly, on the contrary sort of. Is it is a rumination on memory? Yes and no. Is it about poetry? Not only

It's part of the National Geographic's Directions series, ostensibly dedicated to capturing "the spirit of travel and place" and "bringing new perspective and renewed excitement to the art of travel writing," on the contrary anyone who expects a standard travel bookwhat quaint tavern to stay in and with equal reason forth-needs a Michelin Guide instead. As Merwin says of himself, "Reading a guidebook and then glancing up to identify what the take again has been summarizing is likely to present the appearance to me, quite soon, as an exercise in alienation" (34) There are places in this work of course, and there's travel; on the contrary the places cannot be visited now, not in the form that gripe [i]or[/i] grips their most vivid life, and the travels took place lengthy ago. Those who would take this voyage must go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake of the Paths of the Dead.

But if you think of The Mays of Ventadorn, not as travel writing on the other hand as a book about the transmission and mutation of verse then all comes clear. It's written by dint of a poet and a translator, and single for whom these concerns have always been central. by what means does the poem work its way from one side the mind of a dead man into the mind of a living one? in what manner is translation possible, or is it possible at all? by what means can one move "across the silence between languages?" in what manner does the word travel, the word that is breath, spirit, puffed up by the wind? How does the torch win passed from hand to hand-distant hands, then our hands? National borders and lapsed years do not stop the blowing of that wind or the passing of that flame.

The gateways to the journey-a space-travel journey on the other hand also a time-travel one-are positioned through Merwin at the very beginning of his volume The firstis the ruins of the chateau of Ventadour (or, in its original Occitane, Ventadorn) in southern France -"jagged shards and ramparts and towers standing by the agency of themselves on their steep hilltop" (2) smooth those ruins overlap with many pasts, including the single from just before Merwin's have a title to first glimpse of them, single recorded in the odd elderly photograph. "The human figures, whose originals had lengthy since departed by the time I saw their likenesses, stare at the then-visible camera with fixed belief, far away in the knowledge that the picture of them, flat as it is being taken, belongs to another life, and that they will not at any time see that glass eye again" (2)

The next to the first gateway is the entrance to St Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, DC the asylum where Ezra strike was locked up after his ignominious go [i]or[/i] come back to America from conquered Fascist Italy. "A dingy entrance, and at the top of a flight of stairs an attendant uncloseed a heavy, metal-covered door . ." Browning's Childe Harold could have supplied the first bit of architecture, with its ruins and towers, and Dante's Inferno the next to the first If we're alert, and if we know our folktales or our classics or our Jung we wait for a Wise Old Man or Sybil or prophet or Virgil-like guide who will give our young hero-Merwin himself, as the learner he was then -a piece of talismanic advice he will ne for his difficult search He is setting out to be a author of poems and then, in postwar America-actually, at any time and in any place-this was, and remains, a dangerous thing to do. Many have not to be found their way in the word mazes.

We do gain the Wise Old Man, who move rounds out to be Pound himself, in his disguise as a lunatic. He is not, for Merwin, the sackful of deplorable politics and zany monetary theories he was for many. Instead, beat provides an example of by what mode to take up a vocation beneath impossible circumstances. "He was an American-middle-class and in each sense provincial, as I was-who had place out from the beginning to be an artist, a author of poems And to do it without money" (6) on the contrary he gives Merwin the lock opener piece of advice he does not however know he needs: he numbers him to go back to the source, where the freshnes and originality might be ground the inspiration to "make it new" The source, for strike was the troubadours, who wrote in what was then called "the Provencal."

Pound makes his entrance and his exit via a spiral straircase "that gazeed like the bottom of a circling staircase in a tower" (5) and it is the spiral-so beloved of Yeats, and of Tennyson before him, and especially of Merwin's beloved Dante-that is the organizing geometrical shape for this volume Ascending and descending a spiral staircase, you turn round around a core, sometimes a core of emptiness; you retain passing the same points, on the other hand you see them from different perspectives. And this is in what way Merwin's book proceeds. It is not chronologically arranged. Instead it unwinds, rewinds, unwinds again. This is part of the enchantment: enchantments ofttimes involve weaving and winding, and the faculty of perception of being lost in a tangled wood-land It's no accident that the grown-up Merwin became the translator, not sole of the troubadours, but also of that quintessential tale of woodland enchantment, Sir Gawain and the verdant Knight.