Merwin’s life: W.S. Merwin was born in New York City in 1927. His first poems were hymns written for his father, a Presbyterian minister. He studied Romance languages at Princeton University, made his living in the 1950s as a translator in England, France & Spain, tutored Robert Graves’ son in Majorca, knew Ted Hughes & Sylvia Plath when he was living in England in the early 1960s, was at Naropa before he moved to Hawaii in the 1970s, where he has lived for 30 years, restoring his remote ranch to rainforest.
Merwin as translator: Merwin has published nearly 20 books of his own translations, ranging from Spanish old & new (El Cid, Pablo Neruda) to medieval French (Song of Roland) to 20th century Russian (Osip Mandelstam) to his celebrated new translation of Dante’s Purgatorio from medieval Italian. He has also collaborated with translators on collections of poetry from languages he does not himself speak (Urdu, Chinese, Sanskrit, Japanese, Persian, Vietnamese...), making the translations into poems in English.
Merwin’s poetry: Merwin’s first book of poems, A Mask for Janus, was chosen by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Prize series in 1952. His early poems were formal, classical, often concerned with themes from mythology, influenced by Wallace Stevens & Robert Graves. In the 1960s he began to experiment with loosened poetic forms & autobiographical subjects, and his work became less technically crafted & more personal. Merwin is revered by other poets as a master, containing the universal in the particular.
Merwin as Buddhist & environmentalist: When Merwin was awarded the Academy of American Poets’ first $100,000 Tanning Prize (now known as the Wallace Stevens Prize) in 1994, The New York Times published a profile of him by Dinitia Smith, “A Poet of Their Own,” which clearly articulates the intersection of violence, pacifism, Buddhism & concern for the natural world in Merwin’s life, his family history, his experience at Naropa, his long work of restoring his land in Hawaii, and of course his poetry. It’s a piece well worth reading.
Books by W.S. Merwin:
- Present Company (new poems, Copper Canyon Press, 2005)
- Migration (new & selected poems, Copper Canyon Press, 2005)
- Summer Doorways: A Memoir (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005)
- The Ends of the Earth (essays, Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004)
- Purgatorio, A New Verse Translation (Dante trans. Merwin, Knopf, 2001)
- The First Four Books of Poems, including A Mask for Janus (1952), The Dancing Bears (1954), Green with Beasts (1956) & The Drunk in the Furnace (1960), (Copper Canyon Press, 2000)
- The Folding Cliffs: A Narrative (book-length poem on Hawaiian history, Knopf, 1998)
- East Window: Poems from Asia (translations, Copper Canyon Press, 1998)
- The Second Four Books of Poems, including The Moving Target (1963), The Lice (1967), The Carrier of Ladders (1970) & Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment (1973), (Copper Canyon Press reissue, 1993)
