Poetry. Translation. When W.S. Merwin was a young poet, Ezra Pound advised him to "read the seeds of poetry, not the twigs." As the ballads of Spain are among those essential seeds, Merwin set out to select and translate a collection of them into English. Few, if any, popular poetic traditions compare to that of the ballads in the culture of Spain. These terse, passionate, and often violent poems have been remembered, repeated, and loved for centuries throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Evolving from the epic song, this unique poetic genre has influenced the drama of the Golden Age, the novel, and lyric verse of the present day. For this volume--long out of print and reissued in the new series Copper Canyon Classics--W.S. Merwin selected representative examples of every kind of ballad: from episodic story poems to unusual "wonder-mongering" songs. Grouped by kind and arranged in chronological order, these poems provide an essential key to Spanish culture from the late Middle Ages to the twentieth century.

Author City: HAIKU, HI USA

During a sixty-year writing career with more than thirty books, W.S. Merwin has received nearly every major literary award, including the National Book Award in 2005 for MIGRATION: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize; in 2009 for THE SHADOW OF SIRIUS and in 1971 for The Carrier of Ladders. In 2006 he won the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress for PRESENT COMPANY. Merwin lives in Hawaii where he raises endangered palm trees. He was appointed the Library of Congress's seventeenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for 2010-2011.