William Stanley Mervin

William Stanley Merwin nació en New York City en 1927.


Su padre fue un ministro presbiteriano. Sobre este hecho, Merwin ha dicho: «yo comencé a escribir himnos para mi padre y, poco a poco, pude escribir de todo.» Aún niño, su familia se mudó a New Jersey. Así, Merwin creció junto al río Hudson, mirando las grandes torres de Nueva York.
Asistió a la Universidad de Princeton, donde obtuvo un postgrado en lenguas romances. Trabajó como tutor en Francia, Portugal y Mallorca (donde trabajó con el hijo de Robert Graves). En el contexto de su brillante generación (que incluye a Gary Snyder y Galway Kinnell, a John Ashbery y James Merrill), es el principal descubridor contemporáneo de los bosques y ríos norteamericanos.
Desde su primer libro, escrito básicamente durante sus estancias en Europa, Una máscara para Jano (1952), que ganó el premio Yale a los poetas jóvenes, se puso en evidencia la centralidad de la naturaleza en esos empeños.

Esta dicción se irá consolidando en varios libros, como Los osos danzantes (1954) y El blanco en movimiento (1963) hasta llegar a su primera obra de plena madurez: Los piojos (1967). En este libro abandona el corte versal clásico, la puntuación habitual y algunos elementos grecolatinos, impulsando una metafísica de resistencia a los sistemas alienantes de la cultura, del mundo y del sufrimiento.

En ese tono, de cierto minimalismo, escribe El acarreador de las laderas (1970) y el libro que consolida ese período poético, llamado Escritos para un acompañante ilimitado (1973). Tras ese poemario seguirían varios libros como La lluvia en los árboles (1988), Viajes (1993), La zorra (1996), Flor y mano: poemas 1977-1983 (1997) y El sonido del río (1999).

En ellos, la naturaleza aparece como reino de la gracia absoluta, aquejada hoy por un tiempo manual (como en Carrera Andrade) al que el poeta sólo puede oponer un clamor (como en Jorge Guillén). Allí, Merwin se vuelve más conceptual y amargo, a un tiempo, en una sintaxis torrencial, sin dejar de alumbrarnos con la luz de las meditaciones imposibles. Últimamente ha publicado algunas colecciones breves, hasta el presente 2004. Sus poemas han sido traducidos al alemán, al francés, al español (por el poeta mexicano Jorge Esquinca) y a varias lenguas más. Sus honores incluyen el Premio Bollingen, el Premio del Club PEN para traductores (que incluyen la Chanson de Roland, el Purgatorio, Poemas de Pablo Neruda y Aforismos de Antonio Porchia), el Premio Shelley y el Premio Wallace Stevens. Vive actualmente en Haikú, un pueblo de la isla de Maui, ubicada en el estado norteamericano de Hawaii, cultivando huertos, junto a su esposa argentina Paula, quien, según Merwin, «se cansó de vivir por más de treinta años entre los edificios de New York y quería vivir en un lugar más amable».

En medio de la belleza natural –quizá agónica- que ha plasmado de un modo inigualable en sus poemas, Merwin trabaja como activista ambiental y, de vez en cuando, viaja al continente para dar charlas o lecturas sobre poesía y ecología.

Texto de Juan José Rodríguez.











. S. Merwin
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William Stanley Merwin (born 30 September 1927 ) is an American poet. He made a name for himself as an anti-war poet during the 1960s. Later, he would evolve toward mythological themes and develop a unique prosody characterized by indirect narration and the absence of punctuation. In the 80s and 90s, Merwin's interest in Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology also influenced his writing. He continues to write prolifically, though he also dedicates significant time to the restoration of rainforests in Hawaii, where he currently resides.

Merwin has received many honors, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (in both 1971 and 2009) and the Tanning Prize, one of the highest honors bestowed by the Academy of American Poets, as well as the Golden Wreath of the Struga Poetry Evenings.




Contents [hide]
1 Works
2 Bibliography
3 Other sources
4 External links



[edit] Works
In 1952 Merwin's first book of poetry, A Mask for Janus, was published in the Yale Younger Poets Series. W. H. Auden selected the work for that distinction. Later, in 1971 Auden and Merwin would exchange harsh words in the pages of The New York Review of Books. Merwin had published "On Being Awarded the Pulitzer Prize" in the June 3, 1971 issue of The New York Review of Books outlining his objections to the Vietnam War and stating that he was donating his prize money to the draft resistance movement. Auden responded in his letter "Saying No" published in the July 1, 1971 issue stating that the Pulitzer Prize jury was not a political body with any ties to the American foreign policy.

From 1956 to 1957 Merwin was also playwright-in-residence at the Poet's Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts; he became poetry editor at The Nation in 1962. Besides being a prolific poet (he has published over fifteen volumes of his works) he is also a respected translator of Spanish, French, Italian and Latin poetry, including Dante's Purgatorio.

Merwin is probably best known for his poetry about the Vietnam War, and can be included among the canon of Vietnam War-era poets which includes such luminaries as Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg and Yusef Komunyakaa. In 1998, Merwin wrote Folding Cliffs: A Narrative, an ambitious novel-in-verse about Hawaiian history and legend.

Merwin's early subjects were frequently tied to mythological or legendary themes, while many of the poems featured animals, which were treated as emblems in the manner of William Blake. A volume called The Drunk in the Furnace (1960) marked a change for Merwin, in that he began to write in a much more autobiographical way. The title-poem is about Orpheus, seen as an old drunk. 'Where he gets his spirits / it's a mystery', Merwin writes; 'But the stuff keeps him musical'. Another powerful poem of this period is 'Odysseus', which reworks the traditional theme in a way that plays off poems by Stevens and Graves on the same topic.

In the 1960s Merwin began to experiment boldly with metrical irregularity. His poems became much less tidy and controlled. He played with the forms of indirect narration typical of this period, a self-conscious experimentation explained in an essay called 'On Open Form' (1969). The Lice (1967) and The Carrier of Ladders (1970) remain his most influential volumes. These poems often used legendary subjects (as in 'The Hydra' or 'The Judgment of Paris') to explore highly personal themes.

In Merwin's later volumes, such as The Compass Flower (1977), Opening the Hand (1983), and The Rain in the Trees (1988), one sees him transforming earlier themes in fresh ways, developing an almost Zen-like indirection. His latest poems are densely imagistic, dream-like, and full of praise for the natural world. He has lived in Hawaii since the 1970s, and one sees the influence of this tropical landscape everywhere in the recent poems, though the landscape remains emblematic and personal. Migration won the 2005 National Book Award for poetry. A life-long friend of James Wright, Merwin's elegy to him appears in the 2008 volume From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright.

The Shadow of Sirius, published in 2008 by Copper Canyon Press, was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.


[edit] Bibliography
Poetry - collections

The First Four Books of Poems, 1975, 2000
A Mask for Janus, 1952- Awarded the Yale Younger Poets Prize, 1952
The Dancing Bears, 1954
Green with Beasts, 1956
The Drunk in the Furnace, 1960
The Second Four Books of Poems, 1993
The Moving Target, 1963
The Lice, 1967
The Carrier of Ladders, 1970 (awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1971)
Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment, 1973
The Compass Flower, 1977
Finding the Islands, 1982
Opening the Hand, 1983
The Rain in the Trees, 1988
Selected Poems, 1988
Travels, 1993
The Vixen, 1996
Flower & Hand, 1997
The Folding Cliffs: A Narrative, 1998
The River Sound, 1999
The Pupil, 2001
Lament for the Makers, 2002
Migration: New & Selected Poems, 2005
Present Company, 2005
The Shadow of Sirius, 2008 (awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2009)
Poems

"Alba" The New Yorker 84/35 (3 November 2008) : 86

Prose

The Miner's Pale Children, 1970
Houses and Travellers, 1977
Regions of Memory
Unframed Originals: Recollections, 1982
The Lost Uplands: Stories of Southwest France, 1992
The Mays of Ventadorn, 2002
The Ends of the Earth, 2004
The Book of Fables, 2007


Translations

The Poem of the Cid, 1959
The Satires of Persius, 1960
Spanish Ballads, 1961
Lazarillo de Tormes, 1962
The Song of Roland, 1963
Selected Translations, 1948 - 1968, 1968
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Poems by Pablo Neruda, 1969
Products of the Perfected Civilization, Selected Writings of Chamfort, 1969
Voices, Poems of Antonio Porchia, 1969, 1988, 2003
Transparence of the World, Poems by Jean Follain, 1969, 2003
Asian Figures, 1973
Osip Mandelstam: Selected Poems (with Clarence Brown), 1974
Euripedes' Iphigeneia at Aulis (with George E. Dimock, Jr.), 1978
Selected Translations, 1968-1978, 1979
Four French Plays, 1985
From the Spanish Morning, 1985
Vertical Poetry, Poems by Roberto Juarroz, 1988
Sun at Midnight, Poems by Musō Soseki (with Soiku Shigematsu), 1989
Pieces of Shadow: Selected Poems of Jaime Sabines, 1996
East Window: The Asian Translations, 1998
Purgatorio from The Divine Comedy of Dante, 2000
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 2005
Summer Doorways: A Memoir, 2005