A Tribute to Troubadours' Language of Love

THE MAYS OF VENTADORN

By W.S. Merwin

National Geographic Directions

166 pages, $20

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The word "Provence" is laden with mystique. In culinary terms, the word conjures up fare made with robust mixtures of olive oil, capers, garlic and lamb, and writers like M.F.K. Fisher and Peter Mayle have taken any number of armchair travelers on gastronomic tours of this picturesque region in the south of France.

But there is another aspect to the south of France, often overlooked, yet just as tied to the tastes of the tongue: an archaic, extraordinary language in which medieval troubadours sang their songs of love. The language is all but extinct, and if one could hear it spoken today, it might sound as alien as Chaucer's English does to modern ears.

Extinct though it may be, the language and poetry of Provence and the surrounding lands have mingled, like a scent of wild dill, with the life of W.S. Merwin, one of the finest lyrical poets writing today.

In "The Mays of Ventadorn," Merwin pays lavish tribute to the 12th century troubadours and the regions that have meant so much to him during his career, starting with that day in the 1950s when he visited the poet Ezra Pound.

" ... [A]t your age you don't have anything to write about. You may think you do, but you don't," Pound told the 19-year-old Merwin at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C., where Pound was confined after World War II. "So get to work translating .... Try to learn the Provencal, at least some of it, if you can .... Get as close to the original as you can. It will make you use your English and find out what you can do with it."

Another poet who inspired Merwin was Dante, whose homage to the troubadours in the 26th canto of "Purgatorio" made Merwin "want to try again to hear something of the troubadours' brief, bright sense of the world."

Anyone who knows Merwin's poetry or his memoir, "The Lost Upland," knows how intimate he is with the world of nature, how he places himself in sensuous and direct contact with it.

And so, with the words of Pound and Dante in his ears, the young Merwin traveled, maps in hand, to the region known as the Quercy, talking to villagers and combing the countryside for ruins and old farmhouses. It became "a continuing treasure hunt, finding them, trying to learn something of their current status .... But I could scarcely imagine having one of them and living in it."