Medievalbookshop — ADI0066 Merwin, Mays of Ventadorn

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Secondhand book for sale
Scanned image of the book’s front cover

W. S. Merwin.
The Mays of Ventadorn.
Published Washington D.C.: National Geographic, 2002.
Series: Literary Travel.
ISBN 0792265386;
ISBN-13: 9780792265382.
Binding: hardback, perfect bound.
Printed in the USA.
Size: 143×210×18mm.
Page count: Unnumbered prelims inc. 1 monochrome map; main text, 163pp.
Main language: English.
Overall condition good: this is an unused copy, but the dustjacket is noticably shop soiled; the book itself looks in good order.

This item £6.00
P&P inc. within the UK
(delivery outside the UK not currently available)

[Publisher’s price US$20.00/Can$31.00/£12.99]
Weight without packaging: 361g.

How to order this book

W. S. Merwin, one of the great contemporary English-language poets, turns to prose here in a brilliantly evocative re-creation of a distant past — as well an exquisite rendering of his own romance with an abandoned farmhouse in the magical countryside of Southwest France. The Mays of Ventadorn: Tales from Southwest France illuminates the origins of the famous 12th-century Provencal troubadours, beginning with the great Bernart de Ventadorn whose work Merwin first encountered as a young translator of the archaic language known as Old Occitan. The timeless beauty of the troubadours’ pastoral songs and narrative poems has enabled them to survive for 900 years, far outlasting the language from which they sprang.

As he reveals the lyrical pleasures in Southwest France’s medieval courts, Merwin also acquaints readers with the ruins of the chateau of Ventadorn, Bernart’s home, as well as the elegantly careworn farmhouse that the poet himself has owned for decades. Merwin brings a sense of historical continuity to his narrative as he writes of how the warm enchantments that distinguish the farmhouse, the local patois, and the area’s rural traditions are in many respects the direct progeny of the troubadours’ storied culture and language of old.

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