Browsing the Library of Babel: The Mays of Ventadorn

The Mays of Ventadorn.

W. S. Merwin.
Copper Canyon Press. 2019. 146 pp.
ISBN 978-1-55659-546-2.

Thoughtful, discursive books on the relation between life, lands and the distant cultures no longer issue from the press in small numbers to grace publishers' winter catalogues like they once did. The educated amateur who once wrote them has surrendered his or her portfolio. Reflection can be impossibly difficult to manage in a world of unceasing distraction.

Or maybe one landscape remains to us. Maybe the landscape of Provence still can convince one or another of us that there is something attractive to living there over other places.

By "living there" I mean living there without a Smartphone. Maybe even without a computer or television of any kind. For surely these devices are what has brought books about relationship to a landscape to an end. They also have facilitated the reduction of every landscape to a cliché. Few have individual histories any longer.

(Don't get me wrong. I'm not about to throw my computer in the trash after I finish typing this and e-mailing it to the editor.)

After decades of making his way to Ventadour, the manor from the peasants of which came the poet Berhart Ventadorn, fellow poet W. S. Merwin discovered that the disused road to it was strewn with hawthorn.

Oaks, cornels, and here and there the snow of hawthorns, the may trees, in their flowering month for which, in England, they are named.

They become for him "the Mays of Ventadorn."

The voyage had begun before Merwin visited Ezra Pound, at St. Elizabeth's Psychiatric Hospital in Washington, D.C., where the old thrift shop dandy was being held in lieu of going to prison for treason.

He began to to talk to me as though I knew many things whose very names I had never heard, and I nodded and murmured as appropriately as possible.

while...

Behind him a man in pajamas wandered up and down the long room looking at the high discolored ceiling, pausing to reach up and pull some invisible object...

He had already read Pound's much earlier translations from the Provencal poets, Ventadorn among them. Like so much in Pound they were eccentric and occasionally brilliant. They were enough to strike a chord.

The book, The Mays of Ventadorn itself, actually begins decades later:

In the light between rains, on a morning late in spring, the wooded hillsides, the squat stone farmhouses, the barnyards, and the tall, shell-gray, isolated ruins on the ridge appeared to be standing in a single shadow.

Merwin tells us that he often thinks of his visit to Ventadorn as he is writing of it: "almost always from somewhere else."

Years before, he had traveled to France to serve as a tutor. He purchased a dilapidated farmhouse in Quercy, drawn to the area's remoteness. Not consciously so much because it was in Provence but the people and the life seemed to offer him something he needed.

But consciously or not, he was traveling steadily toward Ventadorn. He learned a bit more of the language and the customs such as they survived beyond World War II.

I did not realize, because of youth, I suppose, and because I did not allow myself to believe it, that I was watching the last years when things would happen like that, and that soon I would seldom mention, as though it were slightly embarrassing, how recently I had stood among men singing together as they swung mattocks in the vineyards out on the east slope below the cliff.

He lived there every bit as much in the works of Dante and the Provencal poets and the songs they sing. No matter how distant the two musics might seem, he needed each in order to understand the other.

The reader is treated to snatches from both of those commorancies. Much of her or his voyage is vicarious being traveled through a book. Much more is lived first hand with those vicarious experiences as perspective available nowhere else.

As we come closer to our destination, Merwin gives loose translations of a handful of the poems he so appreciates so we can share in them also. We have arrived at Provence. Eleanor of Aquitaine has taken Ventadorn as her troubadour. The world is filled with cruelty and love. Perhaps twenty or so jongleurs wander from court to court filling it with song.

She has returned to her lands because she has been divorced by her husband, the French King Louis VII. She may or may not have traveled bare breasted, her legs boldly astraddle her horse, with him on his Crusade to the Holy Land, as legend has it, but she has not born him sons. Her lands are equally desirable as herself, and, after a bit of me-time on them, she marries the Norman duke who will soon become the English King Henry II.

Nevertheless, Bernart remains her chivalric lover for some time longer.

While Aliénor was in the Limousin with Henry, Bernart de Ventadorn is generally believed to have become one of her entourage, and to have followed her from the southwest of France to Normandy, and her court as the Duchess there.

Beyond that we know only the songs and the landscape. Also, that Eleanor bore Henry many sons.

Finally, we are ready to walk through the ruins of the manor.

Tucked into the upper right-hand corner of the Michelin map of France #75, just east of the small town of Egletons, in the mountainous department of the Correze, a triangle of black dots near the village of Moustier-Ventador indicated the ruins of the chateau.

Our guide is intent not to romanticize it as others have been in the habit of doing in past books. The facts alone are delightfully—almost mystically—enough.

W. S. Merwin's The Mays of Ventadorn will linger there too briefly. The reader will not wish the voyage to end.

This essay-review first appeared in Eclectica Magazine.