On Romance

W. S. Merwin is a renowned poet, translator, and memoirist. His first published volume of poetry, A Mask for Janus, won the Yale Younger Poets award in 1952.  Since then, Mr. Merwin has gone on to receive numerous other prestigious prizes, including the Bollingen and the Pulitzer.  In 2005, his Migration:  Selected Poems 1951-2001 won the National Book Award. 

A self-proclaimed lover of languages and the medieval European literary tradition, Mr. Merwin has translated the thirteenth-century Provencal troubadours, Dante’s Purgatorio, El Cid, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, among other works.  His most recent volume, Summer Doorways, is an autobiographical account of a youth spent discovering new places, new voices.

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