A poet’s mood fits the times

A poet, Thoreau once wrote, “should come to watch his moods as closely as the cat does a mouse.”

Sometimes, the watchful poet’s mood matches that of the moment. And, when it does, something resonant occurs. This is such an instance in the life of W.S. Merwin, now more than 50 years into his own distinguished career as a poet, translator and essayist. At 76, he finds himself not only in the vanguard of poets organized against war with Iraq but also awaiting the publication of his translations from nine books by Jean Follain, a French poet whose work -- written between the world wars -- speaks to the current historical situation with an almost aching relevance.

“I was struck by that,” Merwin said from his home in Hawaii this week, “when I thought about the book’s very first poem, ‘Voluntary Mutilations’ ”:

Rather than have to serve

in the emperor’s armies

one fine evening the master

took the axe to himself

cut from his hand two great fingers,

his young blonde wife

gently bandaged the place

and the yellow hearted

pansies shook in the border....

“It is a startling poem,” Merwin said. “People passed it around in the early ‘30s, when he wrote it. It made him as famous as poets ever are in Paris, where poets usually are neglected. It is rather unlike the rest of his poems, though many of them refer to the Great War and its devastation through the oblique prism of memory. Follain, who was born in 1903, said that one of his nightmares was that, had he been born only two or three years later, he would have been able to recall nothing of the world before the first war. Everything he valued about life was swept away by that war and, of course, he lived for many years in the shadow of the war that was imminent. He folds them into each other -- the war that he remembers and his dread of the one that is to come.”

Merwin, whose work has been praised by the poet James Merrill for its “wonderful streamlined diction,” would make the short list in any sensible account of America’s greatest living poets. His many awards and honors include not only the Bollingen, Tanning and Ruth Lily poetry prizes, but also the 1970 Pulitzer for his collection “The Carrier of Ladders.” He is also a vital link to 20th century poetry’s heroic age: As a teenager, Merwin was advised by Ezra Pound; in 1952, W.H. Auden selected his first book, “A Mask for Janus,” for inclusion in the Yale Younger Poet Series. Since then, Merwin has written dozens of poetry collections and translated dozens more contemporary and classic works, including a widely admired version of Dante’s “Purgatorio” and, more recently, “Sir Gawain & the Green Knight.”

His bilingual Follain selection, “Transparence of Memory,” is forthcoming as part of Copper Canyon Press’ Kage-an Books series. (The name comes from the Japanese characters for “shadow hermitage,” which is how editor Sam Hamill conceives the translator’s place.)

Merwin said he was drawn to Follain’s work by its affinity for subjective memory -- mutable and situated in a physical landscape -- over the abstraction of time. “That relationship to my own preoccupations is something that I keep finding in Follain,” Merwin said. “His poems seem to have perspective built in, and each time you go back to them, you see further. I was over 40, for example, when I found the poem in this collection called ‘Signs’ in which a restaurant customer feels death coming to him as he peels an almond”:

Sometimes when a customer in a shadowy restaurant

is shelling an almond

a hand comes to rest on his narrow shoulder

he hesitates to finish his glass

the forest in the distance is resting under its snows ....

“That sort of specific, homey setting,” Merwin said, “lends a strange power to Follain’s poems. He had a preoccupation with restaurants, was quite learned about them really. Yet even when death and loss weighed on his memory he remained witty, gentle and pleasant. He was trained as a lawyer and earned his living as a country magistrate, commuting to his village from Paris. He loved the people there and they so loved him that, when he retired, they presented him with a volume of all his written decisions bound in vellum.”

In his time Follain, who died in 1971, was often regarded by critics as a miniaturist. It is an impression Merwin’s translations, precise and faithful, dispel. Take “October Thoughts”:

How one loves

this great wine

that one drinks all alone

when the evening illumines its coppered hills

not a hunter now stalks the lowland game

the sisters of our friends

seem more beautiful

at the same time there is a threat of war

an insect pauses

then goes on.

Or again in the quiet desolation of “The School and Nature”:

Drawn on the blackboard

in the classroom in a town

a circle remained intact

and the teacher’s chair was deserted

and the students had gone....

Harold Bloom believed that a volume of Follain translations Merwin published in 1968 deserves a spot in the Western canon. And, though those renderings are long out of print, the Frenchman has become something of a cult figure among discerning American poets. “American poets have continued to respond to him,” Merwin said, “but the French don’t seem to resonate to him at all anymore. To my mind, though, he is one of the great French poets of the century.”

Merwin, a native New Yorker, recalled that he was first advised to take up translation when, as a 19-year-old, he visited Pound in Washington. “His advice is what impelled me to this project, crystallized it. He said, ‘If you are going to be a poet, you have to work every day. You need to write 75 lines every day, but you won’t have 75 lines of your own every day, so learn language and translate, which will teach you about your own language.’

“In fact, I didn’t want to write for money, but I could translate for money. It was a very good exercise and a way of keeping a modest living. At one point, I was making $2,000 a year translating classics for the BBC, which was then enough to live in London.”

Merwin always has been a poet with deep social, political and environmental concerns. Yet, he once said, “there is a danger in writing a lot of so-called political poetry. I think all poetry is political, but most political poetry doesn’t turn out to be poetry in the long run.”

Still, he has taken a leading role in Poets Against the War, which was organized by Copper Canyon Press’ editors. Friday, in fact, Merwin left his home on Maui, where he and his wife, Paula, grow endangered palms, to go to Washington for an antiwar reading this weekend

“I regard all this with a mixture of feelings,” he said. “I don’t want to look back and think I should have spoken against this war and didn’t. I hate politics. They’re boring and aggravating. But I remember hearing Bertram Russell say that ‘if a poet cannot be independent, then nobody on Earth can be.’

“If he is right, then poets have a responsibility to be independent for everybody. I don’t do it very well, but I can’t let something like this go by without saying something.”