When W.S. Merwin was a young poet, Ezra Pound advised him to "read the
seeds of poetry, not the twigs." As the ballads of Spain are among those
essential seeds, Merwin set out to select and translate a collection of
them into English.
Few, if any, popular poetic traditions compare to that of the ballads in
the culture of Spain. These terse, passionate, and often violent poems
have been remembered, repeated, and loved for centuries throughout the
Spanish-speaking world. Evolving from the epic song, this unique poetic
genre has influenced the drama of the Golden Age, the novel, and lyric
verse of the present day.
For this volume--long out of print and reissued in the new series Copper
Canyon Classics--W.S. Merwin selected representative examples of every
kind of ballad: from episodic story poems to unusual "wonder-mongering"
songs. Grouped by kind and arranged in chronological order, these poems
provide an essential key to Spanish culture from the late Middle Ages to
the twentieth century.
Merwin approached this project humbly and notes in his introduction: "My
aim was not to produce a series of virtuoso performances but a group of
translations which would be faithful and readable, and would get in the
way of the originals as little as possible."
W.S. Merwin is the author of over fifty books of poetry, prose, and
translation. He has earned nearly every major literary prize, including
the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He lives in Hawaii.
