 | W.S. Merwin |
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W.S. Merwin will make two separate public appearances on Wednesday and Thursday, April 19 and 20, at the Whitney Humanities Center (WHC), 53 Wall St.
On April 19, Merwin will read from his work at 7 p.m. in the WHC auditorium. The event is sponsored by the WHC and by the John Christophe Schlesinger Visiting Writer Fund, which was established by Richard and Sheila Schlesinger in memory of their son.
On April 20, "On Romance," a conversation with Merwin led by WHC director María Rosa Menocal, will take place at 4:30 p.m. in the auditorium. The event will serve as the annual Bianca M. Finzi-Contini Calabresi Lecture. A reception will follow.
Both events are free and open to the public.
In a career spanning five decades, Merwin -- also a translator, essayist and environmental activist -- has become one of the most widely read poets in America. His literary career started at the age of 5, when he began to write hymns for his father, a Presbyterian minister. He attended Princeton, where he studied writing with John Berryman and R.P. Blackmur, and he remained there following graduation to immerse himself in the study of Romance languages. He further honed his foreign language skills in travels through Europe, settling for a time in Majorca as a tutor to the son of Robert Graves and eventually spending a year in London working on literary translations.
Merwin's first published volume of poetry, "A Mask for Janus," won the Yale Younger Poets award in 1952 -- chosen by W.H. Auden. His book of poems "The Carrier of Ladders" was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1970. "The Drunk in the Furnace," "The Moving Target," "The Lice" and "The Folding Cliffs" are among the titles of other collections of his poetry.
His recent works include the collection "The River Sound," as well as a new translation of Dante's "Purgatory" and a critically lauded translation of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." He has also published a book of prose, "The Mays of Ventador," as part of the National Geographic Directions Series. In 2004, Shoemaker & Hoard published "The Ends of the Earth," essays expressing the breadth of Merwin's fascination with the natural world. Merwin's "Migration: Selected Poems 1951-2001" won the 2005 National Book Award for poetry. His most recent work, "Summer Doorways," is an autobiographical account of his youth.
The Finzi-Contini lectureship was endowed in 1990 by former Law School dean Guido Calabresi, now a judge in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and by Dr. Paul Calabresi of Brown University, in memory of their mother, Bianca Maria Finzi-Contini Calabresi. A scholar of European literature, Bianca Maria Finzi-Contini fled fascism in Italy, along with her husband Dr. Massimo Calabresi, and settled in New Haven. She earned a Ph.D. in French at Yale. She was a professor of French and Italian at Connecticut College, and later was professor and chair of the Italian department at Albertus Magnus College. She died in 1982, at the age of 80.
The biennial lectureship sponsors a distinguished speaker in the field of comparative literature, broadly defined. The inaugural lecture in the series was delivered in 1991 by Umberto Eco. Subsequent lectures have been given by René Girard, Tzvetan Todorov, Charles Rosen, A. S. Byatt and Orhan Pamuk.
A related event, a screening of Vittorio De Sica's 1970 film "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis'" will take place in the Whitney Humanities Center on Friday, April 21. A reception at 6:30 p.m. will precede the screening at 7:30 p.m. Both are free and open to the public.
For more information, call Manana Sikic at (203) 432-0673 or send an e-mail to manana.sikic@yale.edu.
T H I S
Renowned poet W.S. Merwin to
read from and discuss his work
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