"Lost in Translation" is a poem written in 1973 by James Merrill. It was originally published in
The New Yorker magazine on April 8, 1974, and appeared in book form for the first time in 1976 in Divine Comedies.
(Divine Comedies was awarded the Pulitzer
Prize for poetry in 1977.)
The poem opens with a description of a summer Merrill spent as a child in a great house in The Hamptons, with his governess, waiting patiently for a
rented wooden jigsaw puzzle to arrive in the mail from an Upper East Side Manhattan
puzzle rental shop.
The most studied and celebrated of James Merrill's shorter works of poetry, "Lost in Translation" has been widely praised by
literary critics including Harold Bloom.
Background to the poem
Merrill wrote in his lifetime mainly for a select group of friends, fans, and critics, and expected readers of "Lost in
Translation" to have some knowledge of his biography. Born in New York
City, Merrill was the son of the founder of the world's largest brokerage
firm. He enjoyed a privileged upbringing in economic and cultural terms, although as a child his intelligence and exceptional
financial circumstances often made him feel lonely. Merrill was the only child of Charles E. Merrill and Hellen
Ingram. (Merrill had two older half siblings from his father's first marriage.)
Given that his parents were often preoccupied, his father with business, his
mother with social obligations, Merrill developed a number of close relationships
with household staff. "Lost in Translation" describes a profound childhood bond with the woman who taught him French and German. Merrill's parents would divorce in 1939, when Merrill
was thirteen years old, in a scandal that was front page news on the New
York Times.
Technical description
Not only is "Lost in Translation" a poem about a child putting together a jigsaw puzzle, it is an interpretive puzzle,
designed to engage a reader's interest in solving mysteries at various narrative levels.
The poem is dedicated to Merrill's friend, the distinguished poet, critic, and translator Richard Howard. It consists of 215 lines with an additional four line epigraph. The poem is mainly in unrhymed pentameter but includes
a section in Rubaiyat quatrain
stanzas. "Lost in Translation" may be classified as an autobiographical narrative or narrative poem, but is better understood as a series of embedded narratives (stories within a story).
A mysterious epigraph in German
Unusually for Merrill, the poem bears a mysterious four-line epigraph in
German, which is printed without translation or attribution:
- Diese Tage, die leer dir scheinen
- und wertlos für das All,
- haben Wurzeln zwischen den Steinen
- und trinken dort überall.
In James Merrill's own English version of this epigraph (published in 1985 in Late Settings), these four lines are translated into English as follows:
- These days which, like yourself,
- Seem empty and effaced
- Have avid roots that delve
- To work deep in the waste.
The puzzle is "no puzzle"
The opening lines of the poem describe the library where the young Merrill took his lessons. He describes the scene as if an
eight- or nine-year-old boy were seeing it:
- A card table in the library stands ready
- To receive the puzzle which keeps never coming.
- Daylight shines in or lamplight down
- Upon the tense oasis of green felt.
- Full of unfulfillment, life goes on,
- Mirage arisen from time's trickling sands
- Or fallen piecemeal into place:
- German lesson, picnic, see-saw, walk
- With the collie who "did everything but talk" —
- Sour windfalls of the orchard back of us.
- A summer without parents is the puzzle,
- Or should be. But the boy, day after day,
- Writes in his Line-a-Day No puzzle.
When the puzzle finally arrives, after days of waiting, it is described in detail:
- Out of the blue, as promised, of a New York
- Puzzle-rental shop the puzzle comes —
- A superior one, containing a thousand hand-sawn,
- Sandal-scented pieces. Many take
- shapes known already — the craftsman's repertoire
- nice in its limitation — from other puzzles:
- Witch on broomstick, ostrich, hourglass,
- Even (not surely just in retrospect)
- An inchling, innocently-branching palm.
Mademoiselle
In "Lost in Translation," the narrator's puzzle-making companion is his French
governess, whom he refers to repeatedly as Mademoiselle. Part mother, part
teacher, part nanny, part servant, she is described by Merrill as "stout, plain,
carrot-haired, devout."
At one point in the poem, Mademoiselle speaks the same phrase in French and in German. In addition to playing with the boy's
marionettes and doing jigsaw puzzles with him, Mademoiselle is teaching the
young James Merrill languages which would be critical to making him the sophisticated and urbane lyric poet of later life. By giving name, in
several languages, to objects and tasks around the home, Mademoiselle helps the young James Merrill come to understand a
doubleness about language itself, that objects and activities can have different names and connotations across languages.
From the child's point of view, the "puzzle" goes well beyond what is taking place on the card table. Merrill is puzzling
through the mystery of his existence, puzzling through the mystery of what the world is, what objects are, what people do in
life. An unspoken puzzle is solved when the young Merrill determines what his relationship to Mademoiselle is, given the frequent
absence of his own mother. Mademoiselle knows "her place," he writes, indicating his
first consciousness of his own class privilege, as well as (perhaps) the limits placed on Mademoiselle's maternal role.
Yet other puzzles are not solved until later in life. At one point the narrator's voice modulates into that of an adult. We
find out that Mademoiselle hid her true origins from the boy (and from his family) because of the political tensions leading up
to 1939 and to the outbreak of World War World War II. Mademoiselle claimed
to be French herself, but in fact hid her German or Alsatian birth. She presumably gained a French surname only through marriage to a soldier who died in the Battle of Verdun in World War I. Mademoiselle
could let no one know she was German for fear of losing her job and her employers' trust. This explains the fact that Merrill's
own French, learned in imitation of his governess, was always spoken with a slight German accent. The boy finds out the full
truth only as an adult, after a chance conversation with Mademoiselle's grown nephew, a United Nations interpreter, who tells him the story of
the governess's true origins.
The poem includes several other secondary narratives, including a section in which the puzzle itself is put together. Inspired
by Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat quatrains, Merrill describes an imaginary harem-like 19th
century Orientalist painting, by an alleged follower of Jean-Léon Gérôme, that begins to appear as the puzzle pieces are put
together. When the puzzle is nearly done, the piece that was missing the whole time is found under the table at the boy's feet.
The missing piece is, in fact, an image of the boy's feet. When it is put in place, the portrait of the little boy in the puzzle
is finally complete.
A puzzle within a puzzle...
At the center of the poem is a mysterious sequence in which the poet, attending a present-day séance, describes a medium who is able
to divine that a piece of a wooden jigsaw puzzle has been concealed inside a box.
To understand "Lost in Translation", the reader must work out and solve a puzzle in
the narrative text, revealed by a confession Merrill the adult makes at the end of the poem. The little boy has apparently kept a
piece of the jigsaw puzzle, in the shape of a palm tree, throughout his life.
This fact has jogged the memory in Merrill of a poem called "Palme" by the French Symbolist poet Paul Valéry (1871-1945), and that memory in
turn has reminded Merrill of a German translation he has once seen of that same poem by poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1976-1926).
The poet knows that he has seen and read the Rilke translation before, because he can picture the words on the page. "The
owlet umlaut peeps and hoots/ Above the open vowel," Merrill writes, in some of the poem's most quoted lines. Yet despite
remembering the experience of reading the Rilke translation, he cannot locate a copy in Athens, Greece (where Merrill and his partner David
Jackson were living six months of the year), and begins to doubt whether it exists except in his imagination. The poem "Lost
in Translation" assumes the form of a letter to Richard Howard seeking an actual copy of that translation.
...Solved!
But the translation turns out not to have been lost, or a figment of the poet's imagination, for it is used to write the poem
"Lost In Translation." The German epigraph at the beginning of the poem offers the key clue here. The four lines come from that
"lost" German translation by Rilke of Valéry's "Palme". (Merrill's own English translation of "Palme" is the source of the
translated quatrain above. See Merrill's "Paul Valéry: Palme" in Late Settings, 1985.)
The solution to the puzzle of the poem is hidden in plain sight all along. "Nothing's lost," Merrill suggests, when it comes
to translating experience or memory, at least according to the way Merrill understands our human experience. The poem's coda
salutes the power of the transformative imagination to recover meaning in the world from all we see and remember. Its language
and phrasing offer a veiled tribute by Merrill to the poet he most admired from his father's generation, Wallace Stevens (author of "The Palm at the End of the Mind"):
- But nothing's lost. Or else: all is translation
- And every bit of us is lost in it...
- And in that loss a self-effacing tree,
- Color of context, imperceptibly
- Rustling with its angel, turns the waste
- To shade and fiber, milk and memory.
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