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Lost in Translation | Introduction

"Lost in Translation" was first published in the New Yorker on April 6, 1974. It later became part of James Merrill's collection Divine Comedies, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1976. This work, and the subsequent award, helped cement Merrill's reputation as one of the top young American poets.

The poem is a complex study of loss and the artistic rendering of experience. Merrill presents fragments of experience that become apt metaphors of loss and dislocation in a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate world. The poem's fragmented, yet ultimately unified form highlights the contradictory nature of the creation of art, as the artist strives to "translate" experience into the stylized structure of a poem.

Merrill focuses on the speaker's memories of his childhood at the point when his parents were separating and he was struggling to adapt to his newly disrupted world. The boy anxiously awaits the arrival of a puzzle, which he and his French nanny will put together. When the puzzle finally arrives, it comes alive to him, as it evolves into a metaphor for his own experience. As the pieces of the puzzle "translate" into a unified, meaningful whole, Merrill explores the tensions between art and reality and the problems inherent in establishing an absolute vision of human experience.

Lost in Translation Summary

Stanzas 1–3

The opening quotation of "Lost in Translation" is from a translation by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) of lines 61–64 in the poem "Palme" by the French poet Paul Valéry (1871–1945). Rilke writes, as Merrill quotes:

Diese Tage, die leer dir scheinen 

und wertlos für das All 

haben Wurzeln zwischen den Steinen 

und trinken dort überall.

These lines in English would be "These days, which seem empty / and entirely fruitless to you, / have roots between the stones / and drink from everywhere." This passage announces two of the subjects of the poem: translation and search for meaning. The first three lines of the poem itself then create an atmosphere of anticipation as a boy waits in "daylight" and "lamplight" for a "puzzle which keeps never coming." The juxtaposition of "tense" and "oasis" in the description of the table-top in line 4 suggests that the puzzle will provide pleasure for the boy, but pain if it never arrives. This juxtaposition is extended into the next two lines as life becomes either a rising "mirage" or something falling "into place."

In lines 8 through 11, the speaker lists the activities the boy engages in during his "summer without parents," cared for by his governess. The activities do not seem pleasurable to the boy, as he notes the "sour windfalls of the orchard" behind them. The speaker indicates the real cause of his unease when he notes that the boy's parents are absent, suggesting that this is a "puzzle" to the boy, "or should be." The stanza ends where it began, with the boy's impatience over the missing puzzle, which he notes in his diary ("Line-a-Day").

In the second stanza, the speaker notes that the boy is in love with his governess, whose husband died in Verdun, a World War I battle. The religious governess, "Mademoiselle," prays for him, as does a French priest, and helps him put on puppet shows. She talks with him at night about pre–World War II tensions in Europe and her "French hopes, German fears." Mademoiselle knows little more than the "grief and hardship" she has suffered.

The two continue to wait for the puzzle as even Mademoiselle's watch becomes impatient, "[throwing] up its hands." She tries to alleviate the boy's "steaming bitterness" with sweets, an act that translates as telling him to "have patience, my dear," which is expressed in French ("Patience, chéri") and in German ("Geduld, mein Schatz"), the two languages she has been teaching him.

The lines evoke a memory in the speaker, who digresses in a parenthetical passage to present time.

He notes that the other evening he remembered reading something by Valéry that triggered a memory of Rilke's translation of Valéry's "Palme," which appears at the beginning of the poem. He makes the connection between Valéry's poem and the boy's situation, admitting here that he is the boy. The thought of the tree in that poem, which has "roots between the stones and drink[s] from everywhere," becomes a "sunlit paradigm." It is a model for him of "patience in the blue," ("patience dans l'azur"), a characterization of the slow growth of the palm tree. He goes back to the past when he tries to translate the French words into their German equivalents, asking Mademoiselle hypothetically if he is correct.

In the third stanza, the promised puzzle appears from a New York City shop and has a thousand wooden pieces, smelling like sandalwood. Some pieces have shapes he has seen before in other puzzles, including a "branching palm" that the speaker insists was really there and not just imagined. Mademoiselle excitedly spreads out the pieces that initially look like "incoherent faces in a crowd," before a pattern can be discerned. Each piece will eventually be placed together by "law," the design of the puzzle maker. The "plot thickens" as the pieces interlock and become a story.

Stanza 4

In the first line of the fourth stanza, Made-moiselle attends to the puzzle's borders, but the speaker jumps immediately to the future,... » Complete Lost in Translation Summary