"Lost in Translation" is a narrative poem by James Merrill (1926-1995), one of the most widely studied and celebrated of his shorter work. It was originally published in The New Yorker magazine on April 8, 1974, and was published in book form in 1976 at Divine Comedies.
The poem opens with a description of Merrill's summer spent as a child in a big house in The Hamptons, with her nanny, waiting patiently for the jigsaw wooden jigsaw puzzle to arrive at the post from the Manhattan Upper East Side puzzle rental shop.
"Lost in Translation" is Merrill's most anthologized poem, and has been widely praised by literary critics including Harold Bloom.
Video Lost in Translation (poem)
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Merrill writes in his life especially for a select group of friends, fans, and critics, and the expected reader "Lost in Translation" to have some knowledge of his biography. Born in New York City, Merrill is the son of the founder of the world's largest brokerage firm. He enjoys a privileged education in economics and culture, despite his remarkable intellect and financial circumstances often makes him feel lonely as a child. Merrill is the only son of Charles E. Merrill and Hellen Ingram. (Merrill has 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 the housekeeping staff. "Lost in Translation" describes a deep childhood bond with the woman who taught her French and German. Merrill's parents would divorce in 1939, when Merrill was thirteen, in a scandal that was front page news in the New York Times.
Not only is "Lost in Translation" a poem about a child composing a jigsaw puzzle, it is an interpretive puzzle, designed to engage the reader's interest in solving mysteries at various narrative levels.
This poem is dedicated to Merrill's friend, renowned poet, critic, and translator Richard Howard. It consists of 215 lines with an additional four lines of inscriptions. This poem is primarily in the irregular pentameter but includes the interior of the Rubaiyat quatrain verses. "Lost in Translation" can be classified as an autobiographical narrative or narrative poem, but better understood as a series of inherent narratives (story in story).
Maps Lost in Translation (poem)
Epigraph
Unusual for Merrill, this poem contains a mysterious four-line epigraph in English, printed without translation or attribution:
- These days that seem to be empty for you
- and not valuable into space,
- has roots among the stones
- and drink everywhere.
In the English version of James Merrill of this inscription (published in 1985 in Late Arrangement ), these four lines are translated into English as follows:
- These days, like yourself,
- Looks blank and erased
- Have an investigating avid root
- To work deep in the trash.
Synopsis
In "Lost in Translation", the narrator's puzzle companion is his French nanny, whom he repeatedly refers to as Mademoiselle. Mother's section, part teacher, section caregiver, part maid, she described by Merrill as "dashing, innocent, carrot-haired, obedient."
At one point in the poem, Mademoiselle uttered the same phrase in French and German. In addition to playing with the boy doll and jigsaw puzzles with him, Mademoiselle teaches young James Merrill languages ​​that will be important to make him a sophisticated and polite poet in the future. By giving a name, in several languages, to objects and tasks around the house, Mademoiselle helps young James Merrill to understand the flexibility of the language itself, that objects and activities can have different names and connotations across languages.
From a child's point of view, the "puzzle" goes beyond what happens on the card table. Merrill confuses the mystery of its existence, confusing the mystery of what the world is, what objects, what people do in life. The unspoken puzzle was solved when the younger Merrill determined what his relationship was with Mademoiselle, considering how often he did not have his own mother. Mademoiselle knew his "place," he wrote, showing his first consciousness of his own class privileges, and (perhaps) the limit placed on the role of Mademoiselle's mother.
But other puzzles are not solved until later on. At one point, the narrator's voice modulated into an adult voice. We find that Mademoiselle concealed the true origin of the boy (and of his family) because of political tensions before 1939 and the outbreak of World War II. Mademoiselle claims to be French and hides his birth in Germany or Alsatian. He may obtain a French surname through marriage with a soldier who died in the Battle of Verdun in World War I (1914-1918). Mademoiselle could not let anyone know she was German for fear of losing her job and her employer's confidence. This explains the fact that Merrill's own French, studied as a clone of his nanny, always speaks with a little German accent. The boy discovered the full truth only as an adult, after an opportunity conversation with Mademoiselle's nephew, a translator of the United Nations, who told him the story of the caregiver's origins.
This poem includes several other secondary narratives, including the part in which the puzzle itself is united. Inspired by Omar KhayyÃÆ'¡m Rubaiyat Strains, Merrill depicts an imaginary 19th century Orientalist painting, by a follower of Jean-LÃÆ' © at the GÃÆ'Â © rÃÆ'Â'me, which begins to appear as a puzzle piece put together. When the puzzle is almost complete, pieces that are lost all the time are found under the table at the boy's feet. The missing part is actually a picture of the boy's leg. When installed, the little boy portrait in the puzzle is finally finished.
Puzzle
In the midst of poetry is a mysterious sequence in which the poet, who attends today's sà © nesea, describes a medium that is able to mean that a piece of wooden puzzle has been hidden in a box.
To understand "Lost in Translation", the reader must work and solve the puzzle in the narrative text, expressed by Merrill's adult-made confession at the end of the poem. The little boy seemed to keep a jigsaw puzzle, in the shape of a palm tree, all his life. This fact has crossed the memory of Merrill from a poem called "Palme" by the French Symbolic poet Paul Valerie (1871-1945), and that memory in turn has reminded Merrill of a German translation he had ever seen from the same poem. by poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926).
The poet knows that he has seen and read Rilke's translation before, because he can describe the words on the page. "Umlaut owl peeking and screaming/On top of open vocals", writes Merrill, in some of the most quoted lines of poetry. However, despite the experience of reading Rilke's translation, he can not find a copy in Athens, Greece (where Merrill and his partner, David Jackson live six months of the year), and began to doubt whether it exists except in his imagination. The poem "Lost in Translation" assumes the form of a letter to Richard Howard looking for a copy of the actual translation.
Solution
But the translation was not lost, or a figment of the poet's imagination, because it was used to write poetry "Lost In Translation." The German epigraph at the beginning of the poem offers a clue here. The four lines are derived from the German translation "lost" by Rilke of Valà © à © ry's "Palme". (Merrill's English translation of "Palme" is the source of the quatrain translated above.See Merrill "Paul ValÃÆ'  © ry: Palme " in Final Setup , 1985.)
Original in French:
- These days that seem to be empty for you
- And lost to the universe
- Have greedy root
- Who does the rest.
from Paul Valace, Charmes (1922) The classic Palme dizain 7th Stanza
The solution to the puzzle puzzle is hidden in front of the eye all along. "Nothing is missing," Merrill suggests, when it comes to translating experience or memory, at least in the way Merrill understands our human experience. Coda's poems appreciate the power of transformative imagination to restore meaning in the world from everything we see and remember. His language and sentences offer Merrill's veiled reverence to the most admired poet of his father's generation, Wallace Stevens (author of "The Palm at the End of the Mind"):
- But nothing is missing. Or else: all are translations
- And every bit of us is lost in it...
- And in the loss is a tree that does not stand out,
- Color context, without notice
- Whisper with his angel, change the garbage
- For shade and fiber, milk and memory.
External links
- additional comments about "Lost in Translation"
- Denisa Comanescu: "Translation and Companions"
- Leon Nadel: "Replacing the Waste Land: James Merrill's Search for the Transcendent Authority"
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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