Lost In Translation (poem)
"Lost in Translation" is a narrative poem by James Merrill (1926–1995), one of the most studied and celebrated of his shorter works. It was originally published in The New Yorker magazine on April 8, 1974, and published in book form in 1976 in Divine Comedies.
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.
"Lost in Translation" is Merrill's most anthologized poem, and has been widely praised by literary critics including Harold Bloom.
Read more about Lost In Translation (poem): Background To The Poem, Technical Description, A Mysterious Epigraph in German, Mademoiselle, A Puzzle Within A Puzzle..., ...Solved!
Famous quotes containing the words lost and/or translation:
“We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind
And lost the old nonchalance of the hand;
We are but critics, or but half create,
Timid, entangled, empty and abashed,
Lacking the countenance of our friends.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“To translate, one must have a style of his own, for otherwise the translation will have no rhythm or nuance, which come from the process of artistically thinking through and molding the sentences; they cannot be reconstituted by piecemeal imitation. The problem of translation is to retreat to a simpler tenor of one’s own style and creatively adjust this to one’s author.”
—Paul Goodman (1911–1972)