Lost in Translation (poem) - A Puzzle Within A Puzzle...

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 (1875–1926).

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.