Lost in Translation (poem) - ...Solved!

...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 original in French:

Ces jours qui te semblent vides

Et perdus pour l'univers

Ont des racines avides

Qui travaillent les déserts.

from Paul Valéry, Charmes (1922) Palme classical dizain 7th Stanza

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.