Final Versions

James Merrill's "Lost in Translation": Revision as Complication

…Nomad inlanders meanwhile
Begin to cluster where the totem
Of a certain vibrant egg-yolk yellow
Or pelt of what emerging animal
Acts on the straggler like a trumpet call
To form a more sophisticated unit.(Section 3, stanza 1)

The drafts of James Merrill’s “Lost in Translation” offer an opportunity to read the poem as a reflection on the “hazard and craft” of revision. Though Merrill is better known for the “sophisticated unit”—his virtuosity with traditional poetic forms and his witty, urbane voice. One of America’s most accomplished poets, Merrill received every major poetry prize in the United States, among them the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Born in 1926, the son of Charles Merrill—co-founder of the brokerage firm Merrill-Lynch—and Hellen Ingram, Merrill published 23 books throughout his life including works of drama, fiction, and prose; his last book, A Scattering of Salts, appeared in print one month after his death in 1995. Although he composed primarily short lyric poems, Merrill’s 560-page apocalyptic-camp epic, The Changing Light at Sandover, earned him an esteemed place in the canon of epic poets.

The James Merrill Collection held by the Washington University Archives offers additional insights into Merrill’s art and suggests new vectors of inquiry. The 35,000 items include vast collections of correspondence, journals, photographs, and original manuscripts in addition to ephemera ranging from newspaper clippings and affidavits from Merrill's parents’ divorce to Merrill's death mask. A particular highlight of the collection is the material pertaining to The Changing Light at Sandover, which include a Ouija board, extensive transcriptions, and numerous drafts.

James Merrill in Athens, 1970s

Of the many poets whose drafts are worth considering for lessons of craft, Merrill is one of the most compelling. In a letter of 1960, Merrill’s long-time partner, David Jackson, describes him at work on an essay about Corot: “It is interesting to watch him jump from a meager 2200 words to 3600 words as he embellishes what are, at base, meager reactions TO Corot. Interesting and admirable. He reworks + reworks. No one, today, I would think, works as hard over every draft and word and shade of meaning” (15 June 1960). The archives present evidence of Merrill’s work habits in the form of drafts for nearly all his poems; comparing multiple drafts of “Lost in Translation,” we can see first-hand how by embellishing his material—welcoming “nomad inlanders” and coaxing out “emerging animals”—Merrill disguises the underlying autobiographical themes and prosaic narrative of his first drafts. We can also see how Merrill indexes his drafting process by “marking”—through formal device—sections and stanzas added in the revision process in order to distinguish them from the material of the first draft.

The Poem

Merrill as a child at The Orchard, his family home in Southampton.

“Lost in Translation” appeared first in The New Yorker magazine on April 8, 1974, and then in Divine Comedies in 1976 . It is Merrill’s most anthologized lyric poem, taking as its main conceit the narrator’s childhood memory of piecing together a puzzle with his nanny during the summer of his parents divorce. When Merrill was 13 years old, in 1939, his parents’ divorce made front-page news in The New York Times. Merrill imagines the puzzle-making as a way to reconstitute the family that is falling apart but the metaphor extends into his adulthood and characterizes his lifelong efforts to redeem losses by forging reparative connections. Embedding mysteries and recondite references to future events Merrill complicates the poem’s central metaphor by both engaging the reader in the process of “piecing together” and by suggesting adult analogues—such as translation, or poetic creation—to the child’s play. Memories of the language of his French nanny, “Mademoiselle” (later discovered to be German) evoke passages from a Rainer Maria Rilke translation of Paul Valéry’s “Palme” that lead him to connect seemingly disparate activities. Divided into five formal units—unrhymed pentameter for the odd numbered sections, stressed alliterative verse for Section 2, and Rubaiyat quatrains for Section 4—the poem emphasizes the shifts of perspective that occur with the interpolations of time and the transformations of art and language.

The Drafts

Approximately 33 extant drafts display Merrill’s revisions of “Lost in Translation” on an almost daily basis from October 8 through November 14, 1972. Although this period represents the months of most concentrated compositional activity, even after the poem was sent out to friends in its “finished” form in early 1973 Merrill continued to make minor revisions. The early drafts record Merrill erecting a simple artifice for the whole and subsequently working in fragments—building up individual sections over the course of one or several days. In many ways the final published poem indexes the global drafting process. As new images and related themes emerge Merrill often figures these as discrete formal units, employing parentheses or a new poetic form to distinguish the addition from what came before. At the level of line, Merrill’s drafts show a trend toward condensation and obfuscation of subject matter through alliteration, punning, rhyme, and elusive metaphor. In order to appreciate the scale of Merrill’s revision, we must consider both his line changes (the condensation and translation of language) and his altering conception of the poem as a whole (the new meanings manifested in large structural changes).

Last updated: June 30, 2006