James Merrill - Lost in Translation lyrics

A card table in the library stands ready To receive the puzzle which keeps never coming. Daylight shines in or lamplight down Upon the tense oasis of green felt. Full of unfulfillment, life goes on, Mirage arisen from time's trickling sands Or fallen piecemeal into place: German lesson, picnic, see-saw, walk With the collie who "did everything but talk" – Sour windfalls of the orchard back of us. A summer without parents is the puzzle, Or should be. But the boy, day after day, Writes in his Line-a-Day No puzzle. He's in love, at least. His French Mademoiselle, In real life a widow since Verdun, Is stout, plain, carrot-haired, devout. She prays for him, as does a curé in Alsace, Sews costumes for his marionettes, Helps him to keep behind the scene Whose sidelit goosegirl, speaking with his voice, Plays Guinevere as well as Gunmoll Jean. Or else at bedtime in his tight embrace Tells him her own French hopes, her German fears, Her – but what more is there to tell? Having known grief and hardship, Mademoiselle Knows little more. Her languages. Her place. Noon coffee. Mail. The watch that also waited Pinned to her heart, poor gold, throws up its hands – No puzzle! Steaming bitterness Her sugars draw pops back into his mouth, translated: "Patience, chéri. Geduld, mein Schatz." (Thus, reading Valéry the other evening And seeming to recall a Rilke version of "Palme," That sunlit paradigm whereby the tree Taps a sweet wellspring of authority, The hour came back. Patience dans l'azur. Geduld im. . . Himmelblau? Mademoiselle.) Out of the blue, as promised, of a New York Puzzle-rental shop the puzzle comes – A superior one, containing a thousand hand-sawn, Sandal-scented pieces. Many take Shapes known already – the craftsman's repertoire Nice in its limitation – from other puzzles: Witch on broomstick, ostrich, hourgla**, Even (surely not just in retrospect) An inchling, innocently branching palm. These can be put aside, made stories of While Mademoiselle spreads out the rest face-up, Herself excited as a child; or questioned Like incoherent faces in a crowd, Each with its scrap of highly colored Evidence the Law must piece together. Sky-blue ostrich? Likely story. Mauve of the witch's cloak white, severed fingers Pluck? Detain her. The plot thickens As all at once two pieces interlock. Mademoiselle does borders – (Not so fast. A London dusk, December last. Chatter silenced in the library This grown man reenters, wearing grey. A medium. All except him have seen Panel slid back, recess explored, An object at once unique and common Displayed, planted in a plain tole Casket the subject now considers Through shut eyes, saying in effect: "Even as voices reach me vaguely A dry saw-shriek drowns them out, Some loud machinery – a lumber mill? Far uphill in the fir forest Trees tower, tense with shock, Groaning and cracking as they crash groundward. But hidden here is a freak fragment Of a pattern complex in appearance only. What it seems to show is superficial Next to that long-term lamination Of hazard and craft, the karma that has Made it matter in the first place. Plywood. Piece of a puzzle." Applause Acknowledged by an opening of lids Upon the thing itself. A sudden dread – But to go back. All this lay years ahead.) Mademoiselle does borders. Straight-edge pieces Align themselves with earth or sky In twos and threes, naive cosmogonists Whose views clash. 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. By suppertime two ragged wooden clouds Have formed. In one, a Sheik with beard And flashing sword hilt (he is all but finished) Steps forward on a tiger skin. A piece Snaps shut, and fangs gnash out at us! In the second cloud – they gaze from cloud to cloud With marked if undecipherable feeling – Most of a dark-eyed woman veiled in mauve Is being helped down from her camel (kneeling) By a small backward-looking slave or page-boy (Her son, thinks Mademoiselle mistakenly) Whose feet have not been found. But lucky finds In the last minutes before bed Anchor both factions to the scene's limits And, by so doing, orient Them eye to eye across the green abyss. The yellow promises, oh bliss, To be in time a sumptuous tent. Puzzle begun I write in the day's space, Then, while she bathes, peek at Mademoiselle's Page to the curé: ". . . cette innocente mère, Ce pauvre enfant, que deviendront-ils?" Her azure script is curlicued like pieces Of the puzzle she will be telling him about. (Fearful incuriosity of childhood! "Tu as l'accent allemande," said Dominique. Indeed. Mademoiselle was only French by marriage. Child of an English mother, a remote Descendant of the great explorer Speke, And Prussian father. No one knew. I heard it Long afterwards from her nephew, a UN Interpreter. His matter-of-fact account Touched old strings. My poor Mademoiselle, With 1939 about to shake This world where "each was the enemy, each the friend" To its foundations, kept, though signed in blood, Her peace a shameful secret to the end.) "Schlaf wohl, chéri." Her kiss. Her thumb Crossing my brow against the dreams to come. This World that shifts like sand, its unforeseen Consolidations and elate routine, Whose Potentate had lacked a retinue? Lo! it a**embles on the shrinking Green. Gunmetal-skinned or pale, all plumes and scars, Of Va**alage the noblest avatars – The very coffee-bearer in his vair Vest is a swart Highness, next to ours. Kef easing Boredom, and iced syrups, thirst, In guessed-at glooms old wives who know the worst Outsweat that virile fiction of the New: "Insh'Allah, he will tire –" "– or k** her first!" (Hardly a proper subject for the Home, Work of – dear Richard, I shall let you comb Archives and learned journals for his name – A minor lion attending on Gérôme.) While, thick as Thebes whose presently complete Gates close behind them, Houri and Afreet Both claim the Page. He wonders whom to serve, And what his duties are, and where his feet, And if we'll find, as some before us did, That piece of Distance deep in which lies hid Your tiny apex sugary with sun, Eternal Triangle, Great Pyramid! Then Sky alone is left, a hundred blue Fragments in revolution, with no clue To where a Niche will open. Quite a task, Putting together Heaven, yet we do. It's done. Here under the table all along Were those missing feet. It's done. The dog's tail thumping. Mademoiselle sketching Costumes for a coming harem drama To star the goosegirl. All too soon the swift Dismantling. Lifted by two corners, The puzzle hung together – and did not. Irresistibly a populace Unstitched of its attachments, rattled down. Power went to pieces as the witch Slithered easily from Virtue's gown. The blue held out for time, but crumbled, too. The city had long fallen, and the tent, A separating sauce mousseline, Been swept away. Remained the green On which the grown-ups gambled. A green dusk. First lightning bugs. Last glow of west Green in the false eyes of (coincidence) Our mangy tiger safe on his bared hearth. Before the puzzle was boxed and readdressed To the puzzle shop in the mid-Sixties, Something tells me that one piece contrived To stay in the boy's pocket. How do I know? I know because so many later puzzles Had missing pieces – Maggie Teyte's high notes Gone at the war's end, end of the vogue for collies, A house torn down; and hadn't Mademoiselle Kept back her pitiful bit of truth as well? I've spent the last days, furthermore, Ransacking Athens for that translation of "Palme." Neither the Goethehaus nor the National Library Seems able to unearth it. Yet I can't Just be imagining. I've seen it. Know How much of the sun-ripe original Felicity Rilke made himself forego (Who loved French words – verger, mûr, parfumer) In order to render its underlying sense. Know already in that tongue of his What Pains, what monolithic Truths Shadow stanza to stanza's symmetrical Rhyme-rutted pavement. Know that ground plan left Sublime and barren, where the warm Romance Stone by stone faded, cooled; the fluted nouns Made taller, lonelier than life By leaf-carved capitals in the afterglow. The owlet umlaut peeps and hoots Above the open vowel. And after rain A deep reverberation fills with stars. Lost, is it, buried? One more missing piece? But nothing's lost. Or else: all is translation And every bit of us is lost in it (Or found – I wander through the ruin of S Now and then, wondering at the peacefulness) 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.