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    A Study Guide for James Merrill's "Lost in Translation"
    A Study Guide for James Merrill's "Lost in Translation"
    A Study Guide for James Merrill's "Lost in Translation"
    Ebook32 pages22 minutes

    A Study Guide for James Merrill's "Lost in Translation"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for James Merrill's "Lost in Translation," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 26, 2016
    ISBN9781535827683
    A Study Guide for James Merrill's "Lost in Translation"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for James Merrill's "Lost in Translation" - Gale

      1

      Lost in Translation

      James Merrill

      1974

      Introduction

      Lost in Translation was first published in the New Yorker on April 6, 1974. It later became part of James Merrill's collection Divine Comedies, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1976. This work, and the subsequent award, helped cement Merrill's reputation as one of the top young American poets.

      The poem is a complex study of loss and the artistic rendering of experience. Merrill presents fragments of experience that become apt metaphors of loss and dislocation in a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate world. The poem's fragmented, yet ultimately unified form highlights the contradictory nature of the creation of art, as the artist strives to translate experience into the stylized structure of a poem.

      Merrill focuses on the speaker's memories of his childhood at the point when his parents were separating and he was struggling to adapt to his newly disrupted world. The boy anxiously awaits the arrival of a puzzle, which he and his French nanny will put together. When the puzzle finally arrives, it comes alive to him, as it evolves into a metaphor for his own experience. As the pieces of the puzzle translate into a unified, meaningful whole, Merrill explores the tensions between art and reality and the problems inherent in establishing an absolute vision of human experience.

      Author Biography

      James Ingram Merrill was born in New York City on March 3, 1926, to Charles Merrill, a stockbroker and cofounder of the firm Merrill Lynch, and Helen Ingram, a newspaper publisher. Merrill developed an appreciation for languages at a young age, when he learned French and German from his governess, who appears in his poem Lost in Translation. His parents encouraged his poetry writing during his adolescence. This was apparent when Merrill's father had a collection of Merrill's poetry, Jim's Book, published when his son was only

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