by Harold Bloom
I did not read “Lost in Translation” until Divine Comedies appeared, though it had been printed two years earlier in The New Yorker. The poem transported me with rare immediacy, particularly its conclusion:
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.
The epigraph to “Lost in Translation” is from Rilke’s version of Valéry’s “Palme,” the first four lines of the poem’s seventh stanza. Merrill translated these with a supple elegance:
These days which, like yourself,
Seem empty and effaced
Have avid roots that delve
To work deep in the waste.
The search for the Rilke translation informs one meaning of “lost in translation,” yet that is only one strand in Merrill’s vision of loss. If all is translation and we are lost in it, then Yeats sustains us by his lament in “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”:
But is there any comfort to be found?
Man is in love and loves what vanishes,
What more is there to say?
Merrill, Yeats-haunted, turns to Valéry for a different comfort:
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.
The tree is the palm. Valéry and Wallace Stevens may have known the Shiite Sufi myth that after the creation of Adam there was a remnant of the adamah, or red clay. From that remnant Allah fashioned the palm tree as Adam’s sister. I do not think Merrill knew this until I told him in the early 1990s, and yet that scarcely matters, since he evidenced no surprise.
Like Yeats, Marcel Proust, and C. P. Cavafy, Merrill is the poet of our lost paradises of eros. I can hear him cheerfully intoning, in his tribute to Proust, “The loved one always leaves.” I suspect that Yeats might not have taken to James Merrill’s poetry but that Proust and Cavafy might have cherished it.
As The Book of Ephraim approaches conclusion, Merrill achieves something close to the High Sublime:
Shall I come lighter-hearted to that Spring-tide
Knowing it must be fathomed without a guide?
With no one, nothing along those lines—or these
Whose writing, if not justifies, so mirrors,
So embodies up to now some guiding force,
It can’t simply be written off. In neither
The world’s poem nor the poem’s world have I
Learned to think for myself, much. The twinklings of
Insight hurt or elude the naked eye, no
Metrical lens to focus them, no kismet
Veiled as a stern rhyme sound, to obey whose wink
Floods with rapture its galaxy of sisters.
Muse and maker, each at a loss…
The texture, marvelously interwoven, reveals no interstice for pause. Like the early Mirror, this is an epitome. Wit, dangerously intense, is carried to the edge of parody and then withdrawn. A lightness fiercely knowing suggests the lineage of Alexander Pope and Lord Byron.
It may be that Merrill’s strongest lyric is the canzone “Samos.” I chant it frequently and wonder if anything else in Scripts for the Pageant can survive:
And still, at sea all night, we had a sense
Of sunrise, golden oil poured upon water,
Soothing its heave, letting the sleeper sense
What inborn, amniotic homing sense
Was ferrying him—now through the dream-fire
In which (it has been felt) each human sense
Burns, now through ship’s radar’s cool sixth sense,
Or mere unerring starlight—to an island.
Here we were. The twins of Sea and Land,
Up and about for hours—hues, cries, scents—
Had placed at eye level a single light
Croissant: the harbor glazed with warm pink light.
Fire-wisps were weaving a string bag of light
For sea stones. Their astounding color sense!
Porphyry, alabaster, chrysolite
Translucences that go dead in daylight
Asked only the quick dip in holy water
For the saint of cell on cell to come alight—
Illuminated crystals thinking light,
Refracting it, the gray prismatic fire
Or yellow-gray of sea’s dilute sapphire…
Wavelengths daily deeply score the leit-
Motifs of Loom and Wheel upon this land.
To those who listen, it’s the Promised Land.
A little spin today? Dirt roads inland
Jounce and revolve in a nerve-jangling light,
Doing the ancient dances of the land
Where, gnarled as olive trees that shag the land
With silver, old men—their two-bladed sense
Of spendthrift poverty, the very land
Being, if not loaf, tomb—superbly land
Upright on the downbeat. We who water
The local wine, which “drinks itself” like water,
Clap for more, cry out to be this island
Licked all over by a white, salt fire,
Be noon’s pulsing ember raked by fire,
Know nothing, now, but Earth, Air, Water, Fire!
For once out of the frying pan to land
Within their timeless, everlasting fire!
Blood’s least red monocle, O magnifier
Of the great Eye that sees by its own light
More pictures in “the world’s enchanted fire”
Than come and go in any shrewd crossfire
Upon the page, of syllable and sense,
We want unwilled excursions and ascents,
Crave the upward-rippling rungs of fire,
The outward-rippling rings (enough!) of water…
(Now some details—how else will this hold water?)
Our room’s three flights above the whitewashed water-
front where Pythagoras was born. A fire
Escape of sky-blue iron leads down to water.
Yachts creak on mirror berths, and over water
>
Voices from Sweden or Somaliland
Tell how this or that one crossed the water
To Ephesus, came back with toilet water
And a two kilo box of Turkish delight
—Trifles. Yet they shine with such pure light
In memory, even they, that the eyes water.
As with the setting sun, or innocence,
Do things that fade especially make sense?
Samos. We keep trying to make sense
Of what we can. Not souls of the first water—
Although we’ve put on airs, and taken fire—
We shall be dust of quite another land
Before the seeds here planted come to light.
A canzone, which we associate with Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, began in Provence in the eleventh century and was prevalent first in Italy and then in Spain. Frequently in five stanzas and a coda, it employs, in place of a refrain, a scheme of five rhyme words. Merrill triumphs with the interplay: “sense,” “water,” “fire,” “land,” and “light.” Samos is an island in the eastern Aegean, famous as the birthplace of Pythagoras and of Epicurus. Samian wine was treasured in antiquity and is still quite drinkable.
For Merrill, Samos is the Promised Land. The Byzantium of William Butler Yeats hovers and is deftly evaded. The evasion wavers when Merrill cries out to be Samos, much in the mode of Yeatsian flames begotten by flame. The coda is apotheosis:
Samos. We keep trying to make sense
Of what we can. Not souls of the first water—
Although we’ve put on airs, and taken fire—
We shall be dust of quite another land
Before the seeds here planted come to light.
Praise is redundant. James Merrill’s countenance had a curious poignance, a spindrift gaze toward lost paradise. I recite the coda and rue his departure.
Jay Macpherson, “Ark Parting”
THE CANADIAN POET AND SCHOLAR Jay Macpherson became a dear friend during my many visits as a lecturer to the University of Toronto. Jay was a year younger than I was, and though she was shy, we took to each other very quickly. I had always been a lover of her poetry, and I am proud that I insisted that her superb The Spirit of Solitude: Conventions and Continuity in Late Romance (1982) be published. The last time I went to Toronto to give a lecture series, I stayed as a guest at Jay’s home. Her death in 2012 desolated me. She was so rare a spirit that I simply cannot compare her to anyone else I have ever known.
Jay was a direct descendant of James Macpherson, who asserted he had translated the ancient Scottish bard Ossian from manuscripts. These have never been discovered, and Ossian was James Macpherson. Jay dedicated The Spirit of Solitude to her father, also James Macpherson, who never gave up his faith in the authenticity of Ossian.
Jay’s poetry is unlike anyone else’s. It is deceptively childlike yet is immensely sophisticated. One of my favorites is “Mermaid”:
The fish-tailed lady offering her breast
Has nothing else to give.
She’ll render only brine, if pressed,
That none can drink and live.
She has a magic glass, whose spell
Makes bone look wondrous white.
By day she sings, though, travellers like to tell,
She weeps at night.
The chill of this epiphany stays with me. A tone this uncanny is characteristic of Jay Macpherson. It becomes heightened to a kind of sublime in what I take to be her masterpiece, “The Beauty of Job’s Daughters”:
The old, the mad, the blind have fairest daughters.
Take Job: the beasts the accuser sends at evening
Shoulder his house and shake it; he’s not there,
Attained in age to inwardness of daughters,
In all the land no women found so fair.
Angels and sons of God are nearest neighbours,
And even the accuser may repair
To walk with Job in pleasures of his daughters:
Wide shining rooms more warmly lit at evening,
Gardens beyond whose secrets scent the air.
Not wiles of men nor envy of the neighbours,
Riches of earth, nor what heaven holds more rare,
Can take from Job the beauty of his daughters,
The gardens in the rock, music at evening,
And cup so full that all who come must share.
Perhaps we passed them? it was late, or evening,
And surely those were desert stumps, not daughters,
In fact we doubt that they were ever there.
The old, the mad, the blind have fairest daughters.
In all the land no women found so fair.
The book of Job enchants and devastates me. When Jay first gave me a copy of this poem, I recall both my instant admiration and my bewilderment. Job’s daughters and his sons are all slaughtered by the accuser, who is sanctioned by Yahweh. In the pious nonsense interpolated into the end of Job’s book, we are told that he acquires an entirely new set of sons and daughters, as good as the murdered ones. Jay Macpherson has a Job entirely her own, though there is a touch of William Blake in it. “Inwardness of daughters” is a gentle irony that yet may be more than that.
After three stanzas of mysterious splendor, Macpherson undoes her poem. The beautiful daughters were desert stumps or never existed. The lingering refrain “In all the land no women found so fair” subdues the rest of the poem to Jay Macpherson’s whimsical transformation of a supposed theodicy, that justifies nothing, into her own version of late Romance. Jay’s vision of late Romance emphasized pastoral and elegiac currents, from Comus to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. I enjoyed reciting, in her company, her own variations on Milton’s Eve:
Painful and brief the act. Eve on the barren shore
Sees every cherished feature, plumed tree, bright grass,
Fresh spring, the beasts as placid as before
Beneath the inviolable glass.
There the lost girl gone under sea
Tends her undying grove, never raising her eyes
To where on the salt shell beach in reverie
The mother of all living lies.
The beloved face is lost from sight,
Marred in a whelming tide of blood:
And Adam walks in the cold night
Wilderness, waste wood.
“Eve in Reflection”
The Fall, as in Milton, becomes a narcissistic reverie in which Eve beholds herself and falls in love with what she sees. Jay’s title plays upon both senses of reflection, meditation and the mirror of Narcissus. Nature becomes an “inviolable glass,” and the lost Eve submerged by ocean continues to tend her garden, more than ironically never gazing to her own reverie on the salt shell beach.
Eve’s self-reflection vanishes, damaged by the tide of blood that goes from Cain to our present moment. An estranged Adam walks in a wasteland, a cold darkness replacing the warmth of Eden. Jay Macpherson pursued that darkness in her poem “The Land of Nod”:
Cain since first he fled
Is endless bound to run
Under a scorching sun
That burns a baneful red,
Or hunt among cold rocks
And stiffened marble streams.
Only in Abel’s dreams
The crushing wheel unlocks.
For Abel’s sake, the dead
Shepherd dear to God,
Cain in the Land of Nod
Covers his dreadful head.
Where Abel, cheek on hand,
Sleeps his silver night,
An arky moon makes bright
Calm sheepfolds, quiet land;
And while his brother’s kee
per
Lies so near God’s heart,
There shall no judgment fall to part
Sleeper from sleeper.
Jay’s teacher was Northrop Frye, and the prime influence upon her poetry is William Blake. She inherits from Blake a subtly antinomian stance and an ironic mode of presenting it. The burden of the final quatrain of “The Land of Nod” is a Blakean equivocation. The God who favored Abel over Cain is incapable of judging one sleeper from another. Blake remarked that in equivocal worlds, up and down are equivocal.
Jay Macpherson had a great preference for Noah’s Ark over Noah himself. She began with a singular lyric, “The Ark”:
Cock-robin and the jenny-wren,
The eagle and the lark,
The cuckoo and the broody-hen,
The heavens did remark
Consorting in the Ark:
The pelican in her piety,
The peacock in his pride,
Cormorant insatiety,
The feather-breasted bride,
All bedded down inside.
There sat upon the hatch-lid
The turtle and the crow.
One I’ve heard the Flood did,
One the Fire shall, o’erthrow
—Not in our lifetime, though.
A sexual revel is transferred from Noah, his wife, and Ham to all the birds in the ark. The turtledove, sacred to Venus, is different after the Flood. The crow will be destroyed only in the final Fire. Laconically, Macpherson concludes, “Not in our lifetime, though.”
Noah haunts Macpherson. In her first volume, The Boatman and Other Poems, the title poem, “The Boatman,” intricately turns inside out the story of the Flood:
You might suppose it easy
For a maker not too lazy
To convert the gentle reader to an Ark:
But it takes a willing pupil
To admit both gnat and camel
—Quite an eyeful, all the crew that must embark.
After me when comes the deluge
And you’re looking round for refuge
From God’s anger pouring down in gush and spout,
Then you take the tender creature
