text:
UWROV: Exploring the Arctic
UnderWater Remotely Operated Vehicles
UWROV is a multidisciplinary team of undergraduate students at the University of Washington who specialize in the design, construction, and operation of remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). The team brings scientists and engineers together to work side-by-side, furthering oceanographic research.
Every year, we fully design and build an ROV to participate in the International Marine Advanced Technology Education (MATE) Competition. The team also uses retired vehicles for research.
This year, we are raising money so that we can participate in the MATE competition, held in St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada.
What We Do
What do members gain?
Students who join UWROV receive a unique and exclusive experience:
What is Ocean Technology?
Ocean technology is any kind of technology used for ocean endeavors. The ocean is a very harsh environment for instruments: it corrodes metals, crushes anything at depth, has a high range of temperatures from freezing to boiling, and always works to invade electronics.
As this is a constant struggle for oceanographers, it makes data collection challenging. This is where ocean technology comes in: engineers with specialized skills work to offset the harsh environments of the ocean so that scientists may collect data to learn more about the majority of our planet.
An example of ocean technology is oceanographic sensors that measure anything from light and sound to salinity and fluorescence. The most versatile and adaptive instrument in the category of ocean technology is the ROV (remotely operated vehicle).
What is an ROV?
Remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) are tethered vehicles that are operated remotely. Underwater ROVs are built as a tethered submarine, driven by a team on-ship or on-shore to be used for research or industry in the harsh environment of the ocean.
ROVs have become increasingly popular as they are able to travel to locations that no human can easily venture to. In oceanography, ROVs are used on missions to take measurements and deploy scientific packages. In the oil and gas industry, ROVs are used extensively to install and maintain underwater equipment.
Our ROV: Admare
This year's upgrades:
- Onboard cameras give pilots high definition video of the underwater landscape.
- An Xbox controller makes driving easy and intuitive.
- A pneumatic robotic arm takes samples and places instruments.
- The ROV is connected to the surface by an umbilical cord that provides power and an Ethernet connection to the vehicle.
- Efficient thrusters are oriented to allow the vehicle to move in any direction while staying stable and level.
International MATE Competition
The International Marine Advanced Technology Education (MATE) ROV Competition challenges students to design an ROV to fulfill missions. The teams present themselves as companies wishing to gain contracts with MATE. The competition gives students the opportunity to develop business, engineering, and scientific skills while exposing them to the field of ocean technology.
Each year the missions change. This year the theme is science and industry in the Arctic. The competition is a unique opportunity for students to meet other students and professionals who share a passion for the ocean and its mystery.
The MATE ROV Competition increases student opportunities:
What We Need
Thank you to each of our donors who made traveling to Internationals possible! We will keep in touch with our progress.
UWROV team at Regionals on May 9th, 2015, pictured with their vehicle, Admare.
UWROV participated in Engineering Discovery Days to share with the community the importance of ocean technology and how easy it is for every person to get involved and build their own ROVs. UWROV set up a small pool in which two small PVC pipe ROVs were placed. The controllers were then handed to community members to drive and pick up PVC end-caps off the bottom of the pool. This exhibition represents picking up scientific samples off of the bottom of the ocean and bringing them to the surface for scientists to analyze. The demonstration was a great success! Students especially loved to compete with one another to try to pick up samples faster and so the pool was surrounded all day by shouts of encouragement and groans of frustration when the sample slipped off the arm. UWROV members spent the day discussing with the community about the importance of ocean technology and teaching them how to drive the small vehicles. The team even had some students ask how to build their own small PVC pipe ROV! If you would like to know how to build your own vehicle, visit the MATE website's curriculum page and learn how to build different complexities of ROVs!
April 24th. Students surround the pool as two of them drive their respective ROVs, competing to pick up the 'samples' off of the bottom of the pool, as members of UWROV talk about the importance of ocean technology.
Where: RainyDawg Radio (University of Washington's student run radio station)
When: Monday, April 20th, starting between the hours of 8-10am.
Who: Juliana Pesavento (CEO UWROV) and Adrian Junus (Chief Mechanical Engineer) will be interviewed by Katherine Doughty, the host of 'Cool Things with Humans.'
So, if you are looking for something to listen to on your way to work or while eating breakfast, please join us! (Click on the link above and press the play button in the upper left-hand corner.)
We also realized that after this campaign, most of you will not know how to contact the team to find out how they are doing. So, here you go!
Connect with us:
Likai Chen
Gave $10.00
Craig Reynolds
Gave $100.00
Paul Bromley
Gave $100.00
Marlin Schoonmaker
Gave $250.00
Freddi Fish
Gave $50.00
Leslie and Greg Rice
Gave $50.00
Susan Koch
Gave $200.00
Susan Hautala
Gave $100.00
Russell McDuff
Gave $1,000.00
Helen Cox
Gave $100.00
Mark Holmes
Gave $100.00
Ron Johnson
Gave $250.00
Ian Lee
Gave $10.00
Gregory Cox
Gave $500.00
Aidan Moriarty
Gave $15.00
Gave $20.00
Jeff Horton
Gave $100.00
Mallory Clarke
Gave $10.00
Maryann Nakamura
Gave $100.00
Shirley Zhang
Gave $100.00
Margarete Noe
Gave $100.00
Farzana Ismail
Gave $100.00
Russ and Katherine Schlick Noe
Gave $500.00
Aminah Zainuddin
Gave $100.00
Nancy J Johnson
Gave $50.00
Carole Farley-Toombs
Gave $50.00
Shelley Kaufman
Gave $50.00
Jo Scozzafava
Gave $20.00
Barbara Pesavento
Gave $300.00
Sarah Dewey
Gave $10.00
Scott Daley
Gave $50.00
Evelyn Lessard
Gave $50.00
Jodi Mackey
Gave $20.00
Lynette Rose
Gave $50.00
Patricia Pesavento
Gave $100.00
David Warland
Gave $20.00
T. Z. Chu
Gave $1,000.00
Revina junus
Gave $800.00
Dale and Judy Cockrell
Gave $100.00
Miles Logsdon
Gave $50.00
Langford Family
Gave $200.00
Mike Pesavento
Gave $500.00
Craig Likkel
Gave $100.00
Mark R
Gave $10.00
Rob King
Gave $250.00
Wendy Phippen
Gave $100.00
Novian Junus
Gave $500.00
azlina junus
Gave $100.00
Gerry Pesavento
Gave $100.00
Austin Yeats
Gave $100.00
Jenifer Stender
Gave $50.00
John Harrison
Gave $50.00
Judy Bender
Gave $100.00
Matthew Racz
Gave $5.00
8 supporters have chosen not to be listed for "UWROV: Exploring the Arctic".
Make an Impact
Give $10
Help us build connections and gain experience at the MATE competition. Every bit helps, and we have a place reserved for your name in the Euphotic Zone. Thank you for your contribution!
Give $20
Help us research the science and technology associated with ROVs. Every bit helps, and with this donation, we have a place reserved for your name in the Euphotic Zone. Thank you for your contribution!
Give $50
Help us design a functioning ROV that meets the requirements of the MATE Competition and research expeditions. With this donation, we have a place reserved for your name in the Euphotic Zone. Thank you for your contribution!
Give $100
Help us build and accessorize our ROV. With this donation, we have a place reserved for your name in the Midnight Zone. Thank you for your contribution!
Give $250
Help us test the ROV components to make sure all systems are a go! With this donation, we have a place reserved for your name in the Midnight Zone. Thank you for your contribution!
Give $500
Help us troubleshoot all the problems that will arise (as no project is perfect on the first try). With this donation, we have a place reserved for you in the Abyssal Zone, including a spot for your name or logo on the front page of our website. Thank you for your contribution!
Practice Swim
Give $800
Help us with ROV practice runs, or pay for a student's plane ticket to the International MATE Competition. With this donation, we have a place reserved for your name in the Abyssal Zone, including a spot for your name or logo on the front page of our website. Thank you for your contribution!
Give $1,000
Help us succeed in flying our ROV through the International MATE Competition missions. With this donation, we have a place reserved for your name in the Trenches, including a spot for your name or logo on the ROV itself. Thank you for your contribution!


text:
- Features easy step-by-step instructions for learning the fine art of doodling through the eyes of celebrated artist and puppeteer Jim Henson.
- Includes a brief history about Jim Henson and his influence in art, puppeteering, and television, as well as several of his simple yet profound life philosophies.
- Contains a variety of doodle content, including Jim Henson's character designs, dingbats, borders, frames, backgrounds, and more!
Sounds pretty cool, right? I know I'll be picking up a copy!
And speaking of cool books. Remember when we mentioned The Tales of a Sixth Grade Muppet book that would be coming out this fall to promote The Muppets? Well, the cover art has been revealed and discovered by our friends at ToughPigs! Check it out:
Looks pretty Muppety to me! I love the scribbly drawings in the background. Looks like what I still draw in math class!
You can pre-order both Doodling with Jim Henson and Tales of a Sixth Grade Muppet now from Amazon.com!
The Muppet Mindset by Ryan Dosier, firstname.lastname@example.com

subset: commoncrawl


text:
The socket returned can only be used with ssl_accept, no traffic can be sent or received before that call.
This module contains interface functions to the Secure Socket Layer.
This manual page describes functions that are defined in the ssl module and represents the new ssl implementation that coexists with the old one, as the new implementation is not yet compleat enough to replace the old one.
The new implementation can be accessed by providing the option {ssl_imp, new} to the ssl:connect and ssl:listen functions.
The new implementation is Erlang based and all logic is in Erlang and only payload encryption calculations are done in C via the crypto application. The main reason for making a new implementation is that the old solution was very crippled as the control of the ssl-socket was deep down in openssl making it hard if not impossible to support all inet options, ipv6 and upgrade of a tcp connection to a ssl connection. The alfa version has a few limitations that will be removed before the ssl-4.0 release. Main differences and limitations in the alfa are listed below.
The following data types are used in the functions below:
boolean() = true | false
option() = socketoption() | ssloption()
socketoption() - [{property(), value()}], property() = atom(), value() = term(), defaults to [{mode,list},{packet, 0},{header, 0},{active, true}].
For valid options see inet(3) and gen_tcp(3) .
ssloption() = {verify, verify_code()} | {depth, integer()} | {certfile, path()} | {keyfile, path()} | {password, string()} | {cacertfile, path()} | {ciphers, ciphers()} | {ssl_imp, ssl_imp()} | {reuse_sessions, boolean()}
path() = string() - representing a file path.
verify_code() = 0 | 1 | 2
host() = hostname() | ipaddress()
hostname() = string()
ip_address() = {N1,N2,N3,N4} % IPv4 | {K1,K2,K3,K4,K5,K6,K7,K8} % IPv6
sslsocket() - opaque to the user.
protocol() = sslv3 | tlsv1 | 'tlsv1.1'
ciphers() = [ciphersuite()] | sting() (according to old API)
chiphersuite() = {key_exchange(), chipher(), hash(), exportable()}
key_exchange() = rsa | dh_dss | dh_rsa | dh_anon | dhe_dss | dhe_rsa | krb5 | KeyExchange_export
cipher() = rc4_128 | idea_cbc | des_cbc | '3des_ede_cbc' des40_cbc | dh_dss | aes_128_cbc | aes_256_cbc | rc2_cbc_40 | rc4_40
hash() = md5 | sha
exportable() = export | no_export | ignore
ssl_imp() = new | old - default is old.
When a ssl socket is in active mode (the default), data from the socket is delivered to the owner of the socket in the form of messages:
A Timeout argument specifies a timeout in milliseconds. The default value for a Timeout argument is infinity.
cipher_suites() ->
cipher_suites(Type) -> ciphers()
Type = erlang | openssl
Returns a list of supported cipher suites. cipher_suites() is equivalent to cipher_suites(erlang). Type openssl is provided for backwards compatibility with old ssl that used openssl.
connect(Socket, SslOptions) ->
connect(Socket, SslOptions, Timeout) -> {ok, SslSocket} | {error, Reason}
Socket = socket()
SslOptions = [ssloption()]
Timeout = integer() | infinity
SslSocket = sslsocket()
Reason = term()
Upgrades a gen_tcp, or equivalent, connected socket to a ssl socket e.i performs the client-side ssl handshake.
connect(Host, Port, Options) ->
connect(Host, Port, Options, Timeout) -> {ok, SslSocket} | {error, Reason}
Host = host()
Port = integer()
Options = [option()]
Timeout = integer() | infinity
SslSocket = sslsocket()
Reason = term()
Opens an ssl connection to Host, Port.
close(SslSocket) -> ok | {error, Reason}
SslSocket = sslsocket()
Reason = term()
Close a ssl connection.
controlling_process(SslSocket, NewOwner) ->
ok | {error, Reason}
SslSocket = sslsocket()
NewOwner = pid()
Reason = term()
Assigns a new controlling process to the ssl-socket. A controlling process is the owner of a ssl-socket, and receives all messages from the socket.
connection_info(SslSocket) ->
{ok, {ProtocolVersion, CipherSuite}} | {error, Reason}
CipherSuite = ciphersuite()
ProtocolVersion = protocol()
Returns the negotiated protocol version and cipher suite.
getopts(Socket) ->
getopts(Socket, OptionNames) -> {ok, [socketoption()]} | {error, Reason}
Socket = sslsocket()
OptionNames = [property()]
Get the value of the specified socket options, if no options are specified all options are returned.
listen(Port, Options) ->
{ok, ListenSocket} | {error, Reason}
Port = integer()
Options = options()
ListenSocket = sslsocket()
Creates a ssl listen socket.
peercert(Socket) ->
peercert(Socket, Opts) -> {ok, Cert} | {ok, Subject} | {error, Reason}
Socket = sslsocket()
Opts = [] | [pkix] | [ssl] | [pkix, subject] | [ssl, subject]
Cert = term()
Subject = term()
peercert(Cert) is equivalent to peercert(Cert, []).
The form of the returned certificate depends on the options.
If the options list is empty the certificate is returned as a DER encoded binary.
The options pkix and ssl implies that the certificate is returned as a parsed ASN.1 structure in the form of an Erlang term.
The ssl option gives a more elaborate return structure, with more explicit information. In particular object identifiers are replaced by atoms.
The option subject implies that only the subject's distinguished name part of the peer certificate is returned.
peername(Socket) -> {ok, {Address, Port}} |
{error, Reason}
Socket = sslsocket()
Address = ipaddress()
Port = integer()
Returns the address and port number of the peer.
recv(Socket, Length) ->
recv(Socket, Length, Timeout) -> {ok, Data} | {error, Reason}
Socket = sslsocket()
Length = integer()
Timeout = integer()
Data = [char()] | binary()
This function receives a packet from a socket in passive mode. A closed socket is indicated by a return value {error, closed}.
The Length argument is only meaningful when the socket is in raw mode and denotes the number of bytes to read. If Length = 0, all available bytes are returned. If Length > 0, exactly Length bytes are returned, or an error; possibly discarding less than Length bytes of data when the socket gets closed from the other side.
The optional Timeout parameter specifies a timeout in milliseconds. The default value is infinity.
send(Socket, Data) -> ok | {error, Reason}
Socket = sslsocket()
Data = iolist() | binary()
Writes Data to Socket.
A notable return value is {error, closed} indicating that the socket is closed.
setopts(Socket, Options) -> ok | {error, Reason}
Socket = sslsocket()
Options = [socketoption]()
Sets options according to Options for the socket Socket.
shutdown(Socket, How) -> ok | {error, Reason}
Socket = sslsocket()
How = read | write | read_write
Reason = reason()
Immediately close a socket in one or two directions.
How == write means closing the socket for writing, reading from it is still possible.
To be able to handle that the peer has done a shutdown on the write side, the {exit_on_close, false} option is useful.
ssl_accept(ListenSocket) ->
ssl_accept(ListenSocket, Timeout) -> ok | {error, Reason}
ListenSocket = sslsocket()
Timeout = integer()
Reason = term()
The ssl_accept function establish the SSL connection on the server side. It should be called directly after transport_accept, in the spawned server-loop.
ssl_accept(ListenSocket, SslOptions) ->
ssl_accept(ListenSocket, SslOptions, Timeout) -> {ok, Socket} | {error, Reason}
ListenSocket = socket()
SslOptions = ssloptions()
Timeout = integer()
Reason = term()
Upgrades a gen_tcp, or equivalent, socket to a ssl socket e.i performs the ssl server-side handshake.
sockname(Socket) -> {ok, {Address, Port}} |
{error, Reason}
Socket = sslsocket()
Address = ipaddress()
Port = integer()
Returns the local address and port number of the socket Socket.
start() ->
start(Type) -> ok | {error, Reason}
Type = permanent | transient | temporary
Starts the Ssl application. Default type is temporary. application(3)
stop() -> ok
Stops the Ssl application. application(3)
transport_accept(Socket) ->
transport_accept(Socket, Timeout) -> {ok, NewSocket} | {error, Reason}
Socket = NewSocket = sslsocket()
Timeout = integer()
Reason = reason()
Accepts an incoming connection request on a listen socket. ListenSocket must be a socket returned from listen/2. The socket returned should be passed to ssl_accept to complete ssl handshaking and establishing the connection.
The socket returned can only be used with ssl_accept, no traffic can be sent or received before that call.
The accepted socket inherits the options set for ListenSocket in listen/2.
The default value for Timeout is infinity. If Timeout is specified, and no connection is accepted within the given time, {error, timeout} is returned.
versions() ->
[{SslAppVer, SupportedSslVer, AvailableSslVsn}]
SslAppVer = string()
SupportedSslVer = [protocol()]
AvailableSslVsn = [protocol()]
Returns version information relevant for the ssl application.
inet(3) and gen_tcp(3)


text:
Read, create and love me too…..
Sharing pictures books, creative ideas and seasonal thoughtful family life
Skip to content
Season books
Autumn books
Winter books
Spring books
Summer books
Picture books
Non-fiction children's books
Chapter books
We're going on a bear hunt
Laugh out loud books
Female role-models picture books
Top ten picture books
Oliver Jeffers
Rob Biddulph
Julia Donaldson
Duncan Beedie
Jim Field
Catherine Rayner
Sophy Henn
Picture book themes
Pirate books
Under the sea books
Penguin books
Minibeast books
London books
Dragon books
Space book
Superhero books
Dinosaur books
Number and counting books
Season books
Thoughtful picture books
Environmental picture book
Picture books that encourage creativity
We're going on a bear hunt
Review policy and disclosure
Search for:
Patricia Toht
"Pick a pine tree" by Patricia Toht
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To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here:
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text:
Kantar Worldpanel Australia
Level 1, 181 Miller Street
North Sydney
- +61 2 95634200
- www.kantarworldpanel.com
New Business
Tamsin Timpson
Strategic Insight Director, Worldpanel ComTech
Kantar Worldpanel offers in Australia the ComTech service that monitors on a continuous basis mobile phone, tablet and quad-play ownership, purchasing and usage trends.
Kantar Worldpanel ComTech is the global expert in the telecommunications field, utilising our huge consumer panels to define the market in granular detail. Through our continuous survey methodology we offer our clients unique, detailed and actionable insights through our team of industry recognised experts. This service operational 11 countries is a reference guide for manufacturers, carriers, content providers and industry experts.
The ComTech service can provide:
- Accurate consumer lifecycle analysis
- Passive usage analytics
- Carrier churn statistics
- Contract and Prepay billing data / handset spend
- Market KPIs in terms of both installed base and sales volumes
Kantar Worldpanel ComTech offers our clients the ability to answer such questions as:
- Where are my new customers coming from and what do they look like?
- What impact are new customers having on my brand?
- How are my customers using their device vs. competitors?
- How do different groups of consumers use their device?
- Is there any correlation between tablet and mobile device owned?
- What is the most popular app genre on my brand vs. competitors?


text:
JSeahawks wrote:Peyton Manning is from New Orleans.
RolandDeschain wrote:Oh, FML. The refs would make sure Peyton wins it, just like they did for Jerome "I'm big & dumb as a bus" Bettis 6 years ago. I'm officially a Patriots fan until we meet them in the Super Bowl, or they get knocked off. : /


text:
In comparison to fresh fruit, how healthy are juices that contain 100% juice?Thank you for your assistance!
All sources of fruit, including fresh, canned, dried, frozen, and 100% juice, will contain many nutritional benefits. The fiber content may be lower in the juice, as you consume more skin and pulp (the fiber-rich parts of the fruit) when you consume the whole fruit. However, 100% juice is a great and convenient way to consume the beneficial vitamins and nutrients in fruits.
Sources: USDA database, mypyramid.gov, mayoclinic


text:
Pharmacy Assistant (PA)
26 Feb 2019|
Anywhere |
Anywhere |
Job Description
Shoppers Drug Mart / Pharmaprix require a "Pharmacy Assistant (PA)" in Burnaby, BC:
Experience as a Pharmacy Assistant is an asset. Key responsibilities of a Shoppers Drug Mart Pharmacy Assistant include:….
Note: This job is not from Hospital.ca.
Job snippet was selected from our web partner:
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text:
Worst Company In America Round One: Google Vs. Apple
Here we are at the final match of Round One in the Worst Company In America 2012 Tournament. And while you can argue whether or not we've saved the best for last, these two competitors are certainly two of the biggest.
Both companies do a lot of things right but are also afflicted by hubris and make decisions that turn consumers away.
Google is the largest and most popular search engine. YouTube is the largest video uploading site. It seems like everyone has a gmail address (if only to subscribe to porn sites) and Google+ is gradually picking up steam. Not to mention the love many people have for Google Maps, the Chrome browser and the Android OS for mobile devices.
So why does Google need to track everything you do on each of its sites and services? Or Google's first attempt at social networking, Google Buzz, which landed the company in hot water with the FTC for failing to live up to its privacy promises?
And then there's Apple, which has succeeded in making products — especially its mobile devices — that customers love and are willing to pay a premium for. But even though devices like the iPad and iPhone dominate their respective markets, does that make them good for consumers?
Consumerist reader Dan explains his anger at Apple's gouging customers on the popular tablet:
Okay so I get that people love the iPad. I would buy one too. But I don't see how the company gets away with charging an extra $100 above the base model simply for throwing in an extra 16GB of storage memory – or $200 for another 48GB. Storage memory is the cheapest thing going these days. Apple is actually keeping the device out of the hands of people who could really use it by charging such ridiculous amounts for what is really just a few dollars worth of extra memory.
We expect there to be some heated debate on this one, so let's just get to the vote, shall we?
(Voting for this poll will close at 11:59 p.m. ET on Tuesday March 20.)
This is a post in our Worst Company In America 2012 series. The companies competing for this honor were chosen by you, the readers. See the entire WCIA 2012 bracket and schedule of match-ups HERE.
Want more consumer news? Visit our parent organization, Consumer Reports, for the latest on scams, recalls, and other consumer issues.


text:
The Zoo's new, five-acre Animals of the Savanna expansion is now open! Plan your next visit today.
Celebrate Halloween at Seneca Park Zoo with spooktacular family fun! Buy tickets today.
Michel Gold Michel Vivien Gold Sandals Sandals Vivien Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, and share your Zoo moments with us by tagging #senecaparkzoo!


text:
I'm wondering if we are a little thin at tight end with McCoy on IR.
Miller is obviously a boss, but his foot issues could linger. If he were to miss time, we are left with Luke Willson (a pure receiving tight end), Sean McGrath and basketball convert Darren Fells (plus Cooper Helfet and Victor Marshall).
I wouldn't be shocked to see JS/PC prowling for a veteran TE. I wouldn't be shocked to see Morrah brought back, although personally I think that ship is sailed.
Whatcha think?


text:
Representation of a Custom Southeast Bozeman Montana Luxury Home and Montana Horse Property
9.1 Acres in a lush country setting with trees, creek, unobstructed and spectacular Bridger and Gallatin Mountain views. Secluded, yet minutes to Downtown Bozeman, Montana.
Elegantly appointed.
This luxury 6500 sf Bozeman home has a grand living room with floor to ceiling cobblestone fireplace, formal dining room, kitchen with granite counters, Stainless Steel appliances, kitchen nook, bar seating and walk-in pantry.
Also, luxury master suite with patio and hot tub, or watch a movie in the Media Room, work out in the gym, or play games with the kids.
This Bozeman real estate is set up for horses!
Taunya Fagan Prudential Montana Luxury Real Estate, giving you the advantage...®
406.579.9683 taunya.fagan at prumt.com
All information contained herein is derived from sources deemed reliable, however, is not guaranteed by Prudential Montana Real Estate, Managing Broker, Agents or Sellers. Offering is subject to error, omissions, prior sales, price change or withdrawal without notice and approval of purchase by Seller. We urge independent verification of each and every item submitted, to the satisfaction of any prospective purchaser. 2008 - 2010 © Copyright Prudential Montana Real Estate. All rights reserved. An independently owned and operated member of the Prudential Real Estate Affiliates, Inc. The RockPrudential is a registered service mark of The Prudential Insurance Company of America. Equal Housing Opportunity.


text:
Only Lovers Left Alive is funny?
After premiering at Cannes and screening at TIFF, Only Lovers Left Alive, aka the vampire movie with Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton, finally has a trailer. And it looks funny, maybe? Funny is not a word I would use to describe writer/director Jim Jarmusch—usually I would go with obtuse, difficult, not for everyone. But this trailer has some humor that is too precisely timed to be anything other than intentional. It's in the way Hiddles says, "What a drag" and Swinton's delivery of "let's just hope he's dramatic". I wonder if this is what early reviews meant when they described the movie as "accessible". Did Jim Jarmusch make a crowd pleaser?
Only Lovers Left Alive is about a couple of vampires who have a centuries-long love affair reuniting in Detroit. The trailer doesn't really make the plot very plain—it feels a little like they're not sure how to advertise this movie—but the little sister (Mia Wasikowska) is a troublemaker, and the trailer makes it look like maybe she kills Anton Yelchin. I'm into the vampire fright wigs; it's almost cheeky, given how glossy and polished vampires have gotten over the last few years, to see a pair looking so drained and weary. It opens internationally throughout the end of the year but has no US release date. Distributor Sony Pictures Classics is a classy outfit but they're frugal. Their slate is full already and they've got Blue Jasmine and The Armstrong Lie to get through award season; they've already kicked Foxcatcher to 2014 and I won't be surprised if we have to wait on Lovers, too. It feels like a spring release.
Lainey thinks I'm wasting a Gossip Genie wish on wanting Hiddles and Swinton to have an affair, but he could use a good SWINTON-ing. (Lainey: this man is NOT COOL ENOUGH for her.)


text:
- Dec 28:
- Burke Ramsey files $750M defamation suit over CBS series about sister JonBenet's murder
- Dec 16:
- Ramsey grand juror welcomes new DNA tests, discusses reasons for indicting parents
- Dec 13:
- Boulder police, DA plan new DNA testing in JonBenet Ramsey case
- Oct 28:
- Ex-DA Mary Lacy cites 'butt print' in defense of Ramsey exoneration
- Oct 27:
- DNA in doubt: New analysis challenges DA's exoneration of Ramseys
- Jan 23:
- Fleet and Priscilla White exonerated in death of JonBenet Ramsey — for third time
- Oct 23:
- Judge to release indictment in JonBenet Ramsey case
- Sep 18:
- Camera reporter sues Boulder DA seeking release of Ramsey indictment
- Jan 27:
- JonBenet Ramsey grand jury voted to indict parents in 1999, but DA refused to prosecute
- Jan 23:
- Fleet and Priscilla White exonerated in death of JonBenet Ramsey — for third time
- Oct 23:
- Judge to release indictment in JonBenet Ramsey case
- Sep 18:
- Camera reporter sues Boulder DA seeking release of Ramsey indictment
- Jan 27:
- JonBenet Ramsey grand jury voted to indict parents in 1999, but DA refused to prosecute
In 1998, 12 grand jurors convened to look into the unsolved death of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey. After more than a year of poring over evidence, they left the Boulder County Courthouse without a word.
On Friday, 14 years later, an unprosecuted grand jury indictment revealed the grand jury prepared charges of child abuse resulting in death and accessory to a crime for both John and Patsy Ramsey in the death of their daughter.
The four pages released indicated the jury felt that both the Ramseys permitted a child to be "unreasonably placed in a situation which posed a threat of injury to the child's life or health, which resulted in the death of JonBenet Ramsey" and rendered assistance to a person "knowing the person being assisted has committed and was suspected of the crime of murder in the first degree and child abuse resulting in death."
Alex Hunter, the Boulder County district attorney at the time, never signed the true bill, apparently believing he could not successfully prosecute due to a lack of evidence.
The criteria for a grand jury indictment is probable cause, and the decision does not have to be unanimous among the grand jurors. Hunter would have had to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt to win at trial.
Both of the charges in the indictment carry a statute of limitation of three years.
The documents -- which had been sealed since the jury concluded its work in late 1999 -- were released by retired Weld County Judge Robert Lowenbach in response to a lawsuit brought by Daily Camera reporter Charlie Brennan and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
After Lowenbach ruled last week that the release of the documents would not violate grand jury secrecy rules, DA Stan Garnett turned over the documents for the judge to review. On Wednesday, Lowenbach ruled that the indictment would be released.
According to the court order, the documents submitted to the court by Garnett consisted of 18 pages, nine relating to each of JonBenet's parents. Lowenbach ruled that only pages signed by the foreman of the grand jury would be considered "official actions" of the grand jury and would thus be releasable. In the end, a total of four pages -- two pages for each parent -- were released.
Lin Wood, an attorney for John Ramsey, said the released indictment means "absolutely zero" in terms of the investigation into JonBenet's death.
"The documents today are a mere historical footnote, a small glimpse into the grand jury proceedings," Wood said. "It's four pages of what would have likely been hundreds of volumes of testimony and exhibit."
John Ramsey, in a letter to Garnett on Sunday, objected to the release of the indictment without the entire grand jury record also being unsealed.
"What you have is nothing more than confusing accusations without any evidence to support the accusations," Wood said Friday. "It's fundamentally unfair to the Ramsey family and the system of justice. If you're going to make public what amounts to an accusation, let's see the evidence."
In response to the request, Lowenbach said grand jury transcripts and other evidence did not constitute "official action" and would not be released. But Wood said the Ramseys deserved an exception.
"This case is unprecedented; there will never be another case like it," Wood said. "What this family has endured now for 17 years merits an exception to the rule. John Ramsey's request should have been honored, not only because it's fair but because it's the right thing to do."
'Don't have the evidence'
JonBenet Ramsey was found dead Dec. 26, 1996, in the basement of her family's Boulder home, 755 15th St. -- which is now 749 15th St. -- several hours after Patsy Ramsey called 911 to say her daughter was missing and that a ransom note had been left behind.
On Oct. 13, 1999, more than a year after the case went to the grand jury, then-DA Hunter announced that the grand jury investigation had come to an end and that no charges would be filed due to a lack of evidence.
Hunter declined to comment when reached by phone Friday.
But Bill Wise, Hunter's former top assistant, said he backs up Hunter's choice.
"I think it was the correct decision," Wise said. "You just don't have the evidence. The totality of everything that was presented by the Boulder Police Department was just insignificant to prosecute."
Jim Kolar, now chief of the Telluride Marshal's Department, was a DA investigator assigned to the case in 2004 by former Boulder DA Mary Lacy. Kolar published a book in 2012 titled "Foreign Faction: Who Really Kidnapped JonBenet?" in which he said evidence pointed toward a family member being involved in the murder as opposed to an intruder.
Kolar said the portion of the indictment that was released indicates that the grand jury came to the same conclusion.
"It seems to me that the grand jury thought there was some merit to the theory that the parents, to one extent or another, knew what happened," Kolar said.
But in 2008, it was determined that DNA evidence found on JonBenet did not match any of the Ramseys. Then-DA Lacy subsequently exonerated John and Patsy Ramsey and their son, Burke. Patsy Ramsey died after a battle with cancer in 2006.
"I think a lot of people think (Lacy) stepped over the line by exonerating the family," Kolar said. "She was relying heavily on the DNA, and I don't know that it was appropriate."
Added Wise, "I never would have done it. I'm not in the business of exonerating people until you have a conviction of somebody, and they don't have a conviction."
Wise did say that future prosecutors are not bound by the exoneration.
"When one DA exonerates, the next DA may say, 'No dice,'" he said.
But Bob Grant, who at that time was the district attorney for neighboring Adams County and was among a small group of prosecutors with whom Hunter met monthly, said the exoneration could still "torpedo" any future trial.
"Mary Lacy would become a witness for the defense, and that's a position a prosecutor never wants to be in," he said.
Lacy could not be reached for comment Friday.
Wood said the exoneration and the DNA made what was revealed Friday irrelevant.
"You didn't have DNA testing then, and that fact alone renders these findings by a grand jury in 1999 to be 100 percent wrong," Wood said.
Opportunity for speculation?
In his argument in early October for the release of the documents, Thomas Kelley -- who represented Brennan and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press pro bono -- said the release of the documents would serve to make the process more transparent.
"This indictment should have been tendered to the court, to whom the grand jury's work belongs, in 1999, not secretly pocketed by the DA while giving the public impression the grand jury did nothing," Kelley said.
Garnett -- who took office 10 years after the jury was disbanded -- had previously rejected two requests by the Camera and Brennan seeking the release of the indictment under the Colorado Open Records Act.
Garnett has written a guest opinion that will be published in Sunday's edition of the Daily Camera, and he declined to comment Friday on the release before the opinion was published.
Grant said at this point, the release of the indictment served no practical purpose.
"What this is doing is providing more opportunity for people to speculate without any basis and drag that little girl out as public spectacle," Grant said. "As a human being, I find that abhorrent."
Wise said because the statute of limitations has passed, the matter is "kind of academic anyhow, other than letting the public know."
But Kolar said that in itself was the reason he agreed with the release.
"I'm happy in some regards that more of the public record has been released," he said. "It's just unfortunate that it's taken so long for the information to reach the public."
Contact Camera Staff Writer Mitchell Byars at 303-473-1329, email@example.com or twitter.com/mitchellbyars.


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text:
White Sox down Twins
Minneapolis, MN – Jake Peavy spun seven innings of two-run ball to guide the Chicago White Sox to a 4-2 win over the Minnesota Twins in the middle test of a three-game set at Target Field.
Peavy (5-1) struck out six and scattered five hits without issuing a walk to earn his third straight win. Addison Reed stranded a runner in the ninth to earn his 12th save of the season.
"It was a good team win," Peavy said. "I think everybody contributed tonight against some adversity."
Adam Dunn and Dayan Viciedo hit back-to-back homers in the second inning, and Alexei Ramirez and Tyler Flowers both had two hits and an RBI for the White Sox, winners in two of their last three games.
Trevor Plouffe and Oswaldo Arcia drove in the only runs for the Twins, losers in three of their last five games.
Kevin Correia (4-3) gave up four runs on nine hits over seven-plus frames.
"Correia was good," Twins manager Ron Gardenhire said of his starter. "He left a couple balls up in the eighth and it was double, double, and there you have it and he's out of the ballgame."
Dunn crushed a fastball to left-center to open the second inning and Viciedo followed with a towering blast into the upper deck in left field to put the White Sox ahead 2-0.
The Twins scored a run in the fifth on a controversial call at the plate. With Justin Morneau on second, Arcia laced a base hit to right field. Alex Rios delivered a strike to the plate as Morneau slid to avoid the tag. Morneau slid past the plate, but avoided the tag and reached back and touched home. It appeared that Flowers had tagged Morneau on his left shoulder as he reached back for the plate, but umpire Jordan Baker ruled no contact had been made.
Plouffe tied the game with an RBI single in the seventh, but the White Sox plated a pair of runs in the eighth to take the lead for good. Dewayne Wise ripped a leadoff double to center and Flowers followed with a double of his own to left to score Wise, spelling the end of Correia's night.
Alejandro De Aza bunted Flowers to third and Ramirez followed with a base hit to center to plate Flowers.
Game Notes
Dunn needs just one home run to tie Darrell Evans for 47th place on the all- time list with 414 ... Peavy is 5-1 over six career starts at Target Field ... Correia has lasted at least seven innings in six of his eight starts this season.


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text:
On 'Lost in Translation"
David Kalstone
["Lost in Translation"] begins with the apparently random way things happen to us and it includes a number of episodes not explicitly related. The poem weaves connections between the world of the child, vividly recalled in the present tense, and that of the remembering adult, who only makes his full entrance in the past tenses of the long rhapsodic coda. (Even a more recent episode a mind-reader in London is told as if the child were perceiving it: "This grown man reenters, wearing grey.") An odd massing of consciousness takes place. At first the poet speaks distantly of "the child," "the boy": it isnt until midway through the poem that the childs experience so recaptures him as to identify it in the first person, his very self: "Puzzle begun I write."
[Kalstone enumerates the various "puzzles" that make up the poem.] All these experiences are felt, without anxiety, as analogous: Mademoiselles secret, the lost Rilke translation, the Valéry poem, the excitement of putting together the puzzle, the feel of the summer without parents. The sense of mysterious relations is crystallized for us when the puzzle, as if by magic (and in the only regular stanzas of the poem, the Rubaiyat stanza Merrill likes so much), gathers before our eyes: "Lo! It assembles on the shrinking Green." A fable emerges: grandly confronting one another, a Shiek and a veiled woman, who appear to be quarrelling, like Oberon and Titania, over a young boy, a page. The scene is captured in the manner fairy tales use; according to Bruno Bettelheim, the enchantment transfigures the violent and critical passages of life. Only below the surface do we feel the stronger implications of the completed puzzle, "Eternal Triangle, Great Pyramid!" and its relevance to the childs own abandoned and perhaps disputed state.
What is interesting about this particular version of "The Broken Home" is that it is absorbed into a larger constellation of analogies whose model is "translation." The poem returns at the end to translation, to Valérys poem and Rilkes version, to the sense of what is foregone and what is gained, and to the conviction that nothing is "lost" in translation, or that "All is translation / And every bit of us is lost in it." Merrill, unable to find the Rilke version, still feels he knows "How much of the sun-ripened original / Felicity Rilke made himself forego " [Kalstone continues to quote to the passage that ends "A deep reverberation fills with stars."] In his own absorption of Rilkes Valéry, Merrill performs the process acted out so many times in the poem. After the "warm Romance," after the enchanting childhood, he is left with the adult conviction or realization of a "ground plan left / Sublime and barren," the pattern discovered and echoed in unsuspected corners of life, "color of context," what might have seemed waste transmuted to "shade and filter, milk and memory."
from David Kalstone, "James Merrill: Transparent Things" (Chapter 3) in Five Temperaments (New York: Oxford U P, 1977), 125-126.
James Merrill
Foreign languages entered my life early in the person of my governess. Although we called her Mademoiselle she was not a spinster but a widow. Neither was she French, or even, as she led us to believe, Belgian, but part English and part, to her undying shame, Prussian.
By the time I was eight I had learned from her enough French and German to understand that English was merely one of many ways to express things. A single everyday object could be called assiette or Teller as well as plate or were plates themselves subtly different in France and Germany? Mademoiselles French and Latin prayers seemed to invoke absolutes beyond the ken of our Sunday school pageants. At the same time, I was discovering how the everyday sounds of English could mislead you by having more than one meaning. One afternoon at home I opened a random book and read: "Where is your husband, Alice?" "In the library, sampling the port." If samples were little squares of wallpaper or chintz, and ports were where ships dropped anchor, this hardly clarified the behavior of Alices husband. Long after Mademoiselles exegesis, the phrase haunted me. Words werent what they seemed. The mother tongue could inspire both fascination and distrust.
From James Merrill, "Acoustical Chambers" (originally published in the New York Times Book Review in 1982), rep. in J. D. McClatchy, Ed. Recitative: Prose by James Merrill (North Point: San Francisco, 1986), 3-4.
Stephen Yenser
{Yensers extended survey of "Lost in Translation" focuses on numerous passages and discusses them in detail. In this, he is centered on Merrills description of the page in the jigsaw puzzle.] Mademoiselle perhaps thinks the boy is the veiled womans son, and if so she might be swayed by her own maternal feelings or by her keen awareness of her employers domestic plight. We know that she knows a divorce is in the offing, because the boy sneaks a look at her letter to a curé in Alsace, where he reads "cette innocent mčre, / Ce pauvre enfant, que deviendront-ils?" [(French): that innocent mother, / That poor child, what will become of them?] The boy assumes that these are the figures in the puzzle, but Merrill lets us understand, as we fit together our own pieces, that she is worried about him and his mother. This is pure Merrill, this casting of the poems one direct reference to its emotional and dramatic center in French and the misinterpreting of it. The principle of restraint is honored even as the imminent trauma is specified and authenticating detail is provided. These lines tell us that Mademoiselle, contrary to the boys superior observation about what she "thinks mistakenly," would not be all that wrong to believe that the "slave or page-boy" is the veiled womans son.
from Stephen Yenser, "Backward-Looking Figures" (chapter 1) in The Consuming Myth: The Work of James Merrill (Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1987), 22.
Richard Sáez
Perhaps Merrill's most revealing metamorphosis of Promethean fire is into the linguistic process of "Lost in Translation" (The New Yorker, 6 April 1974). Here he remembers piecing together a puzzle with his multilingual governess, which evokes the more recent memory of a German translation by Rilke of Valery's "Palme." Although he cannot find the translation, he imagines what is lost and retained in 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, műr, parfumer)
In order to render its underlying sense.
For a poem in which the piecing together of a puzzle at every juncture responds to the fitting of words into a poetic pattern, the progress from a meditation on what is lost in literary translation to the transformation of life into literature is quite natural: "But nothing's lost. Or else: all is translation / And every bit of us is lost in it."
"Lost in Translation" is about Merrill's poetry in even more telling ways. Like the oeuvre itself, the legend of the puzzle—seen through the almost predominant pattern of its design—represents an "Eternal Triangle": a page (whom the governess imagines to be a son) torn between service to his sire or his sire's wife. (It is no surprise when the page's missing feet are found under the table with the child's own.) And the shapes of the individual pieces of the puzzle have—like the symbolist's words—their own significance
Many take
Shapes known already—the craftsman's repertoire
Nice in its limitation—from other puzzles:
Witch on broomstick, ostrich, hourglass,
Even (surely not just in retrospect)
An inchling, innocently branching palm
But nowhere does Merrill speak quite so precisely about his own craft— the individual poems and the totality of his work—as in the description by a medium of a "hand-sawn" individual piece of the puzzle
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.
The puzzle exists in Merrill's poetry The whole is composed of intricately related parts, and it rewards explication even though once it has been puzzled out there may be little to do but dismantle it like the puzzle in "Lost in Translation." Its emphasis on "lamination" and "craft" returns us to a discussion of the forms of his poetry.
From "James Merrill's Oedipal Fire." In Harold Bloom (ed.), James Merrill. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1985. Originally Published in Parnassus 3:1 (Fall/Winter 1974). © 1974 by the Poetry in Review Foundation.
Stephen Yenser
"Lost in Translation" calls into play three autobiographical situations. In the most recent one, which the poem outlines last, the setting is Athens, where Merrill had his second home, on Athinaion Efivon Street at the foot of Mount Lykabettos, from 1959 until the late 1970s, and the subject is his rereading of Valery's magnificent lyric, "Palme," and his subsequent search through the city's libraries for Rilke's translation of that poem into German. Merrill half-recalls having seen the translation years earlier, but when he cannot turn up a copy, he wonders whether he hasn't imagined it. That the translation does exist, and that he eventually finds it, his epigraph—an excerpt from Rilke's version attests. The memory of the French and the German poems, and the memory in particular of the exhortation to "Patience," calls up "His French Mademoiselle," in whose care he spent that summer in the family's home in Southampton and on whom he had a crush, though she must have been a good thirty years older than he, since "In real life" she had been "a widow since Verdun." That summer is the second situation in the poem. It occupies sections one, three, and four of five unmarked sections. The moment at which this memory of 1937 begins to unfold in the poet's mind, one of his variations on the celebrated madeleine passage in A la Recherche du temps perdu, comes at the end of his second verse paragraph:
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, cheri. Geduld, mein Schatz."
(Thus, reading Valery 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.)
By setting out first the remembered experience and only then, in the parenthesis, exposing the cause of the memory, the rereading of Valery's poem, Merrill's narrative sequence reverses Proust's. One result is that we are reminded of the elusiveness of a "source." Is the poem's real source the relationship with Mademoiselle? Or is it indeed Valery's lyric? Life or literature? To whose soft, imperative "Patience" is it finally traceable? Or is the source better represented by Rilke's translation? Merrill foreshadows the answer formulated at poem's end in this passage's little vortex of metamorphoses, where the sugar cubes translate the coffee's taste, the coffee's bitterness renders the boy's disappointment, that disappointment is sweetened by Mademoiselle's counsel, and her words accidentally predict his knowledge of Valery's lines—which antedate them. Through it all, the past moment of bittersweet anticipation and the present moment of nostalgia figure each other.
Given such density, it is remarkable that the poem's five parts make up such a clearly structured, nearly symmetrical arrangement. The first part, about the wait for and the arrival of the puzzle, is in a flexible mode that Merrill devised for poems in Water Street and has been refining ever since: verse paragraphs of occasionally rhymed iambic pentameter lines. This part concludes when, after the puzzle's pieces have all been spread out face up on a card table in the library , "The plot thickens / As all at once two pieces interlock." Because the "plot" is the poem's in addition to the puzzle's, the page's as well as the home's, the first section interlocks just here with the second, where Merrill gives up the blank verse for a line that is shorter and more and more insistently accentual and alliterative. The situation changes too, to the third situation mentioned earlier, as the poem records an experience that "lay years ahead" of the boy—in London, where the poet witnesses a demonstration by a medium. Ostensibly an afterthought, this second section fits with the first partly because it too takes place in a library and partly because it involves a piece of a puzzle—though there are also fundamental congruences. Merrill shifts back into blank verse for the central section's two paragraphs, where he describes the progress made on the puzzle by the boy and his Mademoiselle even as he reveals the latter's background, which is a good deal more complex than he had realized when he was eleven. Like the second section, the fourth has its own distinctive prosody, in this case Rubaiyat quatrains. This section describes the completed puzzle, which takes its picture from a painting allegedly done by a disciple of J.-L. Gerome that has an "Oriental" subject. It breaks off in the middle of a stanza, after not quite two lines, and the last section, which returns to the verse paragraph, tells of the dismantling of the puzzle and the poet's search for the Rilke translation.
Merrill's five-part organization, with its prosodically similar odd-numbered sections and unique even-numbered sections, might also have been modeled on the musical scheme known as rondo form (or second rondo form), which often follows an ABACA pattern. And if it were not, perhaps he would not object to the comparison, since he has commented more than once over the years on the potential usefulness of musical forms to the poet.
[ . . . ]
As it happens, he began going to the opera in New York—an experience he recalls fondly in "Matinees"—when he was eleven years old, which would have been the year commemorated in "Lost in Translation."
The opening lines of the poem recall the boy's wait for the puzzle, seemingly lost in translation from the puzzle rental shop—and at the same time they conjure that absence, heavy with imminence, that is the matrix of all poems:
[quotes ll. 1-10]
Hardly a line here but that tugs in Merrillian fashion in two directions. If the "library" implies intellectual work—the study of German, under the eye of Mademoiselle, or of "Palme" in Rilke's translation—the card table introduces the element of play, and together they go some way toward defining the experience of assembling a difficult puzzle, or the experience of writing a poem. The more and less insistent oxymorons in the phrases "keeps never coming," "Full of unfulfillment," and "Sour windfalls," and the latent antitheses of "Daylight" and "lamplight" and "arisen" and "fallen" embody Merrill's special knotty grain of thought. While the rhyme near the end of this quotation, "talk" and "walk," is a little flourish that acknowledges this tour de force of coupling, the term that sums it all up is "see-saw"—which perhaps also slyly extends the reference to the daily language lesson (with its conjugated verbs), itself opposed (as though to iterate the opening line's balance) by "picnic," whose own rhyming reduplication is echoed by "see-saw."
If we do hear a punning allusion to a language lesson in that last term, that is partly because these lines are rich with a sense of time's own richness. The negated continuous construction at the end of Merrill's second line vibrates with possibility. The present tense and the implied passage of time continue to correct each other through the second sentence, while in the third the "trickling sands" suggest both the seeming desolation of the boy's life and the hourglass that the dragging days keep inverting. Unobtrusive but most piquant of all is the fragment between quotation marks, which unexpectedly introduces the past tense. It would be said, years later, by someone affectionately remembering the collie. The single word "'did'" suddenly frames the whole scene, a miniature puzzle of activities, in the past. The following line confirms this point of view on things, for "back of us" has a temporal dimension too, so that the phrase "Sour windfalls" summarizes that entire little world, full of love and absence, good fortune and disaster.
This scene will not stay past, however. As "The clock that also waited / Pinned to her heart, poor gold, throws up its hands," Merrill again resorts to the past tense. Waited—throws, see—saw. No wonder the watch, which ought to be able to tell exactly what time it is, throws up its hands. As the hands meet at noon, so past and present keep converging in the poem. Though these early conjunctions, if noticed at all, are likely to seem merely quirky, they indicate the profound relationship between past and present implicit in the poem's wizard initial sentence—as transfixing in its way as "Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure." And make no mistake: Proust is behind this poem as much as Valery and Rilke are, as he is behind so much of Merrill's work. If Marcel solves his long-standing problem and embarks on his "vocation" in the Guermantes's library at the end of A la Recherche du temps perdu, Merrill assembles his puzzle in the family library, and then in the London library, and finally in the unnamed library that presumably yields the Rilke translation. And it is Proust who adopts the relevant stereoscopic view of his youthful experience, and who uses "translation" as a further metaphor for the elucidation of the artwork:
. . . ce livre essentiel, le seul livre vrai, un grand ecrivain n'a pas, dans le sens courant, a l'inventer, puisqu'il existe deja en chacun de nous, mais a le traduire. Le devoir et la tache d'un ecrivain sont ceux d'un traducteur .
. . . the essential, the only true book, though in the ordinary sense of the word it does not have to be "invented" by a great writer—for it exists already in each one of us—has to be translated by him, The function and the task of a writer are those of a translator.
In such a passage as the opening verse paragraph of "Lost in Translation," the smallest pieces fall into place partly because of the poet's tolerance for perfecting.
[. . .]
Only a poet of the fiercest concentration would find in the stark translation a whole miniature acropolis, discover the pun on "capitals," and not only make us see in the umlaut the eyes of an owl but also let us hear its hoots in his assonance ("owlet," "umlaut," "vowel"). When the boy's puzzle arrives, we learn in the third verse paragraph, it turns out to be "A superior one, containing a thousand hand-sawn, / Sandal-scented pieces." These last words, with their lovely run of sounds ("thousand," "hand-sawn," "sandal"), are the exact analogy to those pieces .
From one angle, then, "Lost in Translation" is itself an intricate puzzle. It is a confirmation of this intricacy that there are several other dimensions to the relationship between puzzle and poem. For example, the puzzle's scene, when it finally takes shape, implicitly stages the situation in the boy's family. Again, the puzzle's composition reflects the poet's material. If much of Merrill's life has been devoted to writing and reading, so that the new poem will avail itself of forms tested before by him and by others, the cutter of the puzzle's pieces has his tradition:
Many take
Shapes known already—the craftsman's repertoire
Nice in its limitation—from other puzzles:
Witch on broomstick, ostrich, hourglass,
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. . . .
These specific shapes have their own immediate relevance; Merrill invites us to put them aside and make stories of them that will suit "Lost in Translation." Thus we might say that the ostrich figures the boy's state of mind and the poem's manner. Left to his own devices, fearful of what he might see, the young Merrill has hidden his head in the puzzle's diverting desert—repeated here in the hourglass's recovery of the first verse paragraph's "trickling sands" and "tense oasis." Of course the oasis has also given the "inchling, innocently branching palm" a place to take root. It is as though these two were opposing impulses in the same life, responding to different sides of one experience: the cheerful and the awful.
The "Witch on broomstick" has a place in this story too, for she is a crucial element in what the boy has been overlooking. Although the original witch never appears here, she is represented in the puzzle, which pictures a sheik's new consort, who threatens his "old wives." This shadowy figure, who appears in Ephraim in the lead role in the unwritten drama of Merrill's youth that he thinks of as The Other Woman, will be one reason for the divorce. She also shows up in Ephraim in the guise of a character named Joanna, who flies into the poem carrying a Ouija board. Like her, the hour-glass has figured in Merrill's other work: he has poems called "Hourglass" andd "Hour Glass II" and the hourglass is an important motif in Scripts for the Pageant, the last of the Sandover books. The palm comes up in a number of his poems and of course in Valery's lyric. Merrill has absorbed much of "Palme" in "Lost in Translation," and lines especially relevant to this constellation of puzzle pieces occur in Valery's seventh stanza:
Ces jours qui te semblent vides
Et perdus pour l'univers
Ont des racines avides
Qui travaillent les deserts.
Merrill quotes Rilke's translation as his epigraph:
Diese Tage, die leer dir scheinen
und wertlos fur das All,
haben Wurzeln zwischen den Steinen
und trinken dort uberall.
And here finally is Merrill's own rendering, published several years after "Lost in Translation":
These days which, like yourself,
Seem empty and effaced
Have avid roots that delve
To work deep in the waste.
So beneath Merrill's "inchling, innocently branching palm" lies an untold, virtually untellable story. In addition to his own pain and regret, and his years of language study, of reading Proust and others, of writing and of waiting (for the puzzle to arrive, for the angel to descend, for the right word, the right moment for this poem or story or translation), there is Valery's poem, with all the experience stored in it and implied in his superb address to the tree.
[. . .]
And then beneath each writer's experience is his mother tongue, with its incalculable depths. This heritage is one subject of the poem's second section, the parenthetical digression in which Merrill recalls the medium's performance. This last consists of solving another kind of puzzle, of identifying without seeing it an object that has been shown to an audience, then "planted in a plain tole / Casket." Merrill's translation of the man's musings aloud "Through shut eyes" moves back in time, as the medium hears in his mind's ear "'a dry saw-shriek, / Some loud machinery—a lumber mill? / Far uphill in the fir forest / Trees tower, tense with shock, / Groaning and cracking as they crash groundward." As the medium tunes in that episode earlier in the object's history, the reader begins to hear the poet's own machinery. Rather like Pound in his first Canto's palimpsest, Merrill turns to a quasi Anglo Saxon verse to remind us again how the present translates the past. The transformations in a poem like this one, Merrill implies as the medium identifies the hidden object, are nothing compared to those of the forces that have produced its materials:
[quotes ll. 73-82]
The real marvel is the ogygian linguistic and historical process, which, like the poem, and indeed like the life, involves plan and accident. Such are the unities of world and page.
While that thought has its reassuring side, it also holds a certain "dread." To have one's eyes opened to this karmic process is not only to see how one's present uses one's past days, however "vides / Et perdus" they might have seemed, but also to see that one is but an ephemeral form of this always economizing flux. The "opening of lids" on "the thing itself" causes a frisson because in addition to the medium's eyelids, the "lids" include the one on the "tole / Casket." When the poet tells us that "All this lay years ahead," we hear not only a reason for breaking off this divagation on the medium but also relief at the thought that he can avoid for some time yet Henry James's "distinguished thing." In other words, "this" lies in the future from the point of view of the boy and in either the past or the future, depending on the referent, from the point of view of the man writing the poem. He has characteristically gone ahead and back at once. Somewhere the poor gold watch will be throwing up its hands again—while Proust will be clapping his.
"But to go back. All this lay years ahead": Merrill's use of the past tense in connection with the future event has much to do with the line's allure. We return to it because it rises above time so, and as we return, it takes still other forms. While "All this" is the evening in the London library, as well as the truncated vision of death, the phrase refers us also to this poem's account of that evening and of every thing else. "All this." Furthermore, since this account that is the poem lies years ahead of the boy, there is a strong sense in which his youth itself lies years ahead of him, to be found in "translation." The poem is a heuristic instrument, a way of discovering the self and knowing it.
But then who is to distinguish between discovery and creation in this area? It is only in view of what he has since become that Merrill can appear then—in the form of a figure in the puzzle, which in the third section begins to take shape—as "a small backward-looking slave or page-boy." He finds this figure in the puzzle exactly because in the middle of his own puzzle of a life he is looking backward. In looking backward, that is—and by "backward" I mean "over the shoulder" and "to the past," but not "shy," though Merrill means the latter too—the figure in the puzzle looks forward to the poet who will create him.
[ . . .]
This is one reason that to speculate as to whether Merrill has imagined this figure (or the whole puzzle) or has remembered him would only be to cloud the issue. One cannot say which is the case in the same way that one cannot say whether the poem began forty years ago, or in the "present" deciphering, or in the medium's performance. It "begins" in several places at once—as this account does, and as a puzzle does: "Mademoiselle does borders. Straight-edge pieces / Align themselves with earth or sky / In twos and threes, naive cosmogonists / Whose views clash."
The "small backward-looking slave or page-boy," "whose feet have not been found" yet, appears beside "Most of a dark-eyed woman veiled in mauve" whom he helps down from her kneeling camel. Mademoiselle perhaps thinks the boy is the veiled woman's son, and if so she might be swayed by her own maternal feelings or by her keen awareness of her employers' domestic plight. We know that she knows a divorce is in the offing, because the boy sneaks a look at her letter to a curl: in Alsace, where he reads "'cette innocente mere, / Ce pauvre enfant, que deviendront-ils?'" The boy assumes that these are the figures in the puzzle, but Merrill lets us understand, as we fit together our own pieces, that she is worried about him and his mother. This is pure Merrill, this casting of the poem's one direct reference to its emotional and dramatic center in French and the misinterpreting of it. The principle of restraint is honored even as the imminent trauma is specified and authenticating detail is provided. These lines tell us that Mademoiselle, contrary to the boy's superior observation about what she "thinks mistakenly," would not be all that wrong to believe that the "slave or page-boy" is the veiled woman's son. Although he is not literally her son, this pair mirror the young Merrill and his mother—as we know partly because the veiled woman looks "across the green abyss" at another figure: "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!" And we associate the Sheik with the father—what a delicate house of cards this is!—not only because of the pun on "finished" but also because, as we learn in the poem's last section, the boy's home has its own "mangy tiger safe on his bared hearth." These last words might stand for much of this poem's paradoxical quality, for Merrill's "hearth" hides his "heart" and the heart of the family's crisis, even as the adjective "bared" discloses their presence.
"One should be as clear as one's natural reticence allows one to be": Marianne Moore's dictum might have been the guiding light in this as in many another poem by Merrill.
Mademoiselle has her own family matters to conceal. Years later, speaking French to a French friend, the poet discovers that he has a German accent. Thus he finds out that Mademoiselle's first language was German. French by marriage, she finds it practical, in the prewar atmosphere, to pass. The poem's ubiquitous dichotomizing takes the form in her of "French hopes" set against "German fears." But her heritage is jigsaw-complicated itself, since she is the "Child of an English mother . . . And Prussian father" and was evidently raised in Alsace. No wonder she likes to do the borders of puzzles. No wonder either that her nephew turns out to be a "UN / Interpreter. " That last detail is one of several that indicate the relationship between her and the poet, who, in his capacity as translator of Valery and Rilke and the others, has an analogous occupation. He after all learned French and German from her—not to mention much else that would help make him the kind of poet he is. (Might not that be why Merrill tells us that she is a "remote / Descendant of the great explorer Speke"? Though in fact she seems to have descended from the American explorer Edmund Fanning, John Hanning Speke fits into the puzzle better. Just as Speke discovered the source of the Victoria Nile, so we might find in him, with his convenient name, an emblem of Merrill's own fluent explorations.)
A partner in the boy's creative enterprises, Mademoiselle is muse as well as substitute mother. When we hear that the UN interpreter's account of her background has "Touched old strings," those strings are not only those that sound a metaphorical chord. Besides helping him with puzzles, she "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." Indeed there exists a program, dated August 11, 1937, which advertises "The Magic Fishbone, by Charles Dickens, as interpreted by the Jimmy Merrill Marionettes. Given for the Southampton Fresh Air Home for Crippled Children." According to the program, "The action takes place in 'The Land of Make Believe,' and Jimmy Merrill himself will play King Watkins, I, the Queen, and Jerry, the Announcer." Just as Jerry, the Announcer, looks forward to that other Master of Ceremonies, Ephraim, so the goosegirl will one day emerge as Psyche in "From the Cupola" and Jean in "Days of 1935." (As for the King and Queen: one cannot but think of God Biology and Mother Nature in Sandover.)
[. . .]
The boy and Mademoiselle are so close as to shade off into each other. If she is "Herself excited is a child" when they get the puzzle, her "world where 'each was the enemy, each the friend' " has its equivalent too in his family life. By the beginning of the fourth section, everything seems to fit:
This World that shifts like sand, its unforeseen
Consolidations and elate routine,
Whose Potentate had lacked a retinue?
Lo! it assembles on the shrinking Green.
"This World" is at once the political world of the 1930s and the puzzle's world, the Sheik's, with its unanchored sections that combine in surprising ways. It is also the world of the poem as poem, its languages and forms and diverse resources—the poem which exemplifies its "elate routine" in the interlacing of "routine" and "retinue" and the internal rhyme of "Potentate" and "elate" and its "consolidations" in the shift at just this point into Rubaiyat quatrains, so that the puzzle's exotic form conforms to its matter. The puzzle's subject, the arrival of the new favorite in the Sheik's harem, is said to be "Hardly a proper subject for the Home," but it is the inevitable subject for this home. Even the progressive clarification of the puzzle's scene, which also suggests the boy's increasing understanding of his circumstances, parallels the development of the actual domestic situation. As we are first allowed to interpret the Sheik and the veiled woman, they stand in for the boy's father and mother. At this juncture, however, as though to trace the change in the father's affections, the veiled woman has become the mother's rival. Not for nothing is the woman veiled.
After some further shifting of its pieces, the puzzle represents more clearly than ever the boy's world:
[quotes ll. 147-154]
The Page transparently corresponds to the boy, on the verge of having loyalties divided between mother and father and of losing his footing—as the precarious shift in mid-sentence across the stanza break from third person to first person brilliantly confirms. Even as the identification is made, however, the poet retains a significant detachment, since the puzzle so wittily translates his story. Even to be able to see the family in terms of such archetypal patterns as the Oedipal triangle is partly to answer the boy's silent question as to whether he will find a "piece of Distance," for that is also a peace that comes with distance on an emotionally trying situation.
As Merrill moves his units about, they take on the polysemy of allegorical elements; as one's mental focus changes, now the subject is the puzzle proper, now the domestic microcosm, now the political alliances of 1938-1939, now the composition of the poem. The poem even makes a gesture or two in the direction of Sandover's macrocosmic and metaphysical concerns. The "shrinking Green" of the card table reminds us of the world's expanding deserts and the possible death of the planet, while the remark that it is "Quite a task / Putting together Heaven, yet we do" touches on the theme of the creation of God. It begins to seem that there is no subject "Lost in Translation" cannot handle as it shifts among home and world, world and page; often by virtue of the manifold richness of its particulars. At the end of the fourth section, in a bit of bravura, Merrill slips the last piece of the puzzle into place, as he recalls finding the Page's missing feet where they had fallen:
It's done. Here under the table all along
Were those missing feet. It's done.
But then whose should those feet be, "under the table," if not the boy's? And if the boy's, then the poet's, "Here under the table" on which the poem is being written. The poet is the boy is the Page. Or he is the page on which the poem's words reconstitute him, "a backward-looking slave" to his own needs. Thanks to such "under the table" transactions, it all comes right, it seems. "The correction of prose, because it has no fixed laws, is endless," Yeats wrote to Dorothy Wellesley, whereas "a poem comes right with a click like a closing box." The solution of the last outstanding mystery and the reiteration of "It's done" make just such a "click."
Or is this case closed so easily? We need to notice that this fourth section does not come out even. These two lines on the feet, which seem to conclude it, are a kind of remainder. It is not even clear that they are part of a quatrain; they stand alone and fit neither with the preceding stanzas nor with the following verse paragraphs. In another moment, Merrill would have had to commit himself, for had the second line been carried to its end, it would have had to rhyme with "along," in which event these lines would have been a fragment of a Rubaiyat stanza, or not, in which event they would have been a short paragraph. It is a matter of "missing feet"—and of a missing metrical foot or two. A closure that is an opening, this passage is irrevocably in transition.
As the one form comes apart, so does the puzzle—as though this UN interpreter were an uninterpreter:
[quotes ll. 161-177]
Because Rilke looms so large in this poem, one is likely to recall his adumbration of the poetic process in the eighth Duino Elegy: "Uns uberfullts. Wir ordnens. Es zerfallt. / Wir ordnens wieder und zerfallen selbst" ("It fills us. We arrange it. It breaks down. / We rearrange it, then break down ourselves"). But in Merrill's lines, along with the sense of an ineluctable cycle, there is the sense of synchronic events. Even as there are certain threads "que la vie brise," life is ceaselessly making new connections. The very same words that describe the breaking up of the puzzle create in themselves a subtle pattern. They begin to weave one of the new "costumes"—a mantle or a mantilla, say—with "Dismantling" itself. The "lace" in "populace," the more evident for "Unstitched" and "gown," takes the form of the attachments among "Unstitched" and "witch," "down" and "gown," "blue" and "too," "mousseline" and "green." The disintegration of the one narrative is part of another—to be specific, a little apocalypse. For if we are responsible for "Putting together Heaven," we are also responsible for destroying it along with our cities. These lines trace out in lyric form the story of much of Sandover. The underset of retrogression in this passage, the drift (reminiscent of the medium's reverse construction of the puzzle piece's history) from its "populace" and "city" back through "tent" to a virtually Edenic "Green" ("gambled" is also "gamboled"): this is a movement found also at a pivotal moment in Scripts for the Pageant. Before that, and before "Lost in Translation," Merrill ran his poetic film backward at the end of "18 West 11th Street," another poem about a childhood home that was destroyed, which concludes with an "Original vacancy" and a "deepening spring." As he puts the adage at the beginning of yet another poem about the partial destruction and rebuilding of a house, "Everything changes; nothing does. "
Nothing does: nothing changes. And nothing will do: no thing or poem or theory will finally suffice. Nothing will do, partly because something is always missing:
[quotes ll. 180-188]
Not finding that translation is comparable to Rilke's not finding equivalences for Valery's phrases. Having translated Valery's poem—as well as a variety of other works ranging from maxims by Chamfort through poems by Montale to stories by Cavafy and Vassilikos—James Merrill knows all too well "How much of the sun-ripe original / Felicity Rilke made himself forego / (Who loved French words—verger, mur, parfumer) / In order to render its underlying sense." But the plight is not just that of the literary translator. The lines just quoted pertain also to the unrealizable vision that motivates any poem, not to mention other projects. As Helen Vendler has seen, Rilke's rendering of Valery "mimics the translation—by Merrill himself, among others—of life into art." Not that "life" here need mean sensuous or concrete experience alone, whatever that might be. Rilke's passion for Valery's poems, for the French language, for language-these were part of his "life."
To fail to translate exactly, or rather to have to translate and thus to be inexact, to create a difference between the putatively original and the necessarily substitutive: this might be thought of as our very condition. It is no coincidence that Merrill's felicitous "Felicity"—meaning "bliss" and "good fortune" as well as the very "stylistic aptness" that the line break highlights—and the echo, by way of "sun-ripe" and the French words, of the "orchard back of us" call into play again the concept of Eden. The parenthesis itself, with its untranslated and by implication untranslatable words ("orchard," "ripe," and "to sweeten" or "to scent," respectively), is almost a tiny, tantalizing paradise, an enclosed orchard or hortus conclusus (as "paradise" means in its remote Old Persian origins). The orchard and the windfalls are always "back ofu s." Nothing will ever quite do.
Then one begins to see that for Merrill nothing will not do either. The Rilke translation is found. Mademoiselle, although she "kept back" her bit of truth, was not able to bury it. From one point of view, the piece of puzzle that the boy pocketed was lost, but from another it has been found, by the medium—"This grown man" who is also a translator of sorts, an agent of communication with an extrasensory world, a variation on the JM of the Sandover books. The "house torn down" rises again in the form of Sandover. Everything changes. To lose is to create an emptiness that must be operated in, a vacancy that will be filled. "Verger," "mur," "parfumer": these words are rendered inexactly in German and English, but the approximation is a matrix of possibility. Underlying the phrase "underlying sense," because it comes on the heels of the French words, for example, are the "scents" connoted by them. In that marvelous ruin that Rilke's translation is, "that ground plan left / Sublime and barren, where the warm Romance / Stone by stone faded, cooled," after a rain, "A deep reverberation fills with stars"—and what is such a "reverberation" if not at once an emptiness and a plenishing? "Reverberation": the word means a redounding of sound or repeated reflecting of light (or heat), a re-echoing, as of Merrill's echoing of Rilke's echoing of Valery (echoing his own sources). "Reverberation" might almost be a translation of "translation," and even though verberare is unrelated to verbum, Merrill wants us to catch a Cratylean glimpse of "rewording" behind the term, much as Stevens, for instance, means us to see "luminous" shining through his phrase "Voluminous master folded in his fire."
To translate, then, is as much to discover in transference as to lose. Here is Merrill's concluding verse paragraph:
[quotes ll. 208-215]
Two orders of proposition appear here. In the first place, as in "A Fever," Merrill is aspiring, like Henry James, to be one on whom nothing is lost. But when nothing is lost at this level, that is largely because of an original openness to experience and a later strenuousness of memory. Nothing is lost, not because it cannot be lost, for indeed it might be that everything is lost in some sense, but because the possibility always exists that one might recall it in some form—as Proust is said in Ephraim "Through superhuman counterpoint to work / The body's resurrection, sense by sense." Nothing is lost in Proust because Proust lost himself in his life's work, or in his work's life, in his own "translation"—his "consuming myth," to adapt a phrase from Merrill's "From the Cupola." In the concluding lines in "Lost in Translation," the Proustian presence is the "self-effacing tree," the palm that appears and disappears as a blue puzzle piece in the blue sky and that conceals the poet's effort; or that gracefully translates his wrestling with his angel into a "Rustling" of fronds and wings, just as the patient palm invisibly "turns the waste" (Rilke's "Steinen," Valery's "deserts") into the sheltering fronds and the nourishing coconut. As Merrill's poem resurrects his childhood, so its last line recovers, by way of "Palme," its opening lines. As though to prove that nothing is lost, his "milk" translates Valery's "lait plat," which appears at the beginning of "Palme," along with "le pain tendre" that "Un ange met sur ma table." The table is there in the first line of Merrill's poem, where it has become the card table, while the milk and angel have been kept back until the end. But not lost.
In the second place, this passage concerns the nature of things. All is metamorphosis, it suggests; the world is all "context," its elements are all a fugacity whose interactive events may be either continuations of earlier phases of themselves or ever-new processes. Merrill will make a harder and deeper sense of the idea in Ephraim. This poem does not have to decide whether it intends a neo-Hegelian faith in evolution or a neo-Heraclitean hypothesis of flux. It is content to approve, in addition to memory, metamorphosis—rather in the vein of Merrill's recent sonnet "Processional," which sets forth the adventures of a "demotic raindrop" that is first "Translated by a polar wand to keen / Six-pointed Mandarin" and dreams of being further promoted into "a hitherto untold / Flakiness, gemlike, nevermore to melt":
But melt it would, and—look—become
Now birdglance, now the gingko leafs fanlight,
To that same tune whereby immensely old
Slabs of dogma and opprobrium,
Exchanging ions under pressure, bred
A spar of burnt-black anchorite,
Or in three tidy strokes of word golf LEAD
Once again turns (LOAD, GOAD) to GOLD.
If that "tune" had a title, it could be "Plus ca change." As early as Merrill's first play, The Bait (1953), he had set similar words to it: "our cold virtues, once thought durable, / But now abstract and frail as snowflakes / Alter to lazy water in the sun. / Fluidity is proof against major disasters. / The marbles melt and wink at me." (And Merrill winks at us, since his prose has crystallized to verse within this one speech.)
One remarkable thing about "Processional," really less hymn than scherzando, is its blithe overriding of categories, as in the conversion to "anchorite" of "anthracite. " In the translation envisioned here, alchemical, rhetorical, and natural metamorphic processes themselves change into one another. How could we not be somewhat lost in it?
from The Consuming Myth: The Work of James Merrill (Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1987). Copyright © 1987 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Lynn Keller
To the extent that Merrill is willing to point to a truth, it is the same one that preoccupies the other contemporary poets whose work we have examined: process. Perhaps in Merrill's case, the proper term for his sense of continuous transformation would be the literary one, "translation," that figures so importantly in his great poem, "Lost in Translation." In that lyric Merrill is less concerned with translation as product, an achieved version in another language (Rilke's version of Valery's text), than with translation as action, as the transformational process described in both poets' versions of that poem about a palm. Even when considering the translated poem, Merrill focuses on the action of its translator, who is imagined making himself forgo "much of the sun-ripe original / Felicity . . . / In order to render its underlying sense" (ellipsis added). Merrill's interest is in the changes made in turning the poem from the "warm Romance" language French into the cool starkness of German. And while most of the poem concerns memories of the distant past—primarily of the summer when his parents divorced— these past events are not fixed, beyond translation. To remember the past is to make it active in the present and to find it changing, just as the speaker's recent experience with a medium and a puzzle piece changes his sense of his boyhood's many puzzles. Thus, as is appropriate for a poem about translation, the poem's conclusion takes the insistently ongoing present tense:
[quotes ll. 208-215]
For Merrill, all art acts as the coconut palm does, translating loss, absence, waste into something substantial and nourishing.
One meaning of the verb "to translate" is "to express one thing in terms of another." That is also a standard definition of the action of metaphor. In Merrill's oeuvre the text most obviously concerned with the process of translation, and with the action of metaphor, is his trilogy, The Changing Light at Sandover.
From "I knew / / That life was fiction in disguise'": Merrill's Divergence from Auden and Modernism." In Guy Rotella (ed.) Critical Essays on James Merrill. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1996. Reprinted from Keller, Lynn. Re-Making It New: Contemporary American Poetry and the Modernist Tradition. Reprinted by permission of Lynn Keller and Cambridge UP.
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