The Translator’s Invisibility

The marginality of modernist translation projects like the Zukofskys’ has extended into the present, both in and out of the academy. Not only do the innovations of modernism inspire few English-language translators, but the critical commentary these innovations receive is shaped by the continuing dominance of transparent discourse—which is to say that they are treated dismissively, even by the fledgling academic discipline of Translation Studies. This is apparent in Ronnie Apter’s Digging for the Treasure: Translation after Pound (Apter 1987).

Apter sought to distinguish Pound’s achievement as a poet— translator from that of his Victorian predecessors and then measure his influence on later English-language poetry translation, mainly in the {224} United States. But she was not fond of the most daring modernist experiments. Although her discussion included many translators, wellknown as well as obscure (Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Lowell, Paul Blackburn, W.S.Merwin), she totally ignored the Zukofskys’ Catullus, preferring instead to comment on the free, colloquial version of Catullus 8 that Louis Zukofsky included in his volume of poems, Anew (1946). For Apter, what was valuable about this version was its evocation of a familiar speaking voice, its illusion of transparency: “the effect recreates Catullus’s pain as if he were alive today” (Apter 1987:56). In line with many other reviewers and critics, she also professed greater admiration for Pound’s “Major Personae” than for the interpretive translations in which he pushed his discourse to heterogeneous extremes. “His translation experiments are interesting,” Apter observed, “but not entirely successful” (ibid.:67).

The standard of “success” here is fluent, domesticating translation where discursive shifts are unobtrusive, scarcely noticeable. Thus, Apter praised Blackburn’s Provençal translations because “he develops a diction in which both modern colloquialisms and deliberate archaisms seem at home” (Apter 1987:72). But Pound’s version of Arnaut Daniel’s “L’aura amara” “is marred by pseudo-archaic excursions” and “ludicrous” renderings, making it “sometimes marvelous and sometimes maddeningly awful” (ibid.:70, 71, 68). Apter definitely shared part of the modernist cultural agenda, notably the “emphasis on passion and intellect combined.” And she went so far as to inscribe this agenda in Pound’s translations, calling his versions of Daniel “Donne-like,” using T.S.Eliot’s reading of “metaphysical” poetry to describe an English-language translation of a Provençal text and then concluding, somewhat disingenuously, that it was Pound, not she, who “has made a semi-successful comparison of Arnaut Daniel and John Donne” (ibid.:71). The kind of translation Apter preferred, however, was not modernist, but Enlightenment, not historicist, but humanist, lacking the distancing effect of the foreign, transparent. She praised Burton Raffel’s version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight because “Raffel has a knack of getting his readers to identify with the emotions of the fourteenth-century characters,” who come to “seem all too human” (ibid.:64).[7]

III

The marginalization of modernism in English-language translation during the postwar period limited the translator’s options and {225} defined their cultural and political stakes. Most translators chose a fluent, domesticating method that reduced the foreign text to dominant cultural values in English, above all transparent discourse, but also a varied range of concepts, beliefs, and ideologies that were equally dominant in Anglo-American culture at this time (Judeo-Christian monotheism, Enlightenment humanism, cultural elitism). The few translators who chose to resist these values by developing a foreignizing method, taking up the innovations pioneered by Pound to signify the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text, encountered condemnation and neglect. The ways in which this cultural situation constrained the translator’s activity, the forms of resistance that a modernist translator might adopt at the margins of English-language literary culture, are pointedly illustrated by the career of the American poet Paul Blackburn (1926–1971). The overriding question in this assessment of Blackburn’s career is twofold: How did his translation projects come to negotiate the dominance of transparency and other values in postwar American culture? And to what extent can he serve as a model of how to resist this dominance? Pound played a crucial role in Blackburn’s formation as a poettranslator. It was under Pound’s influence that Blackburn began studying Provençal troubadour poetry in 1949–1950, when he was an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin.