The Translator’s Invisibility

Blackburn’s account, in an interview given some ten years later, shared the skepticism toward academic institutions that Pound voiced on many occasions, particularly the view that existing curricula did not include earlier poetries validated by a modernist cultural agenda. Blackburn cast himself as the advocate of modernism forcing a revision in the university curriculum by reviving older course offerings:

What got me started on Provençal was reading squibs of it in The Cantos and not being able to understand it, which annoyed me. It hadn’t been taught at Wisconsin since the 30’s, so I found Professor [Karl] Bottke, the medievalist out there, who offered to tutor me in it. I needed the course for credit, and to give credit he needed five students. I got him eight and we had a very good course.

(Ossman 1963:22)

One of Blackburn’s classmates, Sister Bernetta Quinn, who subsequently devoted several critical studies to Pound’s writing, {226} described the course as an effort “to act upon their master’s counsel” in works like The Spirit of Romance (Quinn 1972:94). She also noted that Blackburn’s imitation of the “master” evolved into a translation project: “Many of our class assignments, refined, appeared in 1953 in Blackburn’s Proensa, a revelation of the beauty to be found in troubadour song ‘made new’ and a tribute to the influence of Pound” (ibid.).

Published by the poet Robert Creeley’s Mallorca-based Divers Press, Proensa was a bilingual translation of eleven texts by seven Provençal poets. It was on the basis of this work that Blackburn received a Fulbright fellowship to continue his Provençal studies at the University of Toulouse during 1954–1955. When the fellowship ended, he stayed in Europe for a couple more years, at first teaching English conversation at Toulouse while researching Provençal manuscripts and editions at French and Italian libraries, then moving through towns in Spain and Mallorca, writing his own poems and translating. By 1958, Blackburn had produced a substantial booklength translation of troubadour poetry. As he put it in a postcard to Pound (dated “IV. 17.58”),

I have the anthology of troubadours licked now. 105 pieces (cut fr/ 150—and want to bet they’ll want to cut it more?). But the works, fr. G[uille]m. to Cardenal, Riquier and Pedro de Aragon. (1285). 8 years on this job. I hv. an extra carbon without notes, if you will send it back after a bit Just say you care to see it.[8]

Perhaps the most decisive moment in Blackburn’s apprentice-ship as a modernist poet-translator was his correspondence with Pound. Beginning in 1950 and continuing off and on until 1958, Blackburn wrote to Pound at St. Elizabeth’s and occasionally visited him after relocating to New York. With these letters Blackburn frequently sent Pound his translations, seeking detailed, word-by-word criticisms as well as answers to specific questions about the Provençal texts. Pound’s first response, scrawled over a single sheet of paper, encouraged Blackburn to develop a translation discourse that “modernized off Joyce onto Ford” (10 February 1950). Later Pound explicitly endorsed Blackburn’s translations, instructing Dorothy Pound to write that “you have a definite feeling for the Provençal and should stick to it” and then arranging for the publication of one version. In a typescript added to Dorothy’s letter, Pound wrote: “[Peire Vidal’s] {227} ‘Ab l’alen’ sufficiently approved for Ez to hv/ forwarded same to editor that pays when he prints” (12 August 1950).

Most importantly, Pound’s letters furthered Blackburn’s education in the modernist cultural agenda. Pound’s first response attacked language use in the United States from the standpoint of modernist poetics:

   The fatigue,
   The”, my dear Blackpaul,
of a country where no
   exact statements are
ever made!!

(10 February 1950)