The Translator’s Invisibility

Pound suggested that Blackburn read certain troubadours from modernist angles: “Pieire Cardinal was not hiding under aestheticism” (undated; 1957?); “Try Sordello” (1 December 1950). He recommended that Blackburn meet other modernist poets living in New York, like Louis Dudek and Jackson MacLow (4 July 1950). And he urged Blackburn to study cultural and economic history “to set the stuff IN something,” to situate his Provençal translations in a historical context (25 January 1954?). Pound repeatedly criticized academic institutions for failing to teach a sense of history and sometimes even quizzed Blackburn on historical figures:

Ignorance of history in univ/ grads/ also filthy. blame not the pore stewwddent, but the goddam generations of conditioned profs/ // /thesis fer Sister B/: absolute decline of curiosity re/every vital problem in U.S. educ/ from 1865 onward. whentell did Agassiz die? anyhow.)

(20 March 1950)

The sense of history that Pound taught in these letters avoided any wholesale reduction of the past to the present, as well as any reduction of the present to the past. The former led to “‘modernizing’ / curricula, i.e. excluding any basic thought from ALL the goddam univs” (20 March 1950), whereas the latter led to an antiquarianism without contemporary relevance: “merely retrospective philology LACKS vitality” (1957?). The “vitality” came from allowing the historical difference of earlier cultures to challenge the contemporary cultural situation. “BLACKBURN,” Pound wrote, “might git some life into it IF {228} he/wd/extend his curiosity,” and then he provided a reference to the historian Brooks Adams’ Law of Civilization and Decay (1895): “Vid Brooks Adams/ Civ/ & Dec Knopf reissue / p.160” (25 January 1954?).

The fact that Blackburn was learning from this correspondence is clear in his 1953 review of Hugh Kenner’s study The Poetry of Ezra Pound. Blackburn described Pound’s “strongest and most criticized positions”: his “case for the honorable intelligence as against the material cunning of usurers” and “his insistence on definition and exactitude as against muddle, the deliberate obscuring of facts and downright mendacity” (Blackburn 1953:217). In this rather negative review, Blackburn affected a cranky tone that sounded remarkably like Pound, questioning Kenner’s decision to criticize the critics of The Cantos: “He puts a mouthful of teeth in those moth-eaten wolves, journalism and education, and that other pack of elderly puppies who run with what he calls ‘the upper-middle-brow literary press,’ and then proceeds to beat them off” (ibid.:215). The question Blackburn addressed to Kenner, as well as to every reader of Pound’s poetry, was

why waste time on the dunderheads? Spend your honest effort positively, do the honest work, educate from the top, where there is any. Kung says: “You can’t take all the dirt out of the ground before you plant seed.”

(ibid.:216)

Blackburn seems to be alluding to Pound’s Confucianism in The Cantos (“Kung says”), an allusion that casts Blackburn as Pound, establishing a process of identification for the reviewer (an aspiring poet—translator), yet in a way that is recognizable to the reader of the review, understood as a pose. The correspondence further complicates the allusion by revealing another, more competitive level of identification: this passage from Blackburn’s review is a plagiarism; the tone, the ideas, even the words are actually Pound’s. Blackburn was quoting from one of Pound’s letters to him, although without acknowledgement:

Acc/Kung: not necessary to take all the dirt out of the field before yu plant seed.

Hindoo god of wealth inhabits cow dung. Del Mar: gold mining not only ruins the land, it ruins it FOREVER. No reason to {229} sleep on a middan.

bombs no kulchurl value.

     IF possible to educate from the top??

where there is any top. but at least from where one is.

(12 August 1950)