The Translator’s Invisibility

Pound’s adage-like directive to Blackburn—“Acc/Kung”—seems to suggest that preexisting cultural materials are “necessary” for innovations, however regressive those materials might appear (“the dirt”). And indeed this paradox is signified in Pound’s fractured language, “Acc/Kung,” a pun on “Achtung” (“attention”) that made the adage at once Chinese and German, a recovery of Confucianism with a fascistic overtone—the topical resonance of “Achtung” would have been more pronounced, and more ideologically significant, to an English-language reader in the Cold War era. Blackburn’s review transformed this passage from Pound’s letter into a directive that the critic allow the current cultural situation, however regressive, to determine the “requisite labor,” the sort of commentary that will change that situation into one more favorable to Pound’s poetry (Blackburn 1953:215). In the case of Kenner, this meant educating the educators (“the top”) about Pound’s “form or technique or the materials, or what follows from them, what they lead to” (ibid.). Blackburn charged Kenner with “a too-simple discipleship” while he himself presumably exemplified a more complicated one, as we now know, apparent in his plagiarized quotations from Pound’s letters.

In this plagiarism, Blackburn at once assumed and qualified Pound’s identity, recommending a strategic appropriation of modernism at a moment when it occupied a marginal position in American culture. Blackburn’s strategy required an interrogation of Pound’s modernist cultural politics, revising it to intervene into a later social situation. He faulted Kenner for an “uncritical” acceptance of Pound’s modernism

without facing the economic and social axes of his criticism, and the conclusions these entail. The poet, this poet, as economic and social reformer, is a dilemma all of us must face eventually. It must be faced before it can be worked. The problem cannot be ignored, nor will any uncritical swallowing of the man’s facts and theories do. And it is useless and ignorant to abuse him, simply. There is more than one madhouse in Washington these days.

(Blackburn 1953:217)

{230} The correspondence shows that Blackburn’s identity as poet-translator was not only modernist, but masculinist. It was constructed on the basis of an oedipal rivalry with Pound, in which Blackburn sought approval and encouragement from his poetic father in frank, personal letters that linked his writing to sexual relationships with women. The oedipal nature of this rivalry shapes Blackburn’s bohemian self-portrait in the correspondence, his deviations from bourgeois respectability, his occasional use of obscenities (“The defense is to not give a fuck”). His letters imitated the gruff colloquialism of Pound’s letters, but far exceeded them in shock value (Pound doesn’t go beyond “goddam”). After Pound wrote that he submitted Blackburn’s version of Peire Vidal’s “Ab l’alen” to an editor (12 August 1950), Blackburn’s response made clear the oedipal configuration of his authorial identity:

THANKYOU, POUND. And the dry season is over! Have been sitting here trying to divert me by reading. NG. Other diversions physical better for the health et alli. Going to sources like sex and finally getting it relaxed and fine and broke the drought in a shower of somethingorother. Pure peace: to go into a woman relaxed, i.e. in control of the tensions; to sit and write again, i.e. in control of the tensions. So up and about and seeing and doing and feeling.

(early September 1950?)

Although this remarkable passage opens with Blackburn thanking Pound “for the practical encouragement” of submitting the translation, it quickly begins to suggest that Blackburn himself “broke the drought” in his writing through “sex.”