The Translator’s Invisibility

Blackburn does not challenge Pound in any direct way: one of the striking things about the passage is the conspicuous omission of any first-person pronouns that would indicate Blackburn’s agency. This passage constructs only one subject-position, Pound’s. Yet an agent appears in the sudden syntactical break at “broke the drought,” which assumes an “I,” distinct from Pound, and thus hints at the sexual competition underlying Blackburn’s identity as poet—translator. This identity is fundamentally a patriarchal construction requiring the female to be an object of male sexuality so that Blackburn might regain his “control” over his writing. A sexual exploitation of “a woman” displaces Blackburn’s literary dependence on Pound.

{231} A few months later, on his twenty-fifth birthday, Blackburn wrote a long letter to Pound that continued this link between writing and sexuality. This time another canonical writer is invoked, and the sexual partners multiply:

A month ago, three weeks, something, I got rid of two girl friends, picked fights, having adequate reasons, broke off. A month later both grace my bed at intervals, much more secure because of the honesty regained in their and my reassessments. One doesn’t break off relationships. Stories don’t end. Shxpr knew and killed off all his major characters, ending THEIR story: la seule methode effectif.

(24 November 1950)

Blackburn is again “in control,” devising his own, sexually powerful concept of “honesty,” writing his own narrative as well as those of his “girl friends,” here likened to Shakespearean characters as he is to Shakespeare.

This is the double triangle of Blackburn’s authorial identity: the rivalry with Pound is worked out through a sexual dominance over women and an identification with other canonical writers:

Funny thing, fear of death. I am twenty-five on this date. Seen, faced, lived with, worked with, death. We are all familiars with it, the twenty-five to thirty group. Somewhat, someh o w.

The defense is to not give a fuck.

I am defenseless.

I care about too much.

Your position too. Why you are where you are.

Elective affinities. Good title. (G. was afraid of his genius.)

(Loved many worthy and unworthy women and married—his housekeeper.)

(ibid.)

Blackburn’s imitation of the discontinuous writing in Pound’s letters resulted in a suggestive free-associating that revealed not only the height of his poetic ambitions (Goethe), but also their sexual conditions. The rivalry with Pound, at once literary and sexual, finally becomes explicit near the end of this letter:

{232} Would you care to see more [translations]? I’ll make copies. Reminding me I shall get you some texts of such stuff for xmas. I want to give you something. If you need anything I could find for you let me know. I am unreliable and faithful. If that makes sense to you. I am faithful to two remarkable women at the same time.

(ibid.)

Blackburn is “faithful” to Pound in his respect for the elder writer’s literary authority, but “unreliable” in his effort to challenge that authority through assertions of his sexual potency (i.e., when he is “faithful to two remarkable women at the same time”).

It is impossible to know what Pound thought of such personal revelations. None of his letters referred to them. Still, after this last revealing letter from Blackburn, Pound seems to have broken off the correspondence, which was not resumed for three years. “Is anything wrong?” Blackburn suddenly wrote in 1953, “Or is it, on your part, a cessation of correspondence? And do you object if I write you from time to time, if the latter shot is the case?” (4 July 1953). The correspondence had become important enough to Blackburn’s sense of himself as a writer that he needed merely to write to Pound, without getting any response.