The Translator’s Invisibility

The man who fears war and squats opposing
My words for stour, hath no blood of crimson
But is fit only to rot in womanish peace
Far from where worth’s won and the swords clash
For the death of such sluts I go rejoicing;
Yea, I fill all the air with my music.

(Pound 1956:8)

As Peter Makin has argued, Pound’s appropriations of earlier poets like Bertran serve “as an exemplum, a demonstration of a possible way of living,” and they are laden with various cultural and ideological determinations (Makin 1978:42). Makin links the “phallic aggressiveness” of “Sestina: Altaforte” to Pound’s esteem for “the ‘medieval clean line’” in architecture, as well as to his eulogies of dictators past and present, like Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta of Renaissance Rimini and Benito Mussolini, “a male of the species” (Makin 1978:29–35; Pound 1954:83).

{236} Blackburn included a translation of Bertran’s poem in the troubadour anthology he mentioned to Pound in 1958. He followed Pound’s example by pursuing a modernist translation strategy, resorting to free verse with the most subtly intricate rhythms and making an inventive selection of archaisms. Blackburn’s translation is a strong performance that competes favorably against both of Pound’s appropriations of the Provençal text:

And I love beyond all pleasure, that
lord who horsed, armed and beyond fear is
forehead and spearhead in the attack, and there
emboldens his men with exploits. When
stour proches and comes to quarters
may each man pay his quit-rent firmly,
follow his lord with joy, willingly,
for no man’s proved his worth a stiver until
many the blows
he’s taken and given.

Maces smashing painted helms,
glaive-strokes descending, bucklers riven:
this to be seen at stour’s starting!
And many valorous vassals pierced and piercing
striking together!
And nickering, wandering lost, through
the battle’s thick,
brast-out blood on broken harness,
horses of deadmen and wounded.
And having once sallied into the stour
no boy with a brassard may think of aught, but
the swapping of heads, and hacking off arms—
for here a man is worth more dead
than shott-free and caught!

(Blackburn 1958:119–120)

“Quit-rent,” “vassals,” “glaive-strokes”—Blackburn created a lexicon that was obviously medieval, and he occasionally mimicked Anglo-Saxon patterns of rhythm and alliteration (“brast-out blood on broken harness”). Yet his translation discourse was not only historicizing, but foreignizing: some of the archaisms are decidedly unfamiliar, or {237} anachronistic, used in later periods than the Middle Ages. “Stiver,” a small coin, is first used in the sixteenth century. The verb “nicker” is a nineteenth-century usage for “neigh,” appearing in such literary texts as Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Monastery (1820). “Brassard” is French for “armor,” but in English it constitutes another nineteenth-century usage, this time Victorian, adding a touch of pre-Raphaelite medievalism to the translation. The word “proches” is also French, at least in spelling; in Blackburn’s translation it is a pseudo-archaic neologism, an Anglicized French word that appears to be an archaic variant spelling of “approaches” but actually isn’t (no such spelling is recorded in the OED).