The Translator’s Invisibility

Blackburn worked hard to surpass Pound on every level. His inventive prosody aimed to mimic the song-like sound effects of the Provençal text, evoking the music of Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” especially at the end of the first stanza. And he created a translation discourse that sampled the most varied lexicons, past (“drill”) and present (“honey”), British (“proper fellow”) and American (“pretty thing”), standard usage (“sir”) and slang (“baby”). In a later version, Blackburn coarsened the colloquialism “pretty thing” into “pretty piece,” revealing at the outset the knight’s sexual designs on the girl and treating him (instead of her, as in the Provençal “toza”) in the most unsavoury way, as some sort of sex-crazed ’50s hipster given to pornographic come-ons: “Well, baby! What a pretty piece” (Blackburn 1986:35). Blackburn continues this ironic image of the knight by revising the Provençal text at “pareill paria” (roughly “social equals,” “your fellows,” “your peers”), which he translated as “proper fellow,” suggesting both the knight’s superior social position and the moral impropriety concealed by his “proper” accent. Blackburn’s mixture of archaism with current usage juxtaposes the cultural representations from two periods, allowing them to interrogate one another: the coarse contemporary slang demystifies the more formal rhetorical effects (troubadour and Marlovian) that mystified aristocratic domination (in medieval Provence and Elizabethan England); and the archaism defamiliarizes the most recent and familiar sexual terms (“pretty piece”) by exposing their complicity with masculinist images of women in past aristocratic literary cultures.

This interrogative effect of Blackburn’s mixed lexicons strengthens his version of the shepherdess’s cryptic conclusion—which Pound misread and suppressed. In Blackburn’s version, she describes the mystifying rhetoric of feudal patriarchy as an archaic-sounding “simple show” and then unmasks it as a distraction from the material conditions of the seduction, not the transcendental mana in the {242} Provençal text, but the unequal social relations in which she and the knight are involved, signified here by a colloquialism, “the lunch basket”:

—Sir, the owl is your bird of omen.
There’s always some who’ll stand open-
mouthed before the simple show,
while there’s others’ll wait until
    the lunch basket comes around.

(Blackburn 1958:25)

Given the interrogative effects of its mixed lexicon, Blackburn’s translation can be read as a critique of the ideological determinations, both aristocratic and masculinist, that shape Pound’s version as well as Marcabru’s text.

Blackburn’s Provençal translations are the distinguished achievement of a modernist poet—translator. Taking up the innovations that Pound developed in his versions of troubadour poets like Arnaut Daniel, Blackburn cultivated a discursive heterogeneity to signify the linguistic and cultural difference of the Provençal texts. And he did it by recovering various English-language dialects and discourses—residual, dominant, emergent. There is a rich strain of archaism, partly medieval, partly Elizabethan, suggestive of Chaucer, Douglas, Sir Philip Sidney, Shakespeare: “the king’s helots,” “choler,” “her soft mien,” “seisin,” “cark,” “sire,” “wench,” “harlotry,” “puissance,” “haulberk,” “doublets,” “thee,” “forfend,” “dolors,” “gulls,” “escutcheon,” “villeiny,” “beyond measure.” And there is an equally rich strain of contemporary colloquialism, occasionally British (“tart”), but mostly American, including slang and obscenity from the 1950s, but cutting across different periods, cultural forms (elite and mass), and social groups: “jay-dee”, (for “juvenile delinquent”), “phonies,” “push-cart vendor,” “budged,” “cash,” “grouch,” “make-up,” “goo,” “asshole,” “cunt,” “the doc,” “we’ll have some lovin’,” “all of ‘em crapped out,” “balls,” “this bitch,” “hardup,” “shell out,” “nymphos,” “creeps,” “hide-the-salami,” “skimpy,” “floored,” “you sound like some kind of nut,” “Mafiosi,” “garage,” “steam-rolls,” “a pain in his backside,” “hassle,” “keep his eye peeled for them,” “shimmy,” “90 proof.” Blackburn’s multiple lexicons are also multilingual, including Provençal (“trobar,” “canso,” “vers,”), French (“fosse,” “targe,” “copains,” “maistre,”), and even Gallicized pseudoarchaism (“cavalage,” drawn from the Provençal encavalgar, “to ride a horse”).