The Translator’s Invisibility

{243} Blackburn’s various discursive strategies included syntactical peculiarities adopted by Pound. Dudley Fitts’s review of Pound’s translations took exception to their syntax: after quoting a line from Pound’s Daniel, “Love inkerlie doth leaf and flower and bear,” Fitts complained that “Those, Reader, are verbs, not nouns” (Fitts 1954:19). Blackburn likewise used nouns as verbs, frustrating the reader’s grammatical expectations with phrasing that was strange (“I grouch”), but also evocative (“the night they sorcered me”).

Blackburn’s prosody owes a debt to Pound’s recommendations “as to the use of canzoni in English, whether for composition or in translation” (Anderson 1983:217). Pound felt that some English “rhymes are of the wrong timbre and weight” for the intricately rhymed stanza in Provençal and Italian, and to compensate he developed a “rhyme-aesthetic” that differed from the foreign texts, as well as from current stanzaic forms in English-language poetry: “Against which we have our concealed rhymes and our semisubmerged alliteration” (ibid.). Blackburn’s acute sense of word placement and timing led to varying patterns of internal and end rhyme that sometimes heightened the anachronism of his lexical mix, the clash of different cultures, different historical periods—like the “okay” / “atelier” rhyme in his version of Guillem de Poitou’s Ben vuelh que sapchon li pluzor.

I would like it if people knew this song,
a lot of them, if it prove to be okay
when I bring it in from my atelier, all
fine and shining:
for I surpass the flower of this business,
it’s the truth, and I’ll
produce the vers as witness
when I’ve bound it in rhyme.

(Blackburn 1986:12)

Blackburn’s attention to the musicality of the Provençal text assumes Pound’s discussion of “melopoeia” in the canso and canzone: “the poems of medieval Provence and Tuscany in general, were all made to be sung. Relative estimates of value inside these periods must take count of the cantabile values” of the work, “accounting for its manifest lyric impulse, or for the emotional force in its cadence” (Anderson 1983:216, 230). For Pound, this rhythm-based lyricism produced an effect that was individualistic but also masculinist, constructing a {244} lyrical “I” in the translation that was explicitly male: “I have in my translations tried to bring over the qualities of Guido’s rhythm, not line for line, but to embody in the whole of my English some trace of that power which implies the man,” what Pound later called “a robustezza, a masculinity” (ibid.:19, 242). But Pound’s most innovative translations tended to diverge from his modernist critical representations of the foreign texts, principally because his translation discourse was so heterogeneous, full of textual effects that undermined any illusionism, any sense of the foreign author’s presence, any coherent “I.” In the same way, Blackburn’s lyrical prosody definitely constructs a subjectposition with which the listener/ reader can identify, but the rhythms are always varying, asymmetrical at points, and the lexical and syntactical peculiarities are constantly foregrounding the textuality, weakening the coherence of the speaking voice, splintering the discourse into different cultures and periods, even different genders (depending on the genre), now locked in a mutual interrogation. Here is the opening of Blackburn’s version of Cercamon’s Ab lo temps qe refrescar.