The Translator’s Invisibility

With the fine spring weather
that makes the world seem young again,
when the meadows come green again
I want to begin
with a new song
on a love that’s my cark and desire,
but is so far I cannot hit her mark
or my words fire her.

I’m so sad nothing can comfort me,
better off dead, for foul mouths
have separated me from her, God
damn them—o,
I would have wanted her so much! Now
I grouch and shout, or weep, or sing
or walk about
like any hare-brained golden thing.

And how lovely she I sing is! more
than I know how to tell you here.
Her glance is straight, her color’s fresh
and white, white without blemish, no
{245}   she wears no make-up.
They can say no hard word of her, she
is so fine and clear as an emerald.

(Blackburn 1958:17)

Blackburn’s odd rhythms and diction destabilize the reader’s sympathetic identification with the lyric voice, preventing the translation from being taken as the “original,” the transparent expression of the foreign author, and instead insisting on its secondorder status, a text that produces effects in English, distinct from the Provençal poem but also departing from contemporary English usage, possessing a powerful self-difference, a sudden shifting from the familiar to the unfamiliar, even to the unintelligible.

Blackburn’s translation of Provençal poetry is clearly more accessible than the Zukofskys’ Catullus, requiring a less aggressive application to appreciate because of a more inviting lyricism. But it too follows Pound’s innovations by developing a translation discourse that is both historicist and foreignizing, that signals the cultural differences of the foreign texts through a linguistic experimentalism. The project is marked by the rivalry with Pound that formed Blackburn’s identity as a modernist poet—translator, determining not only the choice of texts and the development of a translation discourse, but also a revisionism that critiques Pound’s own appropriations of the same texts, questioning their investment in aristocracy, patriarchy, individualism—ideological determinations that also marked Blackburn’s writing in varying degrees and across many different forms (letters, poems, translations, interviews). Blackburn’s Provençal project was decisive in his personal formation as a author; but since this formation occurred in writing, the translation could also be conceived as a strategic public intervention, a cultural political practice that was fundamentally modernist, but that was not uncritical in its acceptance of Pound’s modernism.

Blackburn’s rare comments on his work suggest that he saw it along these or related lines. In a 1969 interview, he responded to the question, “What poets have influenced your work?” by citing Pound, Williams, Creeley, Charles Olson, whose poetry he read because “I wanted to find out who my father was” (Packard 1987:9). Blackburn may not have psychoanalyzed his relationship to Pound, but after translating for some twenty years and spending many years in analysis, he definitely possessed a psychoanalytic view of the {246} translating process, of the relationship between the translation and the foreign text, the translator and the foreign author. This is clear in the interview: