The Translator’s Invisibility

I don’t become the author when I’m translating his prose or poetry, but I’m certainly getting my talents into his hang-ups. Another person’s preoccupations are occupying me. They literally own me for that time. You see, it’s not just a matter of reading the language and understanding it and putting it into English. It’s understanding something that makes the man do it, where he’s going. And it’s not an entirely objective process. It must be partially subjective; there has to be some kind of projection. How do you know which word to choose when a word may have four or five possible meanings in English? It’s not just understanding the text. In a way you live it each time, I mean, you’re there. Otherwise, you’re not holding the poem.

(ibid.:13)

English translation theorists from the seventeenth century onward had recommended a sympathetic identification between the translator and the foreign author. In Alexander Tytler’s words, “he must adopt the very soul of his author, which must speak through his own organs” (Tytler 1978:212). Yet this sort of sympathy was used to underwrite the individualism of transparent translation, the illusion of authorial presence produced by fluent discourse: it was Tytler’s answer to the question, “How then shall a translator accomplish this difficult union of ease with fidelity?” Blackburn’s modernist sense of identification acknowledged that there could never be a perfect sympathy, that the translator developed a “projection,” a representation, specific to the target-language culture, that interrogated the foreign author, exposing “his hangups.” When Blackburn’s translator is “there,” the sense of immediacy comes, not from any direct apprehension of the foreign text, but from living out an interpretation that enables the translator to “hold the poem,” rationalize every step in the translation process, every choice of a word.

In responding to a 1970 questionnaire from the New York Quarterly, Blackburn used similar psychological terms to describe the textual effects of translation, observing that the translator’s identification changes the foreign author, but also the translator himself, who {247} increasingly becomes the site of multiple subjectivities, a deviation from rational norms:

He must be willing (& able) to let another man’s life enter his own deeply enough to become some permanent part of his original author. He should be patient, persistent, slightly schizoid, a hard critic, a brilliant editor […] We are all hundreds, maybe thousands of people, potentially or in fact.

(Blackburn 1985:616)

In both the interview and questionnaire, Blackburn’s view of the poet—translator is insistently masculinist: the process of identification or “projection” occurs between men. In the interview, it was part of Blackburn’s bohemian self-presentation, where he abruptly segued from a discussion about “writing in a travel situation” to “girlwatching”: “To come back to the city, though, the subway is an incredible place for girl-watching. You find one face or a good pair of legs—you can look at them for hours” (Packard 1987:14). And yet if, in Blackburn’s account, translation multiplies subjectivities by mediating cultural differences, it can only explode any individualistic concept of identity, masculinist or otherwise. Blackburn felt that the range of different demands made on the translator was extreme, resulting in deviancy, inviting psychiatric terms or allusions to popular cultural forms, like blues and rock-and-roll (or even more specifically the bluesbased rock of Bob Dylan’s 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home), linking the translator to other racial and youth subcultures:

In your view, what is a translator?

A man who brings it all back home.
In short, a madman.

(Blackburn 1985:616)