The Translator’s Invisibility

Blackburn was of course aware that the psychological processes he described so facetiously could be figured only in discursive strategies, and these he saw as a challenge to bourgeois values, not just to individualistic concepts of identity, but to a moralistic sense of propriety in conduct and language. As early as 1950, in a letter to Pound, he remarked on “the impossibility of translating poems written in a twelfth century aristocratic vocabulary into modern english poems written in a twentieth century bourgeois vocabulary” (24 November 1950).

{248} Twenty years later, in a response to the New York Quarterly questionnaire, Blackburn acknowledged that the translator must draw on current English usage, but he also advocated a linguistic experimentalism that recovered marginal discourses, even with the most canonical of literary texts:

How far should a translator attempt to “modernize” an antiquarian piece?

Try first to find a diction, a modern diction, which will translate as many values as possible of the original. I’ve seen Latin poetry translated into hip language that works very well for certain pieces. Carried too far, of course, over a whole body of work, it’d be a stunt.

Some stunts, however, are brilliantly executed.

(Blackburn 1985:617)

Blackburn’s investment in Provençal poetry was partly due to the troubadours’ anti-bourgeois themes, present not only in the celebration of feudal aristocratic values, but also in a representation of the troubadours culled partly from the biographical details in the vidas and razos. Some troubadours were itinerant performers born to commoners—farmers, tradesmen, merchants—but later living and working on the margins of feudal courts; others were landless knights, somewhat migrant, their loyalties drifting among various lords and ladies. In his poem “Sirventes” (1956), a satire “against the city of Toulouse,” Blackburn adopts a troubadour persona and invokes Peire Vidal, portraying him as a bohemian poet, a beatnik, intent on offending any bourgeois sense of decency:

That mad Vidal would spit on it,
that I as his maddened double
do—too
changed, too changed, o
deranged master of song,
master of the viol and the lute
master of those sounds,
I join you in public madness,
in the street I piss
on French politesse

that has wracked all passion from the sound of speech. A leech that sucks the blood is less a lesion. Speech! this imposed imposing imported courtliness, that the more you hear it the {249} more it’s meaningless & without feeling.

(Blackburn 1985:89–90)

In the Provençal translations, Blackburn sometimes tilts his lexicon heavily toward contemporary English, inscribing the troubadour poem With a satire on capitalist economic practices, on businessmen and lawyers. This occurs with another of Bertran de Born’s war songs, No puosc mudar un chantar non esparga. In Blackburn’s version, the marauding knight becomes more criminal, more gangster-like—“A good war, now, makes a niggardly lord/ turn lavish and shell out handsomely”—but the knight is also more business-like, given to financial planning (“expenditures”) and living in suburbia:

have I not taken blows upon my targe?
And dyed red the white of my gonfalon?
Yet for this I have to suffer and pinch my purse,
for Oc-e-No plays with loaded dice.
I’m hardly lord of Rancon or Lusignan
that I can war beyond my own garage
     without an underwriter’s check.
But I’ll contribute knowledge and a good strong arm
with a basin on my head and a buckler on my neck!

(Blackburn 1958:116)