The Translator’s Invisibility

Blackburn actually addressed the social implications of translation on one occasion: in “The International Word,” an article he contributed to a special issue of The Nation devoted to culture and politics. Published in 1962, on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Blackburn was serving as poetry editor of this left-wing magazine, “The International Word” argues that a modernist cultural politics can effectively intervene in the current global situation: in Blackburn’s diagnosis, “the crisis of identity of the individual in a world whose underlying realities are the cold war and the bomb” (Blackburn 1962:358), In a survey of contemporary American poetry, Blackburn found the most politically engaged poets to be modernist: his litany includes Pound, Williams, the Objectivists, Black Mountain, the Beats, the New York School—figures and tendencies that had recently been presented as oppositional in Donald Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry (Allen 1960). Blackburn noted Pound’s insistence “on {250} the values of bringing across other sensibilities in other languages and from all periods of history and civilization” (Blackburn 1962:357) and assigned translation a key geopolitical role: “the mutual insemination of cultures is an important step in what our policy makers think of as international understanding” (ibid.:358). In this politicized rationale for cultural exchange, modernist translation was summoned to resolve a domestic crisis, searching foreign cultures to supply the lack of confidence in the “official values” of Cold War American culture:

The Cold War and the possibly imminent illumination of the world have created another reaction in poets […] There is an affirmation, a reaffirmation, of values, a searching of the older cultures, both American and foreign, modern and ancient, for values to sustain the individual in a world where all the official values have let us down entirely by being in the main hypocritical (consider the phrase “business ethics” for a moment), the religions attentuated to the point where even the monks are screaming from the pinch.

(ibid.:359)

Blackburn’s concern about the “identity of the individual” did not assume a liberal individualism grounded in concepts of personal freedom, self-determination, psychological coherence; he rather saw human identity as other-determined, a composite constructed in relationships to “values” that were transindividual, cultural and social, housed in institutions like the state, the church, the school. If translation could change the contours of subjectivity, Blackburn thought, then it could contribute to a change in values, away from “the military stance and the profit motive” toward less strained geopolitical relations, “perhaps breadth of understanding for other peoples, a greater tolerance for and proficiency in other languages, combined with political wisdom and expediency over the next two generations” (ibid.:358).

Some of Blackburn’s remarks have come to seem much too optimistic. He judged from “the current flood of translations in both prose and poetry” that “The ducts of free exchange are already open in literature” (Blackburn 1962:357, 358). But cultural exchange through translation wasn’t then (nor ever could be) “free” of numerous constraints, literary, economic, political, and English-language translation certainly wasn’t free in 1962. That year the {251} number of translations issued by American publishers was actually small, approximately 6 percent of the total books published (Publishers Weekly 1963). We now know that American translation rates reached their apex in the early 1960s, but they have consistently been quite low in contrast to foreign publishing trends throughout the postwar period, which show much higher percentages of translating English-language books.

Blackburn’s utopianism also has a pro-American slant that seems too uncritical after numerous subsequent developments—the Vietnam War, the political and military interventions in El Salvador and Nicaragua, government skittishness on ecological issues, the emergence of multinational corporations, especially in publishing, where the number of English-language translations has fallen to less than 3 percent of the total books published. In 1962, however, Blackburn imagined that