The Translator’s Invisibility

Perhaps even nationalism, so living a force today in Africa and the Far East, is beginning to die a little in the affluent West. Except for the political forms, Western Europe is on the threshold of becoming an economic unity. Is it an impossible dream to think of a bilingual America stretching from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic Ocean, comprised of eighty-three states instead of fifty? Not by conquest but by union. How move more efficiently to raise the standard of living of underdeveloped countries in our own hemisphere than by removing the borders?

(Blackburn 1962:358)

Readers in 1962 no doubt regarded this passage as a utopian flight. Blackburn himself called it “an impossible dream.” In the following year, he published a somber article in Kulchur, “The Grinding Down,” which surveyed the current poetry “scene” and found modernism marginal and fragmented: “the Renaissance” Blackburn wrote, “didn’t take”; it was now centered in a few small-circulation magazines, “making a place somewhere between the outer fringe of the academic and the inner sector of the so-called beat” (Blackburn 1963:17, 10). In 1962, Blackburn was more sanguine about the prospects of modernism, but the emphasis on the “West” in his utopianism shows the difficulty of imagining relations between the hemispheres during the Cold War—even for a politically engaged poet-translator like him. The perspective from which he anticipated future global developments was clearly that of North American hegemony, allied with western Europe {252} in a strategic containment of Soviet expansionism, but permitted to indulge in some hemispheric expansion of its own (“eighty-three states”).

Blackburn’s article is valuable, not as a historical prediction or foreign policy, but rather as a theoretical model, useful in thinking how translation can be enlisted in a democratic cultural politics. Blackburn saw modernist translation as an effective intervention in American culture, based on a social diagnosis that found hegemonic domestic values implicated in unequal or exclusionary social relations, Blackburn’s own translations, with their various foreignizing strategies, served a left-wing internationalism, designed to combat the ideological forms of exclusion in Cold War America, perhaps most evident in the hysterical patriotism excited by hardening geopolitical positions (Whitfield 1991). The Provençal translation was especially subversive in this cultural situation because it revealed a broad range of influences, foreign and historical. The clear debt to modernism made the project vulnerable to Leslie Fiedler’s politicized attack on Pound’s translations for lacking a “center,” an allegiance to one national literature, American: “Our Muse is the poet without a Muse, whom quite properly we acquit of treason (what remains to betray?) and consign to Saint Elizabeth’s” (Fiedler 1962:459).