The Translator’s Invisibility

Blackburn’s Provençal translation was marked, not only by a connection to an un-American poet—translator, but by an affiliation to popular culture through his resonant use of colloquialism. As Andrew Ross has shown, Cold War intellectuals associated popular culture with totalitarianism, mass thinking, brainwashing, but also with commercialism, egalitarianism, radical democracy. As the American government pursued a policy of Soviet containment abroad, at home intellectuals like Fiedler constructed a national culture of consensus that “depended explicitly upon the containment of intellectual radicalism and cultural populism alike” (Ross 1989:47). In Robert von Hallberg’s view, “what is important to literary history is not only that this consensus existed but that its maintenance and definition depended somehow upon academic institutions. […] To the extent that poets looked to universities for an audience, they were addressing […] the audience that felt greatest responsibility for the refinement of taste and the preservation of a national culture” (Von Hallberg 1985:34). Blackburn’s work with Provençal poetry both questioned and resisted this hegemonic {253} domestic tendency. Allied to a modernist poetic movement that defined itself as “a total rejection of all those qualities typical of academic verse” (Allen 1960:xi), Blackburn’s translation was radical in its ideological interrogations (of the foreign texts, previous English-language appropriations, contemporary American culture) and populist in its juxtaposition of elite and popular cultural discourses.

The publishing history of Blackburn’s manuscript shows without a doubt that the cultural and political values represented by his translation continued to be marginal in the United States late into the 1970s. In Blackburn’s case, however, the marginality was not signalled by mixed reviews or bitter attacks or even media neglect; there was never a publication to review. The manuscript Blackburn felt was finished in 1958 did not see print until twenty years later.

In March of 1958, the influential poetry critic M.L. Rosenthal, who had taught Blackburn briefly at New York University (1947), recommended the Provençal manuscript to Macmillan.[9] In 1957, as poetry editor for The Nation, Rosenthal had accepted one of Blackburn’s translations, his Pound-inspired version of Bertran de Born’s Bem platz to gais temps pascor. Rosenthal was now advising Emile Capouya, an editor in Macmillan’s Trade Department, on a series of poetry volumes. Blackburn submitted the manuscript, tentatively entitled Anthology of Troubadours. It was a translation of sixty-eight texts by thirty poets, considerably reduced from the “105 pieces” that Blackburn mentioned to Pound, “cut fr/150” (17 March 1958). Capouya solicited an outside reader’s report and then, despite a highly critical evaluation, accepted it for publication, issuing Blackburn a contract that paid a small advance ($150) against a full author’s royalty (10 percent of the cover price, $3.50, with a first printing of 1500 copies), plus all the income from first serial rights (initial publications in magazines and anthologies). Although, by October of 1958, the contracts had been signed and countersigned, the manuscript was not complete: Blackburn needed to submit the introduction he had planned.

Capouya scheduled the publication date for the fall of 1959, but Blackburn did not complete the manuscript, and the project languished until 1963, when, a few years after Capouya’s departure from Macmillan, another editor decided to cancel the contract. During the 1960s Blackburn tried to get his manuscript accepted by other publishers, like Doubleday, who asked Rosenthal to evaluate {254} the project. But these attempts were sporadic and without success. The translation at last appeared posthumously in 1978 as Proensa: An Anthology of Troubadour Poetry, edited by Blackburn’s friend, the medievalist and poet George Economou, for the University of California Press.