The Translator’s Invisibility

For the reader’s convenience, there should be uniformity in spelling proper nouns. It is confusing to the uninitiate to find (often on the same page) Peitau & Poitou, Caersi & Quercy, Talhafer & Tagliaferro (I’d translate it “Iron-Cutter,” since it is a nickname); Ventadorn & Ventadour: Marvoill & Mareuil: Amfos & Alfons. Using the modern names of the towns would help the general reader.

Blackburn’s use of variant spellings were a means of archaizing the text, signifying its historical remoteness. Guthrie preferred current English usage (“Iron-Cutter”), even the latest cartography.

Guthrie’s criticisms went deep to the heart of Blackburn’s project. They touched the texts that figured in the oedipal rivalry with Pound: Guthrie’s concern with fluency led to the suggestion that Blackburn delete his Pound-inspired version of Bertran de Born’s war song. “Maybe I am too harsh,” wrote Guthrie, “but from the first line to the last, it seems forced and ineffectual compared with either the original or with E.Pound’s Sestina drawn from the same source.” When Guthrie reached page 135 in the 187-page manuscript, he scrawled a somewhat exasperated criticism of Blackburn’s mixed lexicons:

P.B.

No, look, if you are going to call somebody a burgesa in one line and make the poor inhorantes go looking it up in Levy, you can’t have {258} the burgesa’s husband getting into a (since 1950) hassle nor somebody doing somebuditch dishonor and smoting him on ye hede in the line after.

R.G.

If one says “copains,” one cannot say in the same sentence “had been taken ill.” It is as if one said “His buddy” (only in a foreign language) “gave up the ghost.”

It is interesting to note that Guthrie repeatedly set himself up as a spokesperson for the nonspecialist, nonacademic audience (“the uninitiate,” “the inhorantes”), but simultaneously made the elitist gesture of excluding popular discourses and dialects, especially working-class colloquialisms. Guthrie’s investment in the standard dialect came with a sense of social superiority that surfaced in his comment on another translation, Blackburn’s version of Bernart de Ventadorn’s Can vei la lauzeta mover, Blackburn’s text is typically heterogeneous:

Narcissus at the spring, I kill
      this human self.
Really, though, without hope, over the ladies;
never again trust myself to them.
      I used to defend them
      but now
I’m clearing out, leaving town, quit.
Not one of them helps me against her
who destroys and confounds me,
fear and disbelieve all of them,
      all the same cut.

(Blackburn 1958:47)

Guthrie thought the colloquialism degraded the foreign text, which he saw as more lofty in tone, more proper in speech, more aristocratic: “This,” he wrote, “gets cheap, a sort of Flatbush parody on Bernart, RG.” Blackburn’s use of “Hell” similarly departed from Guthrie’s elite image of the troubadours: “This isn’t in accord with Bernart’s mood, but maybe it’s more modern than ‘Alas.’” For Guthrie, marginal translation discourses trashed canonical texts. The English he preferred was the standard American dialect; if archaism was used, it needed to be unobtrusive and consistent.

{259} Inevitably, Blackburn’s more inventive experiments provoked Guthrie to domesticate the translations, revising them for fluency, but also deleting the political satire enabled by the mixed lexicon. When Blackburn edged his version of Bertran de Born closer to contemporary social issues by portraying feudal knights as bourgeois entrepreneurs, “unable to war beyond my own garage/ without an underwriter’s check” (Blackburn 1958:125), Guthrie complained about the strange effects produced by the multilingual diction: