The Translator’s Invisibility

Mareuil (Dordogne): I use the modern French spelling to normalize the place name. In the manuscripts you’ll find Maroill, Maruoill, Marueill, Maruelh, Marvoill, Merueil, Meruoill, Miroill, and Miroilh. Some of these may be simply copyists’ mistakes, but they also reflect slight differences in pronunciation from area to area. […] The point I would make here is that neither the pronunciation nor the orthography was particularly standardized. Especially in the poems, I use the version that suits my ear at that point. In the razo here I use Anfos for the king of Aragon: the name is also Amfos, Alfons—I don’t remember using the French Alphonse ever.

(Blackburn 1986:285)

The publishing history that banished Blackburn’s Provençal translations to the margins of American literary culture, available only in small-circulation magazines and limited-edition books, inevitably confined the influence of their striking effects. These inspired, not the {261} work of other translators or translation theorists and critics, but mainly Blackburn’s own poetry (Sturgeon 1990). Throughout the 1960s, the translations became a field of prosodic experiment for Blackburn: he explored Charles Olson’s performance-oriented notion of “projective verse,” “in which the poet manages to register both the acquisitions of his ear and the pressures of his breath” (Allen 1960:393). Olson argued that this prosody followed the modernist abandonment of the pentameter standard (“the experiments of Cummings, Pound, Williams”), but it was uniquely made possible by the typewriter, which, “due to its rigidity and space precisions,” could produce a poem “as a script to its vocalization” (ibid.). Blackburn, in his New York Quarterly interview, similarly took the layout of the text as a set of notations for performance: “Punctuation serves much the way that spacing does—that is, to indicate the length of a pause” (Packard 1987:11).

After the Macmillan episode, Blackburn’s revisions of the Provençal translations included more attention to their formal qualities—punctuation, line break, spacing. Occasionally the results were dramatic. Blackburn’s work on the opening of this text by Marcabru developed the iconic aspect of the prosody, its imitation of the falling leaf:

     When the leaf spins
     its staying power
gone,
          twists off,
               falls
                    spinning
down through the branches from top limbs whence
     wind has torn it,
I watch.
It is a sign.
     The icy storm that’s brewing’s better
     than grumbling and meandering summer
     congesting us with hates and whoring.

(Blackburn 1958:30)

     When the leaf spins
its staying power
                    gone,
{262} twists off,
               falls
                    spinning
down through the branches
from top limbs from
which the wind has
               torn it, I
watch.
It is a sign.
     The icy storm that’s brewing’s better
     than grumbling and meandering summer
     congesting us with hates and whoring.

(Blackburn 1986:43)

In the later version, Blackburn sacrificed the archaism “whence,” but replaced it with a repetitive syntactical turn that is more evocative of the “spinning” leaf (“from top limbs from/which the wind has”). These prosodic experiments culminated in Blackburn’s last poems, The Journals (1967–1971), where the autobiographical verse is polyrhythmic—lyrical and angular, conversational and iconic, quietly emotional and parodic—but always inventive, attuned to a reflective music, multicoded:

     Seaplane going over, going
          somewhere. over
               head, the blue re
                    ally re
                         flected in this sea.

(Blackburn 1985:572)