The Translator’s Invisibility

The end of a distance come
so early in the morning
     where the eye stops,
               flames
running O their tongues up thru
     along the rooftree of
          down the coping of
               that church in Harlem.

(ibid.:555)

{263} The wind blowth
snow fallth
branches whip in the wind
     down, rise, forth and back
          drifts groweth summat
It’s going to take us two days at least to
shovel out of this one, off to Buf-fa-lo, o
March, after all, Spring
cometh.

(ibid.:613)

The Journals is essentially an individualistic project, a verse diary of Blackburn’s last years, travelling in Europe and the United States with his wife Joan and son Carlos, suffering through the final stages of his illness with cancer. Yet Blackburn’s prosodic experiments give all this an anti-individualistic edge by pushing the verse toward greater heterogeneity, using rhythm, punctuation, typography to foreground the textuality and erode the coherence of the speaking voice, now a site of diverse lexicons, cultural codes, social affiliations, whose very juxtaposition invites a mutual questioning.

The Provençal project was also a source of personae and themes for Blackburn’s poems, some of which carry on the social criticism he occasionally worked into the lexicon of the translations. His version of Guillem de Poitou’s Ab lo dolchor del temps novel—

In the new season
when the woods burgeon
and birds
sing out the first stave of new song,
time then that a man take the softest joy of her
who is most to his liking.

(Blackburn 1958:13)

—gets quoted in a poem contemporary to the 1958 manuscript, “Meditation on the BMT”:

Here, at the beginning of the new season
before the new leaves burgeon,
     on either side of the Eastern Parkway station
     near the Botanical Gardens
{264} they burn trash on the embankment, laying
barer than ever our sad, civilized refuse. 1 coffee can
without a lid

1 empty pint of White Star, the label
     faded by rain
1 empty beer-can
2 empty Schenley bottles
1 empty condom, seen from
1 nearly empty train
     empty

(Blackburn 1985:141)

Blackburn’s quotation uses the troubadour motif to interrogate consumer capitalism, juxtaposing a lyrical evocation of spring to an itemized list of “trash” visible from a New York subway. The Provençal idealization of human sexuality as a renewing natural pleasure emphasizes the dirty realism of contemporary sexual practices, which come to seem less “civilized,” more emotionally impoverished, even as they suggest that troubadour poetry is itself suspect, a mystification of the material conditions and consequences of sexuality.