The Translator’s Invisibility

It is worth noting, finally, that Blackburn’s experience with the Provençal translation also bears on his other translation projects. With the 1958 manuscript unpublished, he turned his attentions to Latin American writing, particularly the fiction of the Argentine Julio Cortázar. In 1959, Blackburn entered into a contract with Cortázar that made him the Argentine writer’s “exclusive and official literary representative (AGENT) throughout the entire world (except in): France, Germany, Italy and all the Spanish-speaking countries.”[10] Blackburn negotiated the publication of the first English-language versions of Cortázar’s fiction, which were two novels: The Winners, translated by Elaine Kerrigan in 1965, and Hopscotch, translated by Gregory Rabassa in 1966. Late in the 1950s, Blackburn began translating Cortázar’s poems and short stories, mostly for magazine publication, and in 1967, the stories were issued as End of the Game. He then translated another collection of Cortázar’s short prose pieces, Cronopios and Famas (1969), and was the likely translator for the next volume of Cortázar’s stories to appear in English, All Fires The Fire (1973), but his failing health prevented {265} him from taking on this project. Blackburn’s work with Cortázar served the modernist cultural politics that informed his Provençal translation and his article “The International Word,” a left-wing internationalism that viewed translation as a foreignizing intervention in American culture. The Cortázar translations, however, were much more effective in their dissidence, questioning and actually changing literary canons in English.

Blackburn, among the other translators and publishers of Cortázar’s writing, was importing the so-called “boom” in twentieth-century Latin American fiction, a body of foreign literature characterized by experimentalist strategies that challenged the realism dominating British and American narrative. The Latin American boom began circulating in English during the 1950s, when translations of writers like Jorge Luis Borges appeared in magazines and anthologies. Among the first book-length translations in this tendency was in fact Borges’ Ficciones (1962), rendered by various hands, American and British. A few years later, the reviews of the Cortázar translations repeatedly linked him to “his countryman” Borges, and both were inserted in the modernist mainstream of European fiction: Franz Kafka, Italo Svevo, Günter Grass, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute.[11] Contemporary British and American fiction was for the most part realist at this time, with narrative experimentalism banished to the obscure fringes (Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, William Burroughs, William Gaddis, John Hawkes, Thomas Pynchon)—or to popular forms, like horror and science fiction. This is reflected in The New York Times “Best Seller List” for 9 July 1967, the issue in which Blackburn’s End of the Game was reviewed (see Table 3). The list contains mostly varieties of realism (historical and contemporary); the only deviation is a Gothic fantasy, an archaic popular genre modernized in Ira Levin’s novel, Rosemary’s Baby.

Table 3. New York Times “Best Seller List for Fiction,” 9 July 1967

Source: New York Times Book Review 9 July 1967, p.45

Position
This week		Last week	Weeks on list
1	The Eighth Day Thornton Wilder	2	13
2	The Arrangement Elia Kazan	1	20
3	Washington, DC Gore Vidal	3	8
4	The Chosen Chaim Potok	4	7
5	The Plot Irving Wallace	5	5
6	Tales of Manhattan Louis Auchincloss	13
7	The Secret of Santa Vittoria Robert Crichton	43	13
8	Rosemary's Baby Ira Levin	8	4
9	Fathers Herbert Gold	10	11
10	Go to the Widow-Maker James Jones	—	7