The Translator’s Invisibility

Blackburn’s work as a translator spanned various languages and periods, and he published several other translation projects, including The Cid, a selection of Lorca’s poetry, and Picasso’s prose poems, Hunk of Skin. Still, enough has been said to sketch the main contours of his career—and to judge it a powerful response to his cultural situation. Blackburn followed the modernist innovations {271} that were developed by Pound but marginalized by the regime of fluency in English-language translation. This meant cultivating an extremely heterogeneous discourse (a rich mixture of archaism, colloquialism, quotation, nonstandard punctuation and orthography, and prosodic experiment) that prevented the translation from being taken as the “original” and instead asserted its independence as a literary text in a different language and culture. Blackburn’s experimentalist practices were foreignizing: their challenge to fluency, among other domestic values (academic criticism, linguistic elitism, bourgeois propriety, realism, individualism), enabled his translations to signal the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign texts. Yet Blackburn was also appropriating these texts for domestic cultural agendas: in the construction of his authorial identity through a rivalry with Pound; in the prosodic and thematic development of his own poetry; and in a dissident political intervention designed to foster a left-wing internationalism in American culture during the Cold War, when a foreign policy of containing ideological opponents led to a domestic surge of nationalism that excluded cultural differences.

Blackburn’s Provençal translation intervened into this situation, but was also constrained by it, caught between the midcentury reaction against modernism, the academic reception of archaic literary texts, and an elitism that marginalized nonstandard dialects and discourses. Even twenty years later, in 1978, when the manuscript was finally published, the reception reflected the continuing marginality of modernist translation. In The New York Times Book Review, the academic critic and translator Robert M. Adams acknowledged Blackburn’s development of a translation poetics (“Blackburn was a poet, and he responded to the poetry of his originals”), but faulted his “pronounced stylistic mode (in essence the labored slang of Ezra Pound)” and found George Economou’s editing inadequate on largely scholarly grounds: “historical and biographical information is sparse and uncommonly confused in its presentation”; “there is never any indication in the text of where a footnote occurs” (Adams 1979:36).

Blackburn’s own response after the Macmillan episode was to develop new translation projects that continued to serve a modernist cultural politics, although with different foreign literatures and different translation discourses. As Cortázar’s agent and translator, Blackburn worked to get Latin American fiction admitted to the canon of foreign literature in English; and to achieve this canon reformation, {272} he, like many other English-language translators, resorted to fluency, assimilating marginal experimental narratives to the transparent discourse that distinguished the dominant realism. Blackburn’s career as a modernist poet—translator shows quite clearly that translation strategies can be defined as “foreignizing” or “domesticating” only in relation to specific cultural situations, specific moments in the changing reception of a foreign literature, or in the changing hierarchy of domestic values.

Chapter 6. Simpatico

How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are forced to serve? This is the problem of immigrants, and especially of their children, the problem of minorities, the problem of a minor literature, but also a problem for all of us: how to tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path? How to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one’s own language?

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

(trans. Dana Polan)