Late in the correspondence, Blackburn’s rivalry emerges in a choice to translate an obscene Provençal text that Pound, in an access of bourgeois squeamishness, refused to translate. This was “Puois en Raimons e n Trucs Malecs,” written by the poet that inspired Pound’s most innovative translations: Arnaut Daniel. In The Spirit of Romance, Pound had called Daniel’s text a “satire too rank for the modern palate” (Pound 1952:35). Blackburn, however, translated it, and on 3 January 1957, writing from Malaga, he sent it to Pound. Here is a strophe:
In a cover letter, Blackburn pronounced his translation successful, “fair literal and the spirit is there,” and he acknowledged Pound’s earlier sense of its obscenity by adding that “it will never be published.”
{233} Blackburn viewed obscene language as the prerogative of the modernist poet who uses a colloquial discourse, following William Carlos Williams, and in his interview with David Ossman he treated such language as male:
if you want to start from the point of view that speech, and that common speech even, is a very fair and valid medium for poetry, you’re going to find some people whose common speech is commoner than most. That would include a lot of male members— ladies usually watch their language fairly carefully, and that’s only right.
In 1959, soon after Blackburn contracted with Macmillan to publish his Provençal translation, he again wrote to Pound and suggested that obscenity was the prerogative of the male poet—translator:
Macmillan bringing out the troubadours in a condensed version in spring, if I get the intro. done. I believe I have saved the literal of ‘tant las fotei com auziretz’ but on the whole, whenever they complained about strong language, I suggested cutting the piece entirely from the book. Marcabru, Guillem VII etc. had no protestant tradition to deal with. Jeanroy cutting, eliminating those stanzas completely in his fr. literal version in the edition. His wife read the proofs?
Blackburn had rendered the Provençal fotei as “fucked.” The interest in obscenity, expressed in the version of “Truc Malecs” as well as this letter, illustrates how the rivalry with Pound determined Blackburn’s translation projects, occasionally in very direct ways.
The most intensely masculinist expression of this rivalry, at once intersubjective and intertextual, involves a text by Bertran de Born, a celebration of feudal militarism on which both Pound and Blackburn worked: “Bem platz lo gais temps de pascor.” Pound had done a version of it in The Spirit of Romance, partly in verse and partly in prose, to illustrate his claim that “De Born is at his best in the war songs”:
Thus that lord pleaseth me when he is first to attack, fearless, on his armed charger; and thus he emboldens his folk with valiant vassalge; and then when stour is mingled, each wight should be yare, and follow him exulting; for no man is worth a damn till he has taken and given many a blow.
We shall see battle axes and swords, a-battering colored haumes and a-hacking through shields at entering melee; and many vassals smiting together, whence there run free the horses of the dead and wrecked. And when each man of prowess shall be come into the fray he thinks no more of (merely) breaking heads and arms, for a dead man is worth more than one taken alive.
Even though this is a fairly close version, Pound develops a heterogeneous English-language discourse to indicate the historical remoteness of the Provençal text—most obviously, an archaic lexicon. The word “stour” renders the Provençal estorn, estor, meaning “struggle,” “conflict” (Levy 1966). Pound’s choice is virtually a homophonic equivalent, a caique, but it is also an English-language archaism, meaning “armed combat,” initially in Anglo-Saxon, but {235} retained in Middle and Early Modern English as well. It appears in Gavin Douglas’s Aeneid, among many other literary texts, prose and poetry, “pre-Elizabethan” and Elizabethan. Pound’s curious use of “colored haumes” for the Provençal “elms de color” (“painted helmets”), effectively increases the archaism in the translation, but its etymology is uncertain, and it may not strictly be an archaic English word: it seems closer to a variant spelling of the modern French for “helmet,” heaume, than to any archaic English variants for “helm” (cf. OED, s.v. “helm”). What the archaism made seem foreign in this text was the militaristic theme, which Pound at once defined and valorized in a suggestive choice. He translated “chascus om de paratge” as “each man of prowess,” rejecting the possibilities of “paratge” that are more genealogical (“lineage,” “family,” “nobility”) and more indicative of class domination, in favor of a choice that stresses a key value of the feudal aristocracy and genders it male: “valour, bravery, gallantry, martial daring; manly courage, active fortitude” (OED, s.v. “prowess”).
In 1909, a year before the publication of The Spirit of Romance, Pound had published a free adaptation of Bertran’s text, “Sestina: Altaforte,” in which he used the same archaizing strategy. Here, however, Pound celebrated the mere act of aggression, characterized as distinctively aristocratic and masculinist, but devoid of any concept of bravery:
As Peter Makin has argued, Pound’s appropriations of earlier poets like Bertran serve “as an exemplum, a demonstration of a possible way of living,” and they are laden with various cultural and ideological determinations (Makin 1978:42). Makin links the “phallic aggressiveness” of “Sestina: Altaforte” to Pound’s esteem for “the ‘medieval clean line’” in architecture, as well as to his eulogies of dictators past and present, like Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta of Renaissance Rimini and Benito Mussolini, “a male of the species” (Makin 1978:29–35; Pound 1954:83).