Blackburn’s attention to the musicality of the Provençal text assumes Pound’s discussion of “melopoeia” in the canso and canzone: “the poems of medieval Provence and Tuscany in general, were all made to be sung. Relative estimates of value inside these periods must take count of the cantabile values” of the work, “accounting for its manifest lyric impulse, or for the emotional force in its cadence” (Anderson 1983:216, 230). For Pound, this rhythm-based lyricism produced an effect that was individualistic but also masculinist, constructing a {244} lyrical “I” in the translation that was explicitly male: “I have in my translations tried to bring over the qualities of Guido’s rhythm, not line for line, but to embody in the whole of my English some trace of that power which implies the man,” what Pound later called “a robustezza, a masculinity” (ibid.:19, 242). But Pound’s most innovative translations tended to diverge from his modernist critical representations of the foreign texts, principally because his translation discourse was so heterogeneous, full of textual effects that undermined any illusionism, any sense of the foreign author’s presence, any coherent “I.” In the same way, Blackburn’s lyrical prosody definitely constructs a subjectposition with which the listener/ reader can identify, but the rhythms are always varying, asymmetrical at points, and the lexical and syntactical peculiarities are constantly foregrounding the textuality, weakening the coherence of the speaking voice, splintering the discourse into different cultures and periods, even different genders (depending on the genre), now locked in a mutual interrogation. Here is the opening of Blackburn’s version of Cercamon’s Ab lo temps qe refrescar.
Blackburn’s odd rhythms and diction destabilize the reader’s sympathetic identification with the lyric voice, preventing the translation from being taken as the “original,” the transparent expression of the foreign author, and instead insisting on its secondorder status, a text that produces effects in English, distinct from the Provençal poem but also departing from contemporary English usage, possessing a powerful self-difference, a sudden shifting from the familiar to the unfamiliar, even to the unintelligible.
Blackburn’s translation of Provençal poetry is clearly more accessible than the Zukofskys’ Catullus, requiring a less aggressive application to appreciate because of a more inviting lyricism. But it too follows Pound’s innovations by developing a translation discourse that is both historicist and foreignizing, that signals the cultural differences of the foreign texts through a linguistic experimentalism. The project is marked by the rivalry with Pound that formed Blackburn’s identity as a modernist poet—translator, determining not only the choice of texts and the development of a translation discourse, but also a revisionism that critiques Pound’s own appropriations of the same texts, questioning their investment in aristocracy, patriarchy, individualism—ideological determinations that also marked Blackburn’s writing in varying degrees and across many different forms (letters, poems, translations, interviews). Blackburn’s Provençal project was decisive in his personal formation as a author; but since this formation occurred in writing, the translation could also be conceived as a strategic public intervention, a cultural political practice that was fundamentally modernist, but that was not uncritical in its acceptance of Pound’s modernism.
Blackburn’s rare comments on his work suggest that he saw it along these or related lines. In a 1969 interview, he responded to the question, “What poets have influenced your work?” by citing Pound, Williams, Creeley, Charles Olson, whose poetry he read because “I wanted to find out who my father was” (Packard 1987:9). Blackburn may not have psychoanalyzed his relationship to Pound, but after translating for some twenty years and spending many years in analysis, he definitely possessed a psychoanalytic view of the {246} translating process, of the relationship between the translation and the foreign text, the translator and the foreign author. This is clear in the interview:
I don’t become the author when I’m translating his prose or poetry, but I’m certainly getting my talents into his hang-ups. Another person’s preoccupations are occupying me. They literally own me for that time. You see, it’s not just a matter of reading the language and understanding it and putting it into English. It’s understanding something that makes the man do it, where he’s going. And it’s not an entirely objective process. It must be partially subjective; there has to be some kind of projection. How do you know which word to choose when a word may have four or five possible meanings in English? It’s not just understanding the text. In a way you live it each time, I mean, you’re there. Otherwise, you’re not holding the poem.
English translation theorists from the seventeenth century onward had recommended a sympathetic identification between the translator and the foreign author. In Alexander Tytler’s words, “he must adopt the very soul of his author, which must speak through his own organs” (Tytler 1978:212). Yet this sort of sympathy was used to underwrite the individualism of transparent translation, the illusion of authorial presence produced by fluent discourse: it was Tytler’s answer to the question, “How then shall a translator accomplish this difficult union of ease with fidelity?” Blackburn’s modernist sense of identification acknowledged that there could never be a perfect sympathy, that the translator developed a “projection,” a representation, specific to the target-language culture, that interrogated the foreign author, exposing “his hangups.” When Blackburn’s translator is “there,” the sense of immediacy comes, not from any direct apprehension of the foreign text, but from living out an interpretation that enables the translator to “hold the poem,” rationalize every step in the translation process, every choice of a word.