Blackburn’s concern about the “identity of the individual” did not assume a liberal individualism grounded in concepts of personal freedom, self-determination, psychological coherence; he rather saw human identity as other-determined, a composite constructed in relationships to “values” that were transindividual, cultural and social, housed in institutions like the state, the church, the school. If translation could change the contours of subjectivity, Blackburn thought, then it could contribute to a change in values, away from “the military stance and the profit motive” toward less strained geopolitical relations, “perhaps breadth of understanding for other peoples, a greater tolerance for and proficiency in other languages, combined with political wisdom and expediency over the next two generations” (ibid.:358).
Some of Blackburn’s remarks have come to seem much too optimistic. He judged from “the current flood of translations in both prose and poetry” that “The ducts of free exchange are already open in literature” (Blackburn 1962:357, 358). But cultural exchange through translation wasn’t then (nor ever could be) “free” of numerous constraints, literary, economic, political, and English-language translation certainly wasn’t free in 1962. That year the {251} number of translations issued by American publishers was actually small, approximately 6 percent of the total books published (Publishers Weekly 1963). We now know that American translation rates reached their apex in the early 1960s, but they have consistently been quite low in contrast to foreign publishing trends throughout the postwar period, which show much higher percentages of translating English-language books.
Blackburn’s utopianism also has a pro-American slant that seems too uncritical after numerous subsequent developments—the Vietnam War, the political and military interventions in El Salvador and Nicaragua, government skittishness on ecological issues, the emergence of multinational corporations, especially in publishing, where the number of English-language translations has fallen to less than 3 percent of the total books published. In 1962, however, Blackburn imagined that
Perhaps even nationalism, so living a force today in Africa and the Far East, is beginning to die a little in the affluent West. Except for the political forms, Western Europe is on the threshold of becoming an economic unity. Is it an impossible dream to think of a bilingual America stretching from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic Ocean, comprised of eighty-three states instead of fifty? Not by conquest but by union. How move more efficiently to raise the standard of living of underdeveloped countries in our own hemisphere than by removing the borders?
Readers in 1962 no doubt regarded this passage as a utopian flight. Blackburn himself called it “an impossible dream.” In the following year, he published a somber article in Kulchur, “The Grinding Down,” which surveyed the current poetry “scene” and found modernism marginal and fragmented: “the Renaissance” Blackburn wrote, “didn’t take”; it was now centered in a few small-circulation magazines, “making a place somewhere between the outer fringe of the academic and the inner sector of the so-called beat” (Blackburn 1963:17, 10). In 1962, Blackburn was more sanguine about the prospects of modernism, but the emphasis on the “West” in his utopianism shows the difficulty of imagining relations between the hemispheres during the Cold War—even for a politically engaged poet-translator like him. The perspective from which he anticipated future global developments was clearly that of North American hegemony, allied with western Europe {252} in a strategic containment of Soviet expansionism, but permitted to indulge in some hemispheric expansion of its own (“eighty-three states”).
Blackburn’s article is valuable, not as a historical prediction or foreign policy, but rather as a theoretical model, useful in thinking how translation can be enlisted in a democratic cultural politics. Blackburn saw modernist translation as an effective intervention in American culture, based on a social diagnosis that found hegemonic domestic values implicated in unequal or exclusionary social relations, Blackburn’s own translations, with their various foreignizing strategies, served a left-wing internationalism, designed to combat the ideological forms of exclusion in Cold War America, perhaps most evident in the hysterical patriotism excited by hardening geopolitical positions (Whitfield 1991). The Provençal translation was especially subversive in this cultural situation because it revealed a broad range of influences, foreign and historical. The clear debt to modernism made the project vulnerable to Leslie Fiedler’s politicized attack on Pound’s translations for lacking a “center,” an allegiance to one national literature, American: “Our Muse is the poet without a Muse, whom quite properly we acquit of treason (what remains to betray?) and consign to Saint Elizabeth’s” (Fiedler 1962:459).
Blackburn’s Provençal translation was marked, not only by a connection to an un-American poet—translator, but by an affiliation to popular culture through his resonant use of colloquialism. As Andrew Ross has shown, Cold War intellectuals associated popular culture with totalitarianism, mass thinking, brainwashing, but also with commercialism, egalitarianism, radical democracy. As the American government pursued a policy of Soviet containment abroad, at home intellectuals like Fiedler constructed a national culture of consensus that “depended explicitly upon the containment of intellectual radicalism and cultural populism alike” (Ross 1989:47). In Robert von Hallberg’s view, “what is important to literary history is not only that this consensus existed but that its maintenance and definition depended somehow upon academic institutions. […] To the extent that poets looked to universities for an audience, they were addressing […] the audience that felt greatest responsibility for the refinement of taste and the preservation of a national culture” (Von Hallberg 1985:34). Blackburn’s work with Provençal poetry both questioned and resisted this hegemonic {253} domestic tendency. Allied to a modernist poetic movement that defined itself as “a total rejection of all those qualities typical of academic verse” (Allen 1960:xi), Blackburn’s translation was radical in its ideological interrogations (of the foreign texts, previous English-language appropriations, contemporary American culture) and populist in its juxtaposition of elite and popular cultural discourses.
The publishing history of Blackburn’s manuscript shows without a doubt that the cultural and political values represented by his translation continued to be marginal in the United States late into the 1970s. In Blackburn’s case, however, the marginality was not signalled by mixed reviews or bitter attacks or even media neglect; there was never a publication to review. The manuscript Blackburn felt was finished in 1958 did not see print until twenty years later.
In March of 1958, the influential poetry critic M.L. Rosenthal, who had taught Blackburn briefly at New York University (1947), recommended the Provençal manuscript to Macmillan.[9] In 1957, as poetry editor for The Nation, Rosenthal had accepted one of Blackburn’s translations, his Pound-inspired version of Bertran de Born’s Bem platz to gais temps pascor. Rosenthal was now advising Emile Capouya, an editor in Macmillan’s Trade Department, on a series of poetry volumes. Blackburn submitted the manuscript, tentatively entitled Anthology of Troubadours. It was a translation of sixty-eight texts by thirty poets, considerably reduced from the “105 pieces” that Blackburn mentioned to Pound, “cut fr/150” (17 March 1958). Capouya solicited an outside reader’s report and then, despite a highly critical evaluation, accepted it for publication, issuing Blackburn a contract that paid a small advance ($150) against a full author’s royalty (10 percent of the cover price, $3.50, with a first printing of 1500 copies), plus all the income from first serial rights (initial publications in magazines and anthologies). Although, by October of 1958, the contracts had been signed and countersigned, the manuscript was not complete: Blackburn needed to submit the introduction he had planned.
[9]
This publishing history is reconstructed from documents in the Paul Blackburn Collection, Archive for New Poetry: M.L.Rosenthal, Letters to Emile Capouya, 17 July and 2 August 1958; Capouya, Letter to John Ciardi, 27 June 1958; Ciardi, Letter to Capouya, 2 July 1958; Capouya, Letter to Ramon Guthrie, 18 July 1958; Guthrie, Letter to Capouya, 24 July 1958; Guthrie, Report on Blackburn’s