There should also be definitions in the appropriate places (most of which I have marked) of such terms as “alba,” “tenson,” “sirventes,” etc. […]
A number of poems (see pp. 163, 55, 129) need short introductions badly.
Omitting annotations can of course signal the cultural difference of the foreign texts, insisting on their foreignness with all the discomfort of incomprehension. Most of Blackburn’s foreignizing strategies, however, were realized in his translations, and since they constituted notable deviations from fluent discourse, they definitely looked strange to Guthrie. Thus, Blackburn resorted to variant spellings to mimic the absence of standardized orthography and pronunciation in Provençal, but for Guthrie this made the text too resistant to easy readability:
For the reader’s convenience, there should be uniformity in spelling proper nouns. It is confusing to the uninitiate to find (often on the same page) Peitau & Poitou, Caersi & Quercy, Talhafer & Tagliaferro (I’d translate it “Iron-Cutter,” since it is a nickname); Ventadorn & Ventadour: Marvoill & Mareuiclass="underline" Amfos & Alfons. Using the modern names of the towns would help the general reader.
Blackburn’s use of variant spellings were a means of archaizing the text, signifying its historical remoteness. Guthrie preferred current English usage (“Iron-Cutter”), even the latest cartography.
Guthrie’s criticisms went deep to the heart of Blackburn’s project. They touched the texts that figured in the oedipal rivalry with Pound: Guthrie’s concern with fluency led to the suggestion that Blackburn delete his Pound-inspired version of Bertran de Born’s war song. “Maybe I am too harsh,” wrote Guthrie, “but from the first line to the last, it seems forced and ineffectual compared with either the original or with E.Pound’s Sestina drawn from the same source.” When Guthrie reached page 135 in the 187-page manuscript, he scrawled a somewhat exasperated criticism of Blackburn’s mixed lexicons:
P.B.
No, look, if you are going to call somebody a burgesa in one line and make the poor inhorantes go looking it up in Levy, you can’t have {258} the burgesa’s husband getting into a (since 1950) hassle nor somebody doing somebuditch dishonor and smoting him on ye hede in the line after.
If one says “copains,” one cannot say in the same sentence “had been taken ill.” It is as if one said “His buddy” (only in a foreign language) “gave up the ghost.”
It is interesting to note that Guthrie repeatedly set himself up as a spokesperson for the nonspecialist, nonacademic audience (“the uninitiate,” “the inhorantes”), but simultaneously made the elitist gesture of excluding popular discourses and dialects, especially working-class colloquialisms. Guthrie’s investment in the standard dialect came with a sense of social superiority that surfaced in his comment on another translation, Blackburn’s version of Bernart de Ventadorn’s Can vei la lauzeta mover, Blackburn’s text is typically heterogeneous:
Guthrie thought the colloquialism degraded the foreign text, which he saw as more lofty in tone, more proper in speech, more aristocratic: “This,” he wrote, “gets cheap, a sort of Flatbush parody on Bernart, RG.” Blackburn’s use of “Hell” similarly departed from Guthrie’s elite image of the troubadours: “This isn’t in accord with Bernart’s mood, but maybe it’s more modern than ‘Alas.’” For Guthrie, marginal translation discourses trashed canonical texts. The English he preferred was the standard American dialect; if archaism was used, it needed to be unobtrusive and consistent.
{259} Inevitably, Blackburn’s more inventive experiments provoked Guthrie to domesticate the translations, revising them for fluency, but also deleting the political satire enabled by the mixed lexicon. When Blackburn edged his version of Bertran de Born closer to contemporary social issues by portraying feudal knights as bourgeois entrepreneurs, “unable to war beyond my own garage/ without an underwriter’s check” (Blackburn 1958:125), Guthrie complained about the strange effects produced by the multilingual diction:
Since P.B. uses so many anachronisms on the modern side, why “targe” for “shield.” The rime scheme of this sestina aren’t [sic] followed in the translation anyway and, being spotty, would be better omitted. But if a rime must be had (and God knows the “targe—garage” is nothing to be awfully happy about), why not “shield—field”? […] The “garage” part is bad from all angles. If “tarja” must be “targe,” why not have Bertran too poor to fight “at large”?
Guthrie seemed willing to recognize Blackburn’s attention to prosody: free verse that was “spotty,” with the concealed rhymes and semi-submerged alliteration that Pound had recommended for the “cantabile values” of the Provençal text. Yet Guthrie remained unwilling to license Blackburn’s heterogeneous discourse. By crossing languages, cultures, historical periods, the “targe” / “garage” rhyme preempts transparency, any illusionistic sense of an authorial voice, and calls attention to the multiple codes that make this an English-language translation, with a cultural political agenda. Guthrie’s response shows that Blackburn’s translation was in part the casualty of literary values that dominated American culture during the Cold War, in and out of the academy, values that were elitist in their exclusion of marginal cultural discourses, and reactionary in their refusal of the democratic politics that animated Blackburn’s modernist project.
After the Macmillan episode, Blackburn’s writing took various developments. Some responded directly to Guthrie’s report; most continued his already significant accomplishments as a modernist poet—translator, but in new directions. Blackburn’s relationship to the Provençal translation certainly changed. The depth of Guthrie’s impact can be gauged from the final version of the translation: Blackburn incorporated some of Guthrie’s suggestions—even when these conflicted with his modernist experimentalism. At several points, {260} Blackburn followed Guthrie’s insistence on standard English: he used Guthrie’s recommended spelling, “night,” instead of his initial choice, the subcultural “nite”; he accepted Guthrie’s change of “like” to “as” in the colloquialism, “like/they say” (Blackburn 1958:32; 1986:46, 47). Here Blackburn was browbeaten by Guthrie’s distaste for grammatical improprieties, by his rather ethnocentric assumption that the troubadours should be held to English-language cultural norms: “That ‘like’ for ‘as’ must have Guilhem twirling in his grave,” wrote Guthrie, “It fills me with a creeping horror.” Blackburn also abandoned the much criticized “targe” / “garage” rhyme, adopting Guthrie’s “shield” / “field” (Blackburn 1986:164).
Finally, however, Blackburn did not make numerous revisions in the lexicon and syntax of the 1958 versions. Instead, he expanded the selection of Provençal translations, including four more satires by Marcabru that required a larger variety of obscenities. He also added annotations that provided some of the information Guthrie requested and sought to answer his objections. In one note Blackburn commented on the variant spellings, revealing the different, somewhat contradictory determinations that shaped his final version: the historicist impulse apparent in his respect for the Provençal manuscripts, but also his concern with the prosody of his translation, and even his partial acceptance of Guthrie’s call for consistent, modern spelling. Blackburn’s note specifically addresses Guthrie’s report: