The Translator’s Invisibility

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:

Better to have to leave home, better into exile,
than to have to trumpet, into the funnel between
the griskin and the p-hole, for from that place there come
matters better not described (rust-colored). And you’d never
have the slightest guarantee that she would not leak
over you altogether, muzzle, eyebrow, cheek.

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.

(Ossman 1963:25)

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?

(5 February 1959)

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”: