The Translator’s Invisibility

Why didn’t Blackburn complete a project that was certain to be published and under contractual terms that were favorable to the translator (despite the low advance)? Different answers have been offered for this question, ranging from Blackburn’s unsettled personal life at the time (his divorce from his first wife, his financial straits) to a psychoanalytic assessment that found his relations with women, particularly his mother, the poet Frances Frost, linked to an “obsession” with “the idealization of woman as expressed by the Troubadours” (Eshleman 1989:19). The Macmillan episode could only be determined by these private investments in a most public form, which here included a harsh reader’s report. Sara Golden, Blackburn’s second wife (1963–1967), recalled that the report “sent Paul back to an endless spiral of revisions that never ended until his death” (Telephone interview, 23 January 1992). Rosenthal described Blackburn as “appalled” by the report; the poet Robert Kelly, a friend of Blackburn’s who edited some of his posthumous books, mentioned that “Paul was both hurt and amused by it” and would sometimes read out the criticisms in a comically exaggerated voice (Telephone interviews, 26 December 1991 and 23 July 1992). Taken aback by these criticisms, after years of encouragement from writers like Pound and Creeley and from editors at magazines like Hudson Review, Origin, and The Nation, Blackburn did not complete the manuscript. On the contrary, he suddenly felt that it needed an enormous amount of work, not just an introduction and annotations, but substantial revisions of the translation. Unfortunately, he also lacked an editor to facilitate his completion of the project and bring it to press.

Capouya sought evaluations from powerful poet—translators and critics. He turned first to a poet and translator of Dante, John Ciardi, then associated with Saturday Review, who wrote back “Anthol of Troubadours sounds interesting” but declined because of prior commitments. Capouya then turned to Ramon Guthrie, an American poet who lived in France for many years and was currently professor of French at Dartmouth. Guthrie (1896–1973) published his first books in the 1920s: translations and adaptations of troubadour poetry and a novel based on the texts of Marcabru. Under a {255} pseudonym, Guthrie also published The Legend of Ermengarde, what Sally Gall has described as an “exuberantly indecent poem” inspired by troubadour poetry (Gall 1980:184). Capouya planned to publish Guthrie’s volume of poems, Graffitti, also recommended by Rosenthal, who suggested that Guthrie evaluate Blackburn’s translation. Perhaps in an effort to pique Guthrie’s interest, or to ward off any expectations of academic fidelity to the Provençal texts, Capouya’s letter described Blackburn’s project as “a collection of adaptations,” not the “anthology” he mentioned to Ciardi. Guthrie, it turned out, was actually the worst possible reader for Blackburn’s manuscript.

In the 1920s, his own translations of Provençal texts were cast in current English usage with a slight pre-Raphaelite archaism, in diction and verse form (a rhymed stanza). This is the opening of “Winter-Song,” Guthrie’s translation from Marcabru:

Since the withered leaves are shredded
From the branches of the trees,
Mauled and tousled and beheaded
By the bitter autumn breeze,
More I prize the sleety rain
Than the summer’s mealy guile,
Bearing wantonry and lewdness.

(Guthrie 1927a:68)

Although Guthrie lived in Paris during the 1920s and was fond of evoking that modernist cultural moment in his later poetry, the poetry itself reveals him to be more Wordsworthian than Poundian:

Montparnasse
that I shall never see again, the Montparnasse
of Joyce and Pound, Stein, Stella Bowen,
little Zadkine, Giacometti […] all gone in any case,
    and would I might have died, been buried there.

(Guthrie 1970:15)