The Translator’s Invisibility

By the 1950s, Guthrie had also become an academic, even though he lacked a high school diploma and had received the degrees for foreigners offered at the University of Toulouse. And this immersion in academic culture played into his evaluation of Blackburn’s manuscript. His response was substantial and detailed, checking {256} individual translations against the Provençal texts, giving what he called “suggestions” in a two-page report and many marginal comments scattered throughout the manuscript. He didn’t mind Blackburn’s use of obscenity, although in the 1920s he himself was sufficiently prudish to use a French pseudonym for a lewd parody and to bowdlerize his signed translation from Guillem de Poitou: “In which time—here we expurgate… One hundred times and eightyeight, / Till heart and back were both in great / Danger of breaking” (Guthrie 1927a:59). Blackburn’s version initially read “fucked,” but then, apparently in a moment of uncertainty about his male bohemianism, he struck it and added “loved.” Guthrie encouraged Blackburn to use the obscenity, which perhaps served to confirm his own sense of masculinity, compensating for his earlier expurgation through another translator’s work:

The word “loved” is too much like sneaking out the back-door. Why not either the original word in English as was, or “f—d” or leave it in Occitanian “las fotei?” In as legitimate a cause as this, one ought to be able to get away with one 4 letter word.

What did not seem “legitimate” to Guthrie was the modernist experimentalism of Blackburn’s translation: the foreignizing strategies deviated too widely from prevailing domestic values in the reception of archaic texts, especially scholarly annotation and fluent discourse.

Guthrie’s own work with troubadour poetry in the 1920s had assumed the modernist ideal of translation as an independent literary text: he published his translations as poems in their own right, identifying them as translations only in vague footnotes that omitted any precise identification of the Provençal texts. In 1958, however, Guthrie did not recognize Blackburn’s pursuit of this same modernist ideal, his emphasis on the literary qualities of the translation at the expense of annotations, which he limited to the Provençal titles and to the vidas and razos that accompanied the texts in manuscripts. Guthrie wanted Blackburn’s translation to have a more academic cast, even while acknowledging “the general reader”:

There should be a short introduction explaining what, when and where the troubadours were; something of the nature and importance of their work; the formal qualities of their works and the differences between their forms and P.B.’s rendering—also a few {257} words on P.B.’s purpose.

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: