{236} Blackburn included a translation of Bertran’s poem in the troubadour anthology he mentioned to Pound in 1958. He followed Pound’s example by pursuing a modernist translation strategy, resorting to free verse with the most subtly intricate rhythms and making an inventive selection of archaisms. Blackburn’s translation is a strong performance that competes favorably against both of Pound’s appropriations of the Provençal text:
“Quit-rent,” “vassals,” “glaive-strokes”—Blackburn created a lexicon that was obviously medieval, and he occasionally mimicked Anglo-Saxon patterns of rhythm and alliteration (“brast-out blood on broken harness”). Yet his translation discourse was not only historicizing, but foreignizing: some of the archaisms are decidedly unfamiliar, or {237} anachronistic, used in later periods than the Middle Ages. “Stiver,” a small coin, is first used in the sixteenth century. The verb “nicker” is a nineteenth-century usage for “neigh,” appearing in such literary texts as Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Monastery (1820). “Brassard” is French for “armor,” but in English it constitutes another nineteenth-century usage, this time Victorian, adding a touch of pre-Raphaelite medievalism to the translation. The word “proches” is also French, at least in spelling; in Blackburn’s translation it is a pseudo-archaic neologism, an Anglicized French word that appears to be an archaic variant spelling of “approaches” but actually isn’t (no such spelling is recorded in the OED).
And of course there is the borrowing from Pound, “stour,” one of many such borrowings that recur throughout Blackburn’s translations (Apter 1987:76–77; and Apter 1986). Apter has argued that they constitute a “homage” to Pound “as the source of [Blackburn’s] interest in and guide to the translation of Provençal lyrics” (1987:77). But insofar as the borrowings insert Pound’s language in a different context, their meaning is variable, and they can just as well signify a competition with Pound, even a betrayal. Blackburn’s borrowing of “stour” allows his translation to contest Pound’s appropriations of Bertran’s poem, and the rivalry is figured, interestingly enough, in provocative revisions that interrogate the ideological determinations of Pound’s texts. Thus, in striking contrast to Pound, Blackburn rendered “chascus om de paratge” as “no boy with a brassard.” The phrase creates dizzying possibilities of meaning. It can be taken as a modern colloquialism, an affectionate expression of male bonding. Blackburn used “boys” in this way at the beginning of Guillem de Poitou’s Companho, faray un vers…covinen:
Yet the singular “boy” in the translation can be taken as another sort of colloquialism, a masculinist expression of contempt, usually for another’s weakness. Even taken in its most accepted meaning (“male child”), Blackburn’s use of “boy” neatly ironizes Bertran’s euology of feudal militarism, branding it as childish, unmanly, and deleting the suggestion of aristocratic domination in “paratge”. What is interesting here is that Blackburn’s oedipal rivalry with Pound, although possessing a masculinist configuration in itself, {238} paradoxically leads to a translation that questions the poetic father’s phallic aggressiveness, his investment in the feudal patriarchy figured in the Provençal texts.
This rivalry drove Blackburn to exceed Pound in the development of a translation discourse that Pound himself had pioneered. And given the oedipal construction of their relationship, it was inevitable that the discursive competition would get played out over the troubadour representations of the lady. Just as Pound produced his innovative work with Cavalcanti by challenging the pre-Raphaelite image of the lady in Rossetti’s versions (Pound’s poetic “father and mother”), so Blackburn increased the heterogeneity of his translations and questioned Pound’s investment in the patriarchal images of the Provençal love lyric.
Female characters in Provençal poetry are often the objects of male sexual desire, but their representation varies according to their class. Aristocratic women undergo a spiritual and physical idealization, transformed into a passive ornament by the elaborately worked imagery of their lovers, who meet with varying sexual success; women of lower classes receive a more realistic treatment involving forms of seduction that range from pleasant cajoling to brutal intimidation. For The Spirit of Romance Pound translated Marcabru’s “L’autrier jost’un sebissa,” which he identified as a “pastorella,” a dialogue in which a knight riding through the country comes upon a farm girl and attempts to seduce her. Pound’s version is written in precise, current English, lightly archaized:
Pound’s version is again rather close, and it is not distinguished by prosodic and lexical invention. His sharpest departure from the Provençal, however, is extremely pointed: he used the archaism “damsel” to render the knight’s epithet for the shepherdess, “toza,” which Emil Levy defined as “jeune fille” (“young girl”) (Levy 1966), yet with an unsavory connotation, “fille de mauvaise vie” (“immoral girl”). (The Provençal text also stigmatizes the girl with {240} “mestissa,” a reference to her low birth that likewise carries the sense of “mauvais, vil.”) Pound’s use of “damsel” at once idealizes and ironizes the image of the girl, sarcastically marking her inferior social position and portraying the knight as a wittily devious seducer, out to overcome her resistance with flattering appeals to her (presumed) class aspirations.