In responding to a 1970 questionnaire from the New York Quarterly, Blackburn used similar psychological terms to describe the textual effects of translation, observing that the translator’s identification changes the foreign author, but also the translator himself, who {247} increasingly becomes the site of multiple subjectivities, a deviation from rational norms:
He must be willing (& able) to let another man’s life enter his own deeply enough to become some permanent part of his original author. He should be patient, persistent, slightly schizoid, a hard critic, a brilliant editor […] We are all hundreds, maybe thousands of people, potentially or in fact.
In both the interview and questionnaire, Blackburn’s view of the poet—translator is insistently masculinist: the process of identification or “projection” occurs between men. In the interview, it was part of Blackburn’s bohemian self-presentation, where he abruptly segued from a discussion about “writing in a travel situation” to “girlwatching”: “To come back to the city, though, the subway is an incredible place for girl-watching. You find one face or a good pair of legs—you can look at them for hours” (Packard 1987:14). And yet if, in Blackburn’s account, translation multiplies subjectivities by mediating cultural differences, it can only explode any individualistic concept of identity, masculinist or otherwise. Blackburn felt that the range of different demands made on the translator was extreme, resulting in deviancy, inviting psychiatric terms or allusions to popular cultural forms, like blues and rock-and-roll (or even more specifically the bluesbased rock of Bob Dylan’s 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home), linking the translator to other racial and youth subcultures:
Blackburn was of course aware that the psychological processes he described so facetiously could be figured only in discursive strategies, and these he saw as a challenge to bourgeois values, not just to individualistic concepts of identity, but to a moralistic sense of propriety in conduct and language. As early as 1950, in a letter to Pound, he remarked on “the impossibility of translating poems written in a twelfth century aristocratic vocabulary into modern english poems written in a twentieth century bourgeois vocabulary” (24 November 1950).
{248} Twenty years later, in a response to the New York Quarterly questionnaire, Blackburn acknowledged that the translator must draw on current English usage, but he also advocated a linguistic experimentalism that recovered marginal discourses, even with the most canonical of literary texts:
How far should a translator attempt to “modernize” an antiquarian piece?
Try first to find a diction, a modern diction, which will translate as many values as possible of the original. I’ve seen Latin poetry translated into hip language that works very well for certain pieces. Carried too far, of course, over a whole body of work, it’d be a stunt.
Some stunts, however, are brilliantly executed.
Blackburn’s investment in Provençal poetry was partly due to the troubadours’ anti-bourgeois themes, present not only in the celebration of feudal aristocratic values, but also in a representation of the troubadours culled partly from the biographical details in the vidas and razos. Some troubadours were itinerant performers born to commoners—farmers, tradesmen, merchants—but later living and working on the margins of feudal courts; others were landless knights, somewhat migrant, their loyalties drifting among various lords and ladies. In his poem “Sirventes” (1956), a satire “against the city of Toulouse,” Blackburn adopts a troubadour persona and invokes Peire Vidal, portraying him as a bohemian poet, a beatnik, intent on offending any bourgeois sense of decency:
that has wracked all passion from the sound of speech. A leech that sucks the blood is less a lesion. Speech! this imposed imposing imported courtliness, that the more you hear it the {249} more it’s meaningless & without feeling.
In the Provençal translations, Blackburn sometimes tilts his lexicon heavily toward contemporary English, inscribing the troubadour poem With a satire on capitalist economic practices, on businessmen and lawyers. This occurs with another of Bertran de Born’s war songs, No puosc mudar un chantar non esparga. In Blackburn’s version, the marauding knight becomes more criminal, more gangster-like—“A good war, now, makes a niggardly lord/ turn lavish and shell out handsomely”—but the knight is also more business-like, given to financial planning (“expenditures”) and living in suburbia:
Blackburn actually addressed the social implications of translation on one occasion: in “The International Word,” an article he contributed to a special issue of The Nation devoted to culture and politics. Published in 1962, on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Blackburn was serving as poetry editor of this left-wing magazine, “The International Word” argues that a modernist cultural politics can effectively intervene in the current global situation: in Blackburn’s diagnosis, “the crisis of identity of the individual in a world whose underlying realities are the cold war and the bomb” (Blackburn 1962:358), In a survey of contemporary American poetry, Blackburn found the most politically engaged poets to be modernist: his litany includes Pound, Williams, the Objectivists, Black Mountain, the Beats, the New York School—figures and tendencies that had recently been presented as oppositional in Donald Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry (Allen 1960). Blackburn noted Pound’s insistence “on {250} the values of bringing across other sensibilities in other languages and from all periods of history and civilization” (Blackburn 1962:357) and assigned translation a key geopolitical role: “the mutual insemination of cultures is an important step in what our policy makers think of as international understanding” (ibid.:358). In this politicized rationale for cultural exchange, modernist translation was summoned to resolve a domestic crisis, searching foreign cultures to supply the lack of confidence in the “official values” of Cold War American culture:
The Cold War and the possibly imminent illumination of the world have created another reaction in poets […] There is an affirmation, a reaffirmation, of values, a searching of the older cultures, both American and foreign, modern and ancient, for values to sustain the individual in a world where all the official values have let us down entirely by being in the main hypocritical (consider the phrase “business ethics” for a moment), the religions attentuated to the point where even the monks are screaming from the pinch.