Capouya scheduled the publication date for the fall of 1959, but Blackburn did not complete the manuscript, and the project languished until 1963, when, a few years after Capouya’s departure from Macmillan, another editor decided to cancel the contract. During the 1960s Blackburn tried to get his manuscript accepted by other publishers, like Doubleday, who asked Rosenthal to evaluate {254} the project. But these attempts were sporadic and without success. The translation at last appeared posthumously in 1978 as Proensa: An Anthology of Troubadour Poetry, edited by Blackburn’s friend, the medievalist and poet George Economou, for the University of California Press.
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:
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:
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.