Mareuil (Dordogne): I use the modern French spelling to normalize the place name. In the manuscripts you’ll find Maroill, Maruoill, Marueill, Maruelh, Marvoill, Merueil, Meruoill, Miroill, and Miroilh. Some of these may be simply copyists’ mistakes, but they also reflect slight differences in pronunciation from area to area. […] The point I would make here is that neither the pronunciation nor the orthography was particularly standardized. Especially in the poems, I use the version that suits my ear at that point. In the razo here I use Anfos for the king of Aragon: the name is also Amfos, Alfons—I don’t remember using the French Alphonse ever.
The publishing history that banished Blackburn’s Provençal translations to the margins of American literary culture, available only in small-circulation magazines and limited-edition books, inevitably confined the influence of their striking effects. These inspired, not the {261} work of other translators or translation theorists and critics, but mainly Blackburn’s own poetry (Sturgeon 1990). Throughout the 1960s, the translations became a field of prosodic experiment for Blackburn: he explored Charles Olson’s performance-oriented notion of “projective verse,” “in which the poet manages to register both the acquisitions of his ear and the pressures of his breath” (Allen 1960:393). Olson argued that this prosody followed the modernist abandonment of the pentameter standard (“the experiments of Cummings, Pound, Williams”), but it was uniquely made possible by the typewriter, which, “due to its rigidity and space precisions,” could produce a poem “as a script to its vocalization” (ibid.). Blackburn, in his New York Quarterly interview, similarly took the layout of the text as a set of notations for performance: “Punctuation serves much the way that spacing does—that is, to indicate the length of a pause” (Packard 1987:11).
After the Macmillan episode, Blackburn’s revisions of the Provençal translations included more attention to their formal qualities—punctuation, line break, spacing. Occasionally the results were dramatic. Blackburn’s work on the opening of this text by Marcabru developed the iconic aspect of the prosody, its imitation of the falling leaf:
In the later version, Blackburn sacrificed the archaism “whence,” but replaced it with a repetitive syntactical turn that is more evocative of the “spinning” leaf (“from top limbs from/which the wind has”). These prosodic experiments culminated in Blackburn’s last poems, The Journals (1967–1971), where the autobiographical verse is polyrhythmic—lyrical and angular, conversational and iconic, quietly emotional and parodic—but always inventive, attuned to a reflective music, multicoded:
The Journals is essentially an individualistic project, a verse diary of Blackburn’s last years, travelling in Europe and the United States with his wife Joan and son Carlos, suffering through the final stages of his illness with cancer. Yet Blackburn’s prosodic experiments give all this an anti-individualistic edge by pushing the verse toward greater heterogeneity, using rhythm, punctuation, typography to foreground the textuality and erode the coherence of the speaking voice, now a site of diverse lexicons, cultural codes, social affiliations, whose very juxtaposition invites a mutual questioning.
The Provençal project was also a source of personae and themes for Blackburn’s poems, some of which carry on the social criticism he occasionally worked into the lexicon of the translations. His version of Guillem de Poitou’s Ab lo dolchor del temps novel—
—gets quoted in a poem contemporary to the 1958 manuscript, “Meditation on the BMT”:
Blackburn’s quotation uses the troubadour motif to interrogate consumer capitalism, juxtaposing a lyrical evocation of spring to an itemized list of “trash” visible from a New York subway. The Provençal idealization of human sexuality as a renewing natural pleasure emphasizes the dirty realism of contemporary sexual practices, which come to seem less “civilized,” more emotionally impoverished, even as they suggest that troubadour poetry is itself suspect, a mystification of the material conditions and consequences of sexuality.
It is worth noting, finally, that Blackburn’s experience with the Provençal translation also bears on his other translation projects. With the 1958 manuscript unpublished, he turned his attentions to Latin American writing, particularly the fiction of the Argentine Julio Cortázar. In 1959, Blackburn entered into a contract with Cortázar that made him the Argentine writer’s “exclusive and official literary representative (AGENT) throughout the entire world (except in): France, Germany, Italy and all the Spanish-speaking countries.”[10] Blackburn negotiated the publication of the first English-language versions of Cortázar’s fiction, which were two novels: The Winners, translated by Elaine Kerrigan in 1965, and Hopscotch, translated by Gregory Rabassa in 1966. Late in the 1950s, Blackburn began translating Cortázar’s poems and short stories, mostly for magazine publication, and in 1967, the stories were issued as End of the Game. He then translated another collection of Cortázar’s short prose pieces, Cronopios and Famas (1969), and was the likely translator for the next volume of Cortázar’s stories to appear in English, All Fires The Fire (1973), but his failing health prevented {265} him from taking on this project. Blackburn’s work with Cortázar served the modernist cultural politics that informed his Provençal translation and his article “The International Word,” a left-wing internationalism that viewed translation as a foreignizing intervention in American culture. The Cortázar translations, however, were much more effective in their dissidence, questioning and actually changing literary canons in English.
[10]
“Agreement of Representation (Contract),” 11 August 1959, Paul Blackburn Collection, Archive for New Poetry. Sales figures for the Cortázar translations (cited on pp. 265–266) are taken from royalty statements in the Blackburn Collection. Blackburn’s correspondence as Cortázar’s agent documents the increasing American interest in the Argentine writer’s fiction.