Blackburn’s work as a translator spanned various languages and periods, and he published several other translation projects, including The Cid, a selection of Lorca’s poetry, and Picasso’s prose poems, Hunk of Skin. Still, enough has been said to sketch the main contours of his career—and to judge it a powerful response to his cultural situation. Blackburn followed the modernist innovations {271} that were developed by Pound but marginalized by the regime of fluency in English-language translation. This meant cultivating an extremely heterogeneous discourse (a rich mixture of archaism, colloquialism, quotation, nonstandard punctuation and orthography, and prosodic experiment) that prevented the translation from being taken as the “original” and instead asserted its independence as a literary text in a different language and culture. Blackburn’s experimentalist practices were foreignizing: their challenge to fluency, among other domestic values (academic criticism, linguistic elitism, bourgeois propriety, realism, individualism), enabled his translations to signal the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign texts. Yet Blackburn was also appropriating these texts for domestic cultural agendas: in the construction of his authorial identity through a rivalry with Pound; in the prosodic and thematic development of his own poetry; and in a dissident political intervention designed to foster a left-wing internationalism in American culture during the Cold War, when a foreign policy of containing ideological opponents led to a domestic surge of nationalism that excluded cultural differences.
Blackburn’s Provençal translation intervened into this situation, but was also constrained by it, caught between the midcentury reaction against modernism, the academic reception of archaic literary texts, and an elitism that marginalized nonstandard dialects and discourses. Even twenty years later, in 1978, when the manuscript was finally published, the reception reflected the continuing marginality of modernist translation. In The New York Times Book Review, the academic critic and translator Robert M. Adams acknowledged Blackburn’s development of a translation poetics (“Blackburn was a poet, and he responded to the poetry of his originals”), but faulted his “pronounced stylistic mode (in essence the labored slang of Ezra Pound)” and found George Economou’s editing inadequate on largely scholarly grounds: “historical and biographical information is sparse and uncommonly confused in its presentation”; “there is never any indication in the text of where a footnote occurs” (Adams 1979:36).
Blackburn’s own response after the Macmillan episode was to develop new translation projects that continued to serve a modernist cultural politics, although with different foreign literatures and different translation discourses. As Cortázar’s agent and translator, Blackburn worked to get Latin American fiction admitted to the canon of foreign literature in English; and to achieve this canon reformation, {272} he, like many other English-language translators, resorted to fluency, assimilating marginal experimental narratives to the transparent discourse that distinguished the dominant realism. Blackburn’s career as a modernist poet—translator shows quite clearly that translation strategies can be defined as “foreignizing” or “domesticating” only in relation to specific cultural situations, specific moments in the changing reception of a foreign literature, or in the changing hierarchy of domestic values.
Chapter 6. Simpatico
How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are forced to serve? This is the problem of immigrants, and especially of their children, the problem of minorities, the problem of a minor literature, but also a problem for all of us: how to tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path? How to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one’s own language?
In 1978, soon after my translations of Italian poetry began appearing in magazines, I met another American translator of Italian, an older, widely published, and very gifted writer who commented on some of my work and gave me advice about literary translation. Among his many shrewd remarks was the recommendation that I translate an Italian author of my own generation, something which he himself had been doing for many years and with much success. He explained that when author and translator live in the same historical moment, they are more likely to share a common sensibility, and this is highly desirable in translation because it increases the fidelity of the translated text to the original. The translator works better when he and the author are simpatico, said my friend, and by this he meant not just “agreeable,” or “congenial,” meanings which this Italian word is often used to signify, but also “possessing an underlying sympathy.” The translator should not merely get along with the author, not merely find him likeable; there should also be an identity between them.
{274} The ideal situation occurs, my friend believed, when the translator discovers his author at the start of both their careers. In this instance, the translator can closely follow the author’s progress, accumulating exhaustive knowledge of the foreign texts, strengthening and developing the affinity which he already feels with his author’s ideas and tastes, becoming, in effect, of the same mind. When simpatico is present, the translation process can be seen as a veritable recapitulation of the creative process by which the original came into existence; and when the translator is assumed to participate vicariously in the author’s thoughts and feelings, the translated text is read as the transparent expression of authorial psychology or meaning. The voice that the reader hears in any translation made on the basis of simpatico is always recognized as the author’s, never as a translator’s, nor even as some hybrid of the two.
My friend’s ideas about translation still prevail today in Anglo-American culture, although they have dominated English-language translation at least since the seventeenth century. The earl of Roscommon’s Essay on Translated Verse (1684) recommended that the translator
Alexander Tytler’s Essay on the Principles of Translation (1798) asserted that if the translator’s aim is fluency, “he must adopt the very soul of his author” (Tytler 1978:212). John Stuart Blackie’s article on the Victorian translation controversy, “Homer and his translators” (1861), argued that “the successful translator of a poet must not only be a poet himself, but he must be a poet of the same class, and of a kindred inspiration,” “led by a sure instinct to recognise the author who is kindred to himself in taste and spirit, and whom he therefore has a special vocation to translate” (Blackie 1861:269, 271). Burton Raffel’s review of the Zukofskys’ modernist Catullus similarly argued that the optimal conditions for translating the Latin texts include “(a) a poet, (b) an ability to identify with, to almost be Catullus over a protracted period, and (c) great good luck” (Raffel 1969:444).