The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

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‘Ab l’alen’ sufficiently approved for Ez to hv/forwarded same to
editor that pays WHEN he prints” (12 August 1950).
Most importantly, Pound’s letters furthered Blackburn’s education
in the modernist cultural agenda. Pound’s first response attacked
language use in the United States from the standpoint of modernist
poetics:
The fatigue,
The”, my dear Blackpaul,
of a country where no
exact statements are
ever made!!
(10 February 1950)
Pound suggested that Blackburn read certain troubadours from
modernist angles: “Pieire Cardinal was not hiding under aestheticism”
(undated; 1957?); “Try Sordello” (1 December 1950). He recommended
that Blackburn meet other modernist poets living in New York, like
Louis Dudek and Jackson MacLow (4 July 1950). And he urged
Blackburn to study cultural and economic history “to set the stuff IN
something,” to situate his Provençal translations in a historical context
(25 January 1954?). Pound repeatedly criticized academic institutions
for failing to teach a sense of history and sometimes even quizzed
Blackburn on historical figures:
Ignorance of history in univ/grads/also filthy. blame not the pore
stewwddent, but the goddam generations of conditioned profs/ //
/thesis fer Sister B/: absolute decline of curiosity re/every vital
problem in U,S. educ/from 1865 onward. whentell did Agassiz die?
anyhow.)
(20 March 1950)
The sense of history that Pound taught in these letters avoided any
wholesale reduction of the past to the present, as well as any reduction
of the present to the past. The former led to “‘modernizing’/curricula,
i.e. excluding any basic thought from ALL the goddam univs” (20
March 1950), whereas the latter led to an antiquarianism without
contemporary relevance: “merely retrospective philology LACKS
vitality” (1957?). The “vitality” came from allowing the historical
difference of earlier cultures to challenge the contemporary cultural
situation. “BLACKBURN,” Pound wrote, “might git some life into it IF