The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

Margin 243
Blackburn’s various discursive strategies included syntactical
peculiarities adopted by Pound. Dudley Fitts’s review of Pound’s
translations took exception to their syntax: after quoting a line from
Pound’s Daniel, “Love inkerlie doth leaf and flower and bear,” Fitts
complained that “Those, Reader, are verbs, not nouns” (Fitts 1954:19).
Blackburn likewise used nouns as verbs, frustrating the reader’s
grammatical expectations with phrasing that was strange (“I grouch”),
but also evocative (“the night they sorcered me”).
Blackburn’s prosody owes a debt to Pound’s recommendations “as
to the use of canzoni in English, whether for composition or in
translation” (Anderson 1983:217). Pound felt that some English
“rhymes are of the wrong timbre and weight” for the intricately
rhymed stanza in Provençal and Italian, and to compensate he
developed a “rhyme-aesthetic” that differed from the foreign texts, as
well as from current stanzaic forms in English-language poetry:
“Against which we have our concealed rhymes and our semisubmerged
alliteration” (ibid.). Blackburn’s acute sense of word
placement and timing led to varying patterns of internal and end
rhyme that sometimes heightened the anachronism of his lexical mix,
the clash of different cultures, different historical periods—like the
“okay”/“atelier” rhyme in his version of Guillem de Poitou’s Ben vuelh
que sapchon li pluzor.
I would like it if people knew this song,
a lot of them, if it prove to be okay
when I bring it in from my atelier, all
fine and shining:
for I surpass the flower of this business,
it’s the truth, and I’ll
produce the vers as witness
when I’ve bound it in rhyme.
(Blackburn 1986:12)
Blackburn’s attention to the musicality of the Provençal text assumes
Pound’s discussion of “melopoeia” in the canso and canzone: “the
poems of medieval Provence and Tuscany in general, were all made to
be sung. Relative estimates of value inside these periods must take
count of the cantabile values” of the work, “accounting for its manifest
lyric impulse, or for the emotional force in its cadence” (Anderson
1983:216, 230). For Pound, this rhythm-based lyricism produced an
effect that was individualistic but also masculinist, constructing a