The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

250 The Translator’s Invisibility
the values of bringing across other sensibilities in other languages and
from all periods of history and civilization” (Blackburn 1962:357) and
assigned translation a key geopolitical role: “the mutual insemination
of cultures is an important step in what our policy makers think of
as international understanding” (ibid.:358). In this politicized
rationale for cultural exchange, modernist translation was summoned
to resolve a domestic crisis, searching foreign cultures to supply the
lack of confidence in the “official values” of Cold War American
culture:
The Cold War and the possibly imminent illumination of the
world have created another reaction in poets […] There is an
affirmation, a reaffirmation, of values, a searching of the older
cultures, both American and foreign, modern and ancient, for
values to sustain the individual in a world where all the official
values have let us down entirely by being in the main hypocritical
(consider the phrase “business ethics” for a moment), the
religions attentuated to the point where even the monks are
screaming from the pinch.
(ibid.:359)
Blackburn’s concern about the “identity of the individual” did not
assume a liberal individualism grounded in concepts of personal
freedom, self-determination, psychological coherence; he rather saw
human identity as other-determined, a composite constructed in
relationships to “values” that were transindividual, cultural and social,
housed in institutions like the state, the church, the school. If
translation could change the contours of subjectivity, Blackburn
thought, then it could contribute to a change in values, away from “the
military stance and the profit motive” toward less strained geopolitical
relations, “perhaps breadth of understanding for other peoples, a
greater tolerance for and proficiency in other languages, combined
with political wisdom and expediency over the next two generations”
(ibid.:358).
Some of Blackburn’s remarks have come to seem much too
optimistic. He judged from “the current flood of translations in both
prose and poetry” that “The ducts of free exchange are already open
in literature” (Blackburn 1962:357, 358). But cultural exchange
through translation wasn’t then (nor ever could be) “free” of
numerous constraints, literary, economic, political, and Englishlanguage
translation certainly wasn’t free in 1962. That year the