venuti

228 The Translator’s Invisibilityhe/wd/extend his curiosity,” and then he provided a reference to thehistorian Brooks Adams’ Law of Civilization and Decay (1895): “VidBrooks Adams/Civ/& Dec Knopf reissue/p. 160” (25 January 1954?).The fact that Blackburn was learning from this correspondence isclear in his 1953 review of Hugh Kenner’s study The Poetry of EzraPound. Blackburn described Pound’s “strongest and most criticizedpositions”: his “case for the honorable intelligence as against thematerial cunning of usurers” and “his insistence on definition andexactitude as against muddle, the deliberate obscuring of facts anddownright mendacity” (Blackburn 1953:217). In this rather negativereview, Blackburn affected a cranky tone that sounded remarkably likePound, questioning Kenner’s decision to criticize the critics of TheCantos: “He puts a mouthful of teeth in those moth-eaten wolves,journalism and education, and that other pack of elderly puppies whorun with what he calls ‘the upper-middle-brow literary press,’ andthen proceeds to beat them off” (ibid.:215). The question Blackburnaddressed to Kenner, as well as to every reader of Pound’s poetry, waswhy waste time on the dunderheads? Spend your honest effortpositively, do the honest work, educate from the top, where there isany. Kung says: “You can’t take all the dirt out of the ground beforeyou plant seed.”(ibid.:216)Blackburn seems to be alluding to Pound’s Confucianism in The Cantos(“Kung says”), an allusion that casts Blackburn as Pound, establishinga process of identification for the reviewer (an aspiring poet—translator), yet in a way that is recognizable to the reader of the review,understood as a pose. The correspondence further complicates theallusion by revealing another, more competitive level of identification:this passage from Blackburn’s review is a plagiarism; the tone, theideas, even the words are actually Pound’s. Blackburn was quotingfrom one of Pound’s letters to him, although withoutacknowledgement:Acc/Kung: not necessary to take all the dirt out ofthe field before yu plant seed.Hindoo god of wealth inhabits cow dung. Del Mar: gold miningnotonly ruins the land, it ruins it FOREVER. No reason to