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232 The Translator’s InvisibilityWould you care to see more [translations]? I’ll make copies.Reminding me I shall get you some texts of such stuff for xmas. Iwant to give you something. If you need anything I could find foryou let me know. I am unreliable and faithful. If that makes sense toyou. I am faithful to two remarkable women at the same time.(ibid.)Blackburn is “faithful” to Pound in his respect for the elder writer’sliterary authority, but “unreliable” in his effort to challenge thatauthority through assertions of his sexual potency (i.e., when he is“faithful to two remarkable women at the same time”).It is impossible to know what Pound thought of such personalrevelations. None of his letters referred to them. Still, after this lastrevealing letter from Blackburn, Pound seems to have broken off thecorrespondence, which was not resumed for three years. “Is anythingwrong?” Blackburn suddenly wrote in 1953, “Or is it, on your part, acessation of correspondence? And do you object if I write you fromtime to time, if the latter shot is the case?” (4 July 1953). Thecorrespondence had become important enough to Blackburn’s sense ofhimself as a writer that he needed merely to write to Pound, withoutgetting any response.Late in the correspondence, Blackburn’s rivalry emerges in a choiceto translate an obscene Provençal text that Pound, in an access ofbourgeois squeamishness, refused to translate. This was “Puois enRaimons e n Trucs Malecs,” written by the poet that inspired Pound’smost innovative translations: Arnaut Daniel. In The Spirit of Romance,Pound had called Daniel’s text a “satire too rank for the modernpalate” (Pound 1952:35). Blackburn, however, translated it, and on 3January 1957, writing from Malaga, he sent it to Pound. Here is astrophe:Better to have to leave home, better into exile,than to have to trumpet, into the funnel betweenthe griskin and the p-hole, for from that place there comematters better not described (rust-colored). And you’d neverhave the slightest guarantee that she would not leakover you altogether, muzzle, eyebrow, cheek.In a cover letter, Blackburn pronounced his translation successful, “fairliteral and the spirit is there,” and he acknowledged Pound’s earliersense of its obscenity by adding that “it will never be published.”