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Margin 241—Look, honey, I said, I turnedinto here and out of my wayjust to keep you company.Such a peasant girl ought notwithout a proper fellowpasture so many beasts alonein such a wild country.(Blackburn 1958:24)Blackburn worked hard to surpass Pound on every level. Hisinventive prosody aimed to mimic the song-like sound effects of theProvençal text, evoking the music of Christopher Marlowe’s “ThePassionate Shepherd to His Love,” especially at the end of the firststanza. And he created a translation discourse that sampled the mostvaried lexicons, past (“drill”) and present (“honey”), British (“properfellow”) and American (“pretty thing”), standard usage (“sir”) andslang (“baby”). In a later version, Blackburn coarsened thecolloquialism “pretty thing” into “pretty piece,” revealing at theoutset the knight’s sexual designs on the girl and treating him (insteadof her, as in the Provençal “toza”) in the most unsavoury way, as somesort of sex-crazed ’50s hipster given to pornographic come-ons: “Well,baby! What a pretty piece” (Blackburn 1986:35). Blackburn continuesthis ironic image of the knight by revising the Provençal text at“pareill paria” (roughly “social equals,” “your fellows,” “yourpeers”), which he translated as “proper fellow,” suggesting both theknight’s superior social position and the moral impropriety concealedby his “proper” accent. Blackburn’s mixture of archaism with currentusage juxtaposes the cultural representations from two periods,allowing them to interrogate one another: the coarse contemporaryslang demystifies the more formal rhetorical effects (troubadour andMarlovian) that mystified aristocratic domination (in medievalProvence and Elizabethan England); and the archaism defamiliarizesthe most recent and familiar sexual terms (“pretty piece”) by exposingtheir complicity with masculinist images of women in past aristocraticliterary cultures.This interrogative effect of Blackburn’s mixed lexicons strengthenshis version of the shepherdess’s cryptic conclusion—which Poundmisread and suppressed. In Blackburn’s version, she describes themystifying rhetoric of feudal patriarchy as an archaic-sounding“simple show” and then unmasks it as a distraction from the materialconditions of the seduction, not the transcendental mana in the