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Margin 243Blackburn’s various discursive strategies included syntacticalpeculiarities adopted by Pound. Dudley Fitts’s review of Pound’stranslations took exception to their syntax: after quoting a line fromPound’s Daniel, “Love inkerlie doth leaf and flower and bear,” Fittscomplained that “Those, Reader, are verbs, not nouns” (Fitts 1954:19).Blackburn likewise used nouns as verbs, frustrating the reader’sgrammatical 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 “asto the use of canzoni in English, whether for composition or intranslation” (Anderson 1983:217). Pound felt that some English“rhymes are of the wrong timbre and weight” for the intricatelyrhymed stanza in Provençal and Italian, and to compensate hedeveloped a “rhyme-aesthetic” that differed from the foreign texts, aswell as from current stanzaic forms in English-language poetry:“Against which we have our concealed rhymes and our semisubmergedalliteration” (ibid.). Blackburn’s acute sense of wordplacement and timing led to varying patterns of internal and endrhyme 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 vuelhque sapchon li pluzor.I would like it if people knew this song,a lot of them, if it prove to be okaywhen I bring it in from my atelier, allfine and shining:for I surpass the flower of this business,it’s the truth, and I’llproduce the vers as witnesswhen I’ve bound it in rhyme.(Blackburn 1986:12)Blackburn’s attention to the musicality of the Provençal text assumesPound’s discussion of “melopoeia” in the canso and canzone: “thepoems of medieval Provence and Tuscany in general, were all made tobe sung. Relative estimates of value inside these periods must takecount of the cantabile values” of the work, “accounting for its manifestlyric impulse, or for the emotional force in its cadence” (Anderson1983:216, 230). For Pound, this rhythm-based lyricism produced aneffect that was individualistic but also masculinist, constructing a