venuti

Margin 245she wears no make-up.They can say no hard word of her, sheis so fine and clear as an emerald.(Blackburn 1958:17)Blackburn’s odd rhythms and diction destabilize the reader’ssympathetic identification with the lyric voice, preventing thetranslation from being taken as the “original,” the transparentexpression of the foreign author, and instead insisting on its secondorderstatus, a text that produces effects in English, distinct from theProvençal poem but also departing from contemporary English usage,possessing a powerful self-difference, a sudden shifting from thefamiliar to the unfamiliar, even to the unintelligible.Blackburn’s translation of Provençal poetry is clearly moreaccessible than the Zukofskys’ Catullus, requiring a less aggressiveapplication to appreciate because of a more inviting lyricism. But ittoo follows Pound’s innovations by developing a translationdiscourse that is both historicist and foreignizing, that signals thecultural differences of the foreign texts through a linguisticexperimentalism. The project is marked by the rivalry with Poundthat formed Blackburn’s identity as a modernist poet—translator,determining not only the choice of texts and the development of atranslation discourse, but also a revisionism that critiques Pound’sown appropriations of the same texts, questioning their investmentin aristocracy, patriarchy, individualism—ideological determinationsthat also marked Blackburn’s writing in varying degrees andacross many different forms (letters, poems, translations,interviews). Blackburn’s Provençal project was decisive in hispersonal formation as a author; but since this formation occurred inwriting, the translation could also be conceived as a strategic publicintervention, a cultural political practice that was fundamentallymodernist, but that was not uncritical in its acceptance of Pound’smodernism.Blackburn’s rare comments on his work suggest that he saw italong these or related lines. In a 1969 interview, he responded to thequestion, “What poets have influenced your work?” by citing Pound,Williams, Creeley, Charles Olson, whose poetry he read because “Iwanted to find out who my father was” (Packard 1987:9). Blackburnmay not have psychoanalyzed his relationship to Pound, but aftertranslating for some twenty years and spending many years inanalysis, he definitely possessed a psychoanalytic view of the