venuti

Margin 247increasingly becomes the site of multiple subjectivities, a deviationfrom rational norms:He must be willing (& able) to let another man’s life enter his owndeeply enough to become some permanent part of his originalauthor. He should be patient, persistent, slightly schizoid, a hardcritic, a brilliant editor […] We are all hundreds, maybe thousands ofpeople, potentially or in fact.(Blackburn 1985:616)In both the interview and questionnaire, Blackburn’s view of thepoet—translator is insistently masculinist: the process of identificationor “projection” occurs between men. In the interview, it was part ofBlackburn’s bohemian self-presentation, where he abruptly seguedfrom a discussion about “writing in a travel situation” to “girlwatching”:“To come back to the city, though, the subway is anincredible place for girl-watching. You find one face or a good pair oflegs—you can look at them for hours” (Packard 1987:14). And yet if, inBlackburn’s account, translation multiplies subjectivities by mediatingcultural differences, it can only explode any individualistic concept ofidentity, masculinist or otherwise. Blackburn felt that the range ofdifferent demands made on the translator was extreme, resulting indeviancy, inviting psychiatric terms or allusions to popular culturalforms, like blues and rock-and-roll (or even more specifically the bluesbasedrock of Bob Dylan’s 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home),linking the translator to other racial and youth subcultures:In your view, what is a translator?A man who brings it all back home.In short, a madman.(Blackburn 1985:616)Blackburn was of course aware that the psychological processes hedescribed so facetiously could be figured only in discursive strategies,and these he saw as a challenge to bourgeois values, not just toindividualistic concepts of identity, but to a moralistic sense ofpropriety in conduct and language. As early as 1950, in a letter toPound, he remarked on “the impossibility of translating poems writtenin a twelfth century aristocratic vocabulary into MODERN ENGLISHPOEMS written in a twentieth century bourgeois vocabulary” (24