venuti

Margin 249more it’s meaningless& without feeling.(Blackburn 1985:89–90)In the Provençal translations, Blackburn sometimes tilts his lexiconheavily toward contemporary English, inscribing the troubadourpoem With a satire on capitalist economic practices, onbusinessmen and lawyers. This occurs with another of Bertran deBorn’s war songs, No puosc mudar un chantar non esparga. InBlackburn’s version, the marauding knight becomes more criminal,more gangster-like—“A good war, now, makes a niggardly lord/turn lavish and shell out handsomely”—but the knight is also morebusiness-like, given to financial planning (“expenditures”) andliving in suburbia:have I not taken blows upon my targe?And dyed red the white of my gonfalon?Yet for this I have to suffer and pinch my purse,for Oc-e-No plays with loaded dice.I’m hardly lord of Rancon or Lusignanthat I can war beyond my own garagewithout an underwriter’s check.But I’ll contribute knowledge and a good strong armwith a basin on my head and a buckler on my neck!(Blackburn 1958:116)Blackburn actually addressed the social implications of translation onone occasion: in “The International Word,” an article he contributedto a special issue of The Nation devoted to culture and politics.Published in 1962, on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis, whenBlackburn was serving as poetry editor of this left-wing magazine,“The International Word” argues that a modernist cultural politics caneffectively intervene in the current global situation: in Blackburn’sdiagnosis, “the crisis of identity of the individual in a world whoseunderlying realities are the cold war and the bomb” (Blackburn1962:358), In a survey of contemporary American poetry, Blackburnfound the most politically engaged poets to be modernist: his litanyincludes Pound, Williams, the Objectivists, Black Mountain, the Beats,the New York School—figures and tendencies that had recently beenpresented as oppositional in Donald Allen’s anthology, The NewAmerican Poetry (Allen 1960). Blackburn noted Pound’s insistence “on