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250 The Translator’s Invisibilitythe values of bringing across other sensibilities in other languages andfrom all periods of history and civilization” (Blackburn 1962:357) andassigned translation a key geopolitical role: “the mutual inseminationof cultures is an important step in what our policy makers think ofas international understanding” (ibid.:358). In this politicizedrationale for cultural exchange, modernist translation was summonedto resolve a domestic crisis, searching foreign cultures to supply thelack of confidence in the “official values” of Cold War Americanculture:The Cold War and the possibly imminent illumination of theworld have created another reaction in poets […] There is anaffirmation, a reaffirmation, of values, a searching of the oldercultures, both American and foreign, modern and ancient, forvalues to sustain the individual in a world where all the officialvalues have let us down entirely by being in the main hypocritical(consider the phrase “business ethics” for a moment), thereligions attentuated to the point where even the monks arescreaming from the pinch.(ibid.:359)Blackburn’s concern about the “identity of the individual” did notassume a liberal individualism grounded in concepts of personalfreedom, self-determination, psychological coherence; he rather sawhuman identity as other-determined, a composite constructed inrelationships to “values” that were transindividual, cultural and social,housed in institutions like the state, the church, the school. Iftranslation could change the contours of subjectivity, Blackburnthought, then it could contribute to a change in values, away from “themilitary stance and the profit motive” toward less strained geopoliticalrelations, “perhaps breadth of understanding for other peoples, agreater tolerance for and proficiency in other languages, combinedwith political wisdom and expediency over the next two generations”(ibid.:358).Some of Blackburn’s remarks have come to seem much toooptimistic. He judged from “the current flood of translations in bothprose and poetry” that “The ducts of free exchange are already openin literature” (Blackburn 1962:357, 358). But cultural exchangethrough translation wasn’t then (nor ever could be) “free” ofnumerous constraints, literary, economic, political, and Englishlanguagetranslation certainly wasn’t free in 1962. That year the