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Margin 251number of translations issued by American publishers was actuallysmall, approximately 6 percent of the total books published(Publishers Weekly 1963). We now know that American translationrates reached their apex in the early 1960s, but they have consistentlybeen quite low in contrast to foreign publishing trends throughoutthe postwar period, which show much higher percentages oftranslating English-language books.Blackburn’s utopianism also has a pro-American slant that seemstoo uncritical after numerous subsequent developments—the VietnamWar, the political and military interventions in El Salvador andNicaragua, government skittishness on ecological issues, theemergence of multinational corporations, especially in publishing,where the number of English-language translations has fallen to lessthan 3 percent of the total books published. In 1962, however,Blackburn imagined thatPerhaps even nationalism, so living a force today in Africa and theFar East, is beginning to die a little in the affluent West. Except forthe political forms, Western Europe is on the threshold of becomingan economic unity. Is it an impossible dream to think of a bilingualAmerica stretching from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic Ocean,comprised of eighty-three states instead of fifty? Not by conquestbut by union. How move more efficiently to raise the standard ofliving of underdeveloped countries in our own hemisphere than byremoving the borders?(Blackburn 1962:358)Readers in 1962 no doubt regarded this passage as a utopian flight.Blackburn himself called it “an impossible dream.” In the followingyear, he published a somber article in Kulchur, “The Grinding Down,”which surveyed the current poetry “scene” and found modernismmarginal and fragmented: “the Renaissance” Blackburn wrote, “didn’ttake”; it was now centered in a few small-circulation magazines,“making a place somewhere between the outer fringe of the academicand the inner sector of the so-called beat” (Blackburn 1963:17, 10). In1962, Blackburn was more sanguine about the prospects of modernism,but the emphasis on the “West” in his utopianism shows the difficultyof imagining relations between the hemispheres during the ColdWar—even for a politically engaged poet-translator like him. Theperspective from which he anticipated future global developments wasclearly that of North American hegemony, allied with western Europe