venuti

252 The Translator’s Invisibilityin a strategic containment of Soviet expansionism, but permitted toindulge in some hemispheric expansion of its own (“eighty-threestates”).Blackburn’s article is valuable, not as a historical prediction orforeign policy, but rather as a theoretical model, useful inthinking how translation can be enlisted in a democratic culturalpolitics. Blackburn saw modernist translation as an effectiveintervention in American culture, based on a social diagnosis thatfound hegemonic domestic values implicated in unequal orexclusionary social relations, Blackburn’s own translations, withtheir various foreignizing strategies, served a left-winginternationalism, designed to combat the ideological forms ofexclusion in Cold War America, perhaps most evident in thehysterical patriotism excited by hardening geopolitical positions(Whitfield 1991). The Provençal translation was especiallysubversive in this cultural situation because it revealed a broadrange of influences, foreign and historical. The clear debt tomodernism made the project vulnerable to Leslie Fiedler’spoliticized attack on Pound’s translations for lacking a “center,”an allegiance to one national literature, American: “Our Muse isthe poet without a Muse, whom quite properly we acquit oftreason (what remains to betray?) and consign to SaintElizabeth’s” (Fiedler 1962:459).Blackburn’s Provençal translation was marked, not only by aconnection to an un-American poet—translator, but by an affiliationto popular culture through his resonant use of colloquialism. AsAndrew Ross has shown, Cold War intellectuals associated popularculture with totalitarianism, mass thinking, brainwashing, but alsowith commercialism, egalitarianism, radical democracy. As theAmerican government pursued a policy of Soviet containmentabroad, at home intellectuals like Fiedler constructed a nationalculture of consensus that “depended explicitly upon thecontainment of intellectual radicalism and cultural populism alike”(Ross 1989:47). In Robert von Hallberg’s view, “what is important toliterary history is not only that this consensus existed but that itsmaintenance and definition depended somehow upon academicinstitutions. […] To the extent that poets looked to universities foran audience, they were addressing […] the audience that felt greatestresponsibility for the refinement of taste and the preservation of anational culture” (Von Hallberg 1985:34). Blackburn’s work withProvençal poetry both questioned and resisted this hegemonic