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256 The Translator’s Invisibilityindividual translations against the Provençal texts, giving what hecalled “suggestions” in a two-page report and many marginalcomments scattered throughout the manuscript. He didn’t mindBlackburn’s use of obscenity, although in the 1920s he himself wassufficiently prudish to use a French pseudonym for a lewd parody andto bowdlerize his signed translation from Guillem de Poitou: “Inwhich time—here we expurgate… One hundred times and eightyeight,/Tillheart and back were both in great/Danger of breaking”(Guthrie 1927a:59). Blackburn’s version initially read “fucked,” butthen, apparently in a moment of uncertainty about his malebohemianism, he struck it and added “loved.” Guthrie encouragedBlackburn to use the obscenity, which perhaps served to confirm hisown sense of masculinity, compensating for his earlier expurgationthrough another translator’s work:The word “loved” is too much like sneaking out the back-door. Whynot either the original word in English as was, or “f—d” or leave itin Occitanian “las fotei?” In as legitimate a cause as this, one oughtto be able to get away with one 4 letter word.What did not seem “legitimate” to Guthrie was the modernistexperimentalism of Blackburn’s translation: the foreignizingstrategies deviated too widely from prevailing domestic values in thereception of archaic texts, especially scholarly annotation and fluentdiscourse.Guthrie’s own work with troubadour poetry in the 1920s hadassumed the modernist ideal of translation as an independent literarytext: he published his translations as poems in their own right,identifying them as translations only in vague footnotes that omittedany precise identification of the Provençal texts. In 1958, however,Guthrie did not recognize Blackburn’s pursuit of this same modernistideal, his emphasis on the literary qualities of the translation at theexpense of annotations, which he limited to the Provençal titles andto the vidas and razos that accompanied the texts in manuscripts.Guthrie wanted Blackburn’s translation to have a more academic cast,even while acknowledging “the general reader”:There should be a short introduction explaining what, when andwhere the troubadours were; something of the nature andimportance of their work; the formal qualities of their works and thedifferences between their forms and P.B.’s rendering—also a few