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Margin 259Inevitably, Blackburn’s more inventive experiments provokedGuthrie to domesticate the translations, revising them for fluency, butalso deleting the political satire enabled by the mixed lexicon. WhenBlackburn edged his version of Bertran de Born closer to contemporarysocial issues by portraying feudal knights as bourgeois entrepreneurs,“unable to war beyond my own garage/ without an underwriter’scheck” (Blackburn 1958:125), Guthrie complained about the strangeeffects produced by the multilingual diction:Since P.B. uses so many anachronisms on the modern side, why“targe” for “shield.” The rime scheme of this sestina aren’t [sic]followed in the translation anyway and, being spotty, would bebetter omitted. But if a rime must be had (and God knows the“targe—garage” is nothing to be awfully happy about), why not“shield—field”? […] The “garage” part is bad from all angles. If“tarja” must be “targe,” why not have Bertran too poor to fight “atlarge”?Guthrie seemed willing to recognize Blackburn’s attention toprosody: free verse that was “spotty,” with the concealed rhymes andsemi-submerged alliteration that Pound had recommended for the“cantabile values” of the Provençal text. Yet Guthrie remainedunwilling to license Blackburn’s heterogeneous discourse. Bycrossing languages, cultures, historical periods, the “targe”/“garage”rhyme preempts transparency, any illusionistic sense of an authorialvoice, and calls attention to the multiple codes that make this anEnglish-language translation, with a cultural political agenda.Guthrie’s response shows that Blackburn’s translation was in part thecasualty of literary values that dominated American culture duringthe Cold War, in and out of the academy, values that were elitist intheir exclusion of marginal cultural discourses, and reactionary intheir refusal of the democratic politics that animated Blackburn’smodernist project.After the Macmillan episode, Blackburn’s writing took variousdevelopments. Some responded directly to Guthrie’s report; mostcontinued his already significant accomplishments as a modernistpoet—translator, but in new directions. Blackburn’s relationship to theProvençal translation certainly changed. The depth of Guthrie’s impactcan be gauged from the final version of the translation: Blackburnincorporated some of Guthrie’s suggestions—even when theseconflicted with his modernist experimentalism. At several points,