venuti

Margin 265him from taking on this project. Blackburn’s work with Cortázarserved the modernist cultural politics that informed his Provençaltranslation and his article “The International Word,” a left-winginternationalism that viewed translation as a foreignizingintervention in American culture. The Cortázar translations,however, were much more effective in their dissidence,questioning and actually changing literary canons in English.Blackburn, among the other translators and publishers ofCortázar’s writing, was importing the so-called “boom” intwentieth-century Latin American fiction, a body of foreignliterature characterized by experimentalist strategies thatchallenged the realism dominating British and American narrative.The Latin American boom began circulating in English during the1950s, when translations of writers like Jorge Luis Borges appearedin magazines and anthologies. Among the first book-lengthtranslations in this tendency was in fact Borges’ Ficciones (1962),rendered by various hands, American and British. A few yearslater, the reviews of the Cortázar translations repeatedly linkedhim to “his countryman” Borges, and both were inserted in themodernist mainstream of European fiction: Franz Kafka, ItaloSvevo, Günter Grass, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, NathalieSarraute. 11 Contemporary British and American fiction was for themost part realist at this time, with narrative experimentalismbanished to the obscure fringes (Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett,Flann O’Brien, William Burroughs, William Gaddis, John Hawkes,Thomas Pynchon)—or to popular forms, like horror and sciencefiction. This is reflected in The New York Times “Best Seller List” for9 July 1967, the issue in which Blackburn’s End of the Game wasreviewed (see Table 3). The list contains mostly varieties of realism(historical and contemporary); the only deviation is a Gothicfantasy, an archaic popular genre modernized in Ira Levin’s novel,Rosemary’s Baby.The success of Latin American writers like Borges and Cortázarwas both critical and commercial, owing to numerous, mostlyfavorable reviews, the support of trade publishers like Grove,Pantheon, and New Directions, and publishing subventions issuedthrough the Center for Inter-American Relations, a culturalorganization funded by private foundations. The translations werevery well received. Rabassa’s version of Hopscotch won the 1966National Book Award for Translation. Within the first six months ofpublication, The Winners sold 8195 hardback copies; within five