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Margin 271that were developed by Pound but marginalized by the regime offluency in English-language translation. This meant cultivating anextremely heterogeneous discourse (a rich mixture of archaism,colloquialism, quotation, nonstandard punctuation andorthography, and prosodic experiment) that prevented thetranslation from being taken as the “original” and instead assertedits independence as a literary text in a different language andculture. Blackburn’s experimentalist practices were foreignizing:their challenge to fluency, among other domestic values (academiccriticism, linguistic elitism, bourgeois propriety, realism,individualism), enabled his translations to signal the linguistic andcultural differences of the foreign texts. Yet Blackburn was alsoappropriating these texts for domestic cultural agendas: in theconstruction of his authorial identity through a rivalry with Pound;in the prosodic and thematic development of his own poetry; andin a dissident political intervention designed to foster a left-winginternationalism in American culture during the Cold War, when aforeign policy of containing ideological opponents led to a domesticsurge of nationalism that excluded cultural differences.Blackburn’s Provençal translation intervened into this situation,but was also constrained by it, caught between the midcenturyreaction against modernism, the academic reception of archaicliterary texts, and an elitism that marginalized nonstandard dialectsand discourses. Even twenty years later, in 1978, when themanuscript was finally published, the reception reflected thecontinuing marginality of modernist translation. In The New YorkTimes Book Review, the academic critic and translator Robert M.Adams acknowledged Blackburn’s development of a translationpoetics (“Blackburn was a poet, and he responded to the poetry ofhis originals”), but faulted his “pronounced stylistic mode (inessence the labored slang of Ezra Pound)” and found GeorgeEconomou’s editing inadequate on largely scholarly grounds:“historical and biographical information is sparse and uncommonlyconfused in its presentation”; “there is never any indication in thetext of where a footnote occurs” (Adams 1979:36).Blackburn’s own response after the Macmillan episode was todevelop new translation projects that continued to serve a modernistcultural politics, although with different foreign literatures anddifferent translation discourses. As Cortázar’s agent and translator,Blackburn worked to get Latin American fiction admitted to the canonof foreign literature in English; and to achieve this canon reformation,