The eye and the ear: Ezra Pound, Brazilian concrete poetry and their paideuma

The present dissertation studies the Brazilian concrete poetry movement in its relation with Ezra Pound and other authors that constituted important references for it, focusing especially in the relations between the visual and the acoustic as epistemological and aesthetic models for the production of poetry. The Brazilian concrete poetry movement is discussed first in terms of its precedents in the Modernism of the beginning of the 20th century in Brazil, the Americas, and Europe, and then placed in the historical and cultural context of the decades in which it emerged and flourished (after the end of World War II), paying especial attention to its correspondence with and translation of Ezra Pound. Together with their assimilation of Ezra Pound, the Brazilian concrete poets also incorporated in their work (through translation, imitation, and criticism), references to many poets of the recent or remote past that Pound had signaled as essential. The thesis examines in particular two instances of this assimilation: Chinese classical poetry (which brings up the issue of the Chinese written character as a medium for poetry raised by Fenollosa) and troubadour poetry (which opens up the question of the relation of poetry to melody, rhythm, and performance). The other translation carried out by the Brazilian concrete poets that the thesis examines carefully is their rendering of Mallarme's works, which turns out to be difficult to reconcile with their aspirations to continue Pound's legacy. These translations are examined in their relations to the domains of the visual, the acoustic, and the conceptual as complementary areas of poetic technique. They are not only considered as products to be submitted to textual criticism, but as processes, in their implications for a more general theory of translation that would be related to issues of transmission, tradition, and transformation. The conclusion of the thesis proposes the notions of rhythm and of tact as possible ways of bridging the gap between the visual and the acoustic elements in poetry in order to gain a fuller understanding of concrete poetry in particular and as a perspective for the study of poetics at a more general level.