| This study is an analysis of the relationship between Portuguese-language literature and the Western tradition, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in terms of the shifting critical fortunes of Portugal's most renowned writer, Luis de Camoes. By examining several episodes in Western and Portuguese-language literary history that most clearly exemplify the pervasiveness and then precipitous decline of Camoes' influence, this study suggests that his relatively recent exclusion from the Western canon is one of principal reasons for the general devaluation of Portuguese-language literature. Chapter One investigates the lopsided relationship between Portuguese and Spanish and examines the historical quandary of Portuguese-language writers, who, because they have frequently been bilingual, have had to decide in which of the two languages they will write. Chapter Two is a reading of Fernando Pessoa's Mensagem--and his entire heteronymic scheme--as an elaborate construct for overcoming the influence of Camoes. Chapter Three is an analysis of Ezra Pound's reading of Camoes in The Spirit of Romance that suggests that by attacking the Portuguese poet for writing in an outmoded genre and in an "unmusical" language, Pound is largely responsible for the rapid decline of Camoes' literary reputation in the twentieth century. Chapter Four is an attempt to rethink Brazilian literary history by placing Camoes in the position of prominence within that tradition that he clearly deserves. After tracing the pervasiveness and shifts in Camonian influence in Brazilian literature from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, the chapter focuses on the surprising extent of Camoes' influence on two Modernist poets, Manuel Bandeira and Carlos Drummond de Andrade. Chapter Five treats aspects of Camoes' influence on English letters, particularly in the nineteenth century, from the perspective of the troubling relationship between his best-known English translator, Richard F. Burton. It argues that one of the reasons for the decline in Camoes literary reputation is the lack of a complete modern English translation of his lyric poems. |
