Re-Reading Pound and Camões

This chapter concerns Ezra Pound’s critical appraisal of the Portuguese epic, Os Lusiadas (1572), by Luís Vaz de Camões (1524/25–80). For half a century, when Pound theorized about the epic form, he consistently admired what he called primary epics, particularly Homer’s, but tended to dismiss secondary epics. Besides Dante’s Divina Commedia, the other great epic for Pound, argues Stephen Wilson, is Camões’s poem, praised especially for its expression of the “real,” or, as Pound explains it, “this song [that] tells of real men, whose deeds surpass all the fictitious deeds of fabled heroes.” For Wilson, Pound’s view of the Renaissance derives from two metahistorical tropes, the translatio imperii and the translatio studii, which generate a history in which a Renaissance inevitably figures as epochal. Pound’s essay on Camões further represents his first attempt to link literature and economics by raising the question of how a society’s economic structure relates to its literature. Pound’s involvement with Camões is pertinent, given that Portuguese and Spanish share a common history, culture, and aestheticism.