Camões As World Author: Cosmopolitan Misreadings

1616

Paulo HORTA¹ 

[1] New York University Abu Dhabi;

关键词: cosmopolitismo;    lectura errónea;    imperialismo;    post-colonialismo;    romanticismo;    literatura comparada;    epopeya;    camões;    richard francis burton;    schlegel;   

DOI  :  

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Paulo Lemos Horta looks at Renaissance Portuguese poet Luis de Camões’ epic The Lusiads (which celebrates Vasco da Gama’s discovery of a route to India) in light of the successive misreadings that fashioned the text a work of world literature. Beginning in the 19th century, German Romantic readers, attentive to Camões’s travels in the Hormuz straight and India discerned (or read into the poem) Persian and Indian influences. This would determine the later interpretation of the poem by its English, then American translators. Focusing on this tradition, Horta explores how a national poem can be radically transformed and re-contextualized into a global text, to the point of being read almost against itself. Taking the Romantic view to its limit, its Victorian translator Richard Francis Burton (the same who translated the Thousand and One Nights) talked about the Lusiads’ «perfume of the East»: he speculated that Camões had been influenced by Persian poetry and saw a parallel between Camões’s genius of the Cape of Good Hope, Adamastor, and the jinni of the Thousand and One Nights. Horta’s analysis points to the insufficiency of readings of the poem that insist on the straightforward and unproblematic nature of the poem as –or the– foundational epic of modern European imperialism, and suggests instead that Romanticism’s creative misreading of the epic (in a Bloomian sense) may have opened up more rewarding avenues for the circulation of The Lusiads as a text of world literature.

【 授权许可】

Unknown