After Translation: The Transfer and Circulation of Modern Poetics Across the Atlantic

4 /Transferring the “Luminous Detail”: Sousândrade, Pound, and the Imagist Origins of Brazilian Concrete Poetry

Chapter 4 focuses on the Brazilian movement of Concrete poetics developed by the São Paulo-based brothers Augusto and Haroldo de Campos that revolutionized both Latin American and world poetry during the 1960s. Mirroring Ezra Pound's formulation of the notion of the "luminous detail" as a hybrid or complex poetic image constituting a self-sufficient critical fact, the São Paulo-based brothers manage to rewrite the literary history of the Brazilian and Latin American avant-garde. Pound's overarching influence on the Brazilian collective of Concrete poets is particularly evident in the critical study by the de Campos brothers of the poetry of the romantic Brazilian poet Joaquim de Sousa Andrade (1833-1902) in ReVisão de Sousândrade (1964). As examined in this chapter, Augusto and Haroldo de Campos relevantly incorporate the poetry of the Brazilian romantic poet into the theoretical body of concretismo precisely as the Latin American precursor of Pound's own modernist poetics of imagisme.