Why is that, five centuries after his birth, the poet Luís de Camões still has the power to challenge and intrigue? Down through the centuries, Camões has consistently commanded attention from commentators and translators, as well as readers and simple admirers.
His epic poem, Os Lusíadas, published in 1572, was so highly regarded that, around a decade later, a pirate edition was published, in itself a tribute to the quality of the work. The paper on which the new copies were printed leaves no room for doubt: part of the paper used was manufactured in 1581. In neighbouring Spain, Os Lusíadas was translated into Spanish in 1580, twice in the same year: one version published in Madrid and the other in Alcalá de Henares. The epic is currently translated into dozens of languages.
Who was Luís de Camões?
Luís de Camões was probably born in Lisbon in 1524. He is said to have moved in the aristocratic circles of Coimbra (where he is thought to have studied) as well as the court in Lisbon.
Because of his temperamental nature, he often got involved in fights and was imprisoned several times. He fought in North Africa (Ceuta), where he was blinded in one eye, and lived in India and Macao.
On one of his return trips from Macao to Goa, he was shipwrecked, and legend has it that he saved Os Lusíadas by swimming with one arm and keeping the manuscript out of the water with the other.
He died in poverty on 10 June 1579 or 1580. He is still considered the greatest Portuguese poet of all time.
Short biography slightly inspired by what is published by Infopédia (Porto Editora).
Epic and lyric poet, dramatist and letter writer, Camões was always drawn to the new, to that which was unknown but that awakened his great thirst for experience and knowledge. He lived at a time of extraordinary new discoveries, with the maritime explorers, the new opportunities for trade and new knowledge of distant lands and peoples. There was another world he explored with rare expertise, the inner life of the human soul and the deepest recesses of its labyrinths: victories and defeats, terrors and challenges, contradiction and indecision, in a quest unprecedented in the history of literature.
Os Lusíadas is an epic poem, a tale of adventurous voyages across the oceans.
In Lisbon, he frequented the court and the milieux where poetry of the greatest refinement was written, but he was also familiar with the city’s sleazier underworld. At Corpus Christi, he saw a group of men attack Gonçalo Borges, who was in charge of the king’s stables. Despite being masked, he immediately recognised them as his friends and defended them. He was imprisoned and, on his release, opted to sail for India.
The voyage was in no way a punishment, but rather a lucid decision in response to his desire to exchange the old continent for the new world. The route he followed to India differed little from that taken by Vasco da Gama in 1497-98, as he related in Os Lusíadas. However, rather than sailing straight back, as Vasco da Gama had, the poet lingered; he was away for some 17 years, travelling the East and stopping in Mozambique on his return.
Camões personal luggage was probably modest. But the intellectual baggage he took with him would fill the hold of any ship. He was a man of extraordinary learning, acquired, as everything seems to suggest, at the Monastery of Santa Cruz in Coimbra, where his uncle, Bento de Camões, was the prior. Even so, his memory must have been prodigious.
The structure of Os Lusíadas is similar to that of other classic epic poems. It has ten cantos, like chapters in a story designed to be presented orally.
It consists of 8,816 lines divided into 1,102 stanzas, each one with eight lines. Each stanza has the following rhyming scheme: ABABABCC.
In Os Lusíadas, erudite learning and experience go hand in hand. The focus on observation of everything new is clearly expressed through the recurrent use of the verb ‘to see’, more frequent than any other, except for the verb ‘to be’. Who could be unmoved by “I saw, clearly seen, the bright light”, describing St Elmo’s fire and the waterspout in the sea.
The Mediterranean Sea is no longer the limit of experience. The model for Os Lusíadas, Virgil’s Aeneid, never strays from the bounds of the Mediterranean, like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey before it. Camões’ poem strikes out decisively from this geographical limit, leaving behind the Mediterranean on a voyage through the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. It is the first epic poem to explore the oceans. Indeed, Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered) by Torquato Tasso, published nine years after Os Lusíadas, looks back to the time of the first crusade in the eleventh century, concentrating its action in the Eastern Mediterranean. Tasso himself expressed admiration for Camões, lavishing praise on him in a celebrated sonnet, and his hero, Vasco da Gama.
But this is not the only virgin territory that Camões explores. As well as venturing through the labyrinths of the globe, he also explored another experience that had never been so penetratingly analysed, the inner labyrinths of man. His poetic voice was one of those which, in any period, went furthest in reflecting on fragmentation, change, the clash of opposites and the wanderings of the “errant and wayward pilgrim / seeing nations, languages and customs / varied skies, different qualities”, as he wrote. For Camões, opposites were not mutually exclusive, meaning that the conflict never finds a point of resolution: “desire does not seek the desired forthwith, / so as not to lack where it abounds”. The dialectic leads the opposing terms to turn back constantly on each other, prolonging the dissonance, and thus the love and the song. These are, after all, the dilemmas that still torture the human heart.
Camões extolled a type of female figure that fits the Petrarchan mould, with snow-white skin, golden hair and shining eyes. But the feelings of love she inspires are generally a path to grief and suffering. One of the rare moments in which he experiences a truly rewarding love is that gifted by a “captive whose love I knew in India, called Bárbora”. But then the poet is led to superimpose, on the standard of Petrarchan beauty, that of the Black woman. He was the first poet to extol her charms.
Much has been written about Camões’ life story: his loves, his time in prison, shipwrecks, scrapes. Several theories have been advanced as to the woman he actually loved. Leonor, Catarina, Guiomar are names we find in his works. However, poetry is fiction, and it is not possible to identify any of them with the woman he actually loved.
Fisrt stanza of Os Lusíadas – Translation by Sir Richard Francis Burton, London, 1880.
The feats of Arms, and
famed heroick Host,
from occidental
Lusitanian strand,
who o’er the waters
ne’er by seaman crost,
fared beyond the
Taprobáne land,
forceful in perils
and in battle-post,
with more than promised
force of mortal hand;
and in the regions of
a distant race
rear’d a new throne so
haught in Pride of Place.
The high esteem deserved by Luís de Camões and his place in the diffuse collective imagination that has been attributed to him, down through the centuries, makes him the Portuguese poet who is most effusively recast in new versions of himself, as if in afterlives. More often than not, these new versions tell us more about those who foster them, than about the poet himself.
In the end, this quest makes sense as a way of moulding the poet to each person’s mind, which is to say, of making him their own, bringing him into our contemporary world. Only the classic writers, such as Camões, always have something more to say and continue to lend themselves to surprising, and disturbing, new readings.
