Luís de Camões

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Luís de Camões set sail from Lisbon on Palm Sunday, the 24th of March 1553, carrying nothing but his soldier's pay and the beginnings of a poem. He had just been freed from prison by royal order, the pardon describing him simply as "a young man and poor" going to serve in India. Few departures in literary history carry more irony: the man who would come to define Portugal's identity in verse was leaving that identity behind, possibly forever. His last words, as he recorded them in a letter, were those of the Roman general Scipio Africanus: "Ingrata patria, non possidebis ossa mea" - Ungrateful fatherland, you will not possess my bones. He was right, in a sense. The remains placed in the Jerónimos Monastery in 1880 are, in all probability, someone else's. What endured was the work he saved from a shipwreck near the mouth of the Mekong River: Os Lusíadas, the poem so thoroughly woven into Portuguese culture that the language itself is sometimes called the language of Camões. The day he died, the 10th of June, is Portugal's national day.

• 2. A Disputed Beginning

  ›

  Much of what passes for fact about Camões' early life is folklore, and his biographers were the first to admit it. Even his birth year is contested: the earliest biographers, Severin de Faria and Manoel Correa, initially gave 1517, but records from the Casa da Índia, later examined by Manuel de Faria e Sousa, point to 1524, in Lisbon. Other cities, including Coimbra, Santarém and Alenquer, claim the honor of being his birthplace, though scholars find the arguments against Lisbon weak. His family traced its ancestry to the Kingdom of Galicia, not far from Cape Finisterre. A paternal ancestor, Vasco Pires de Camões, was a Galician troubadour and warrior who moved to Portugal in 1370, receiving lands and honors from the king. Antão Vaz de Camões, descended from that line, married Dona Guiomar da Gama, a relative of the explorer Vasco da Gama. Their son Simão, who served in the Royal Navy and traded in Guinea and India, became Luís's father. His uncle Bento, a chancellor of the University of Coimbra and prior of the Monastery of Santa Cruz, appears to have guided his education, though the poet's name never appears in the university's records. What survives as evidence of his learning is the work itself: the density of his classical references, his command of Latin and Spanish, and his evident familiarity with Ovid, Horace, Virgil, Homer and a wide range of ancient and modern writers.

• 3. Bohemian Life and Exile

  ›

  Back in Lisbon at around twenty years of age, before finishing his studies, Camões entered the court of John III. He is described by his contemporaries as a man of average size, reddish blond hair, blind in his right eye, skilled in physical exercises, and with a temperamental disposition that made him quick to fight. He lost the right eye in a naval battle in the Strait of Gibraltar, during a two-year stint as a soldier in Ceuta. The circumstances that led him there are disputed: one tradition links his departure to a frustrated passion for a woman named Catarina de Ataíde, another to a rumored infatuation with Infanta Dona Maria, sister of the king, which supposedly earned him a prison term. A document from 1550 records his enlistment to travel to India, describing him as 25 years old with a ginger beard, but he did not board immediately. In a Corpus Christi procession, he got into a sword fight with Gonçalo Borges, an employee of the Royal Palace, and wounded him. The imprisonment that followed ended on the 7th of March 1553, with a royal pardon acknowledging that he was poor and going to serve in India. The enrollment records for that year list him as a squire who received 2400, like the others.

• 4. Seventeen Years in the East

  ›

  Camões traveled aboard the carrack São Bento, belonging to the fleet of Fernão Álvares Cabral. The passage was violent: a storm at the Cape of Good Hope sank three of the fleet's other ships. He landed in Goa in 1554 and enlisted under the viceroy D. Afonso de Noronha, fighting in an expedition against the king of Chembé. In 1555, under the next viceroy, D. Pedro Mascarenhas, he accompanied Manuel de Vasconcelos on a campaign against Moorish forces in the Red Sea, ending the winter in Ormuz, in the Persian Gulf. He was most likely already writing Os Lusíadas by this point. Back in Goa in 1556, he composed a play, the "Auto de Filodemo", for the governor D. Francisco Barreto. An anonymous satire attributed to him led to another arrest, possibly lasting until 1561. When D. Francisco Coutinho assumed the governorship, Camões was released and given employment. He was appointed Superintendent for the Dead and Missing in Macau in 1562, serving there from 1563 until 1564 or 1565, at a time when Macau was barely more than a trading post. On the voyage back toward Goa, he was shipwrecked near the mouth of the Mekong River. He saved himself and the manuscript of Os Lusíadas. The poet and friend Diogo do Couto, who partly accompanied the work as it was being written, later noted that the shipwreck profoundly reshaped the poem's themes, an effect noticeable starting with Canto VII. He was taken eventually to Malacca, where a new arrest warrant awaited him on charges of misappropriating assets belonging to the dead under his care. His friend Diogo do Couto found him in Mozambique between 1568 and 1569, dependent on friends for food, the pension-less years having reduced him to near destitution.

• 5. The Return and Its Costs

  ›

  Diogo do Couto described finding Camões in Mozambique in a letter that has become one of the most cited passages in Portuguese literary history: "so poor that he was dependent on friends to feed him". Couto also recorded that the manuscript of Camões' second major collection, the Parnassus of Luís de Camões, a book described as one of great erudition, doctrine and philosophy, was stolen from him there. A governor named Pedro Barreto had been making false promises that prevented him from departing; Barreto eventually embargoed his departure for the sum of two hundred cruzados, claiming reimbursement for expenses. Friends collected the amount. Camões arrived in Cascais aboard the carrack Santa Clara on the 7th of April 1570. He presented Os Lusíadas in recitation to King Sebastian, still a teenager, who ordered the work published in 1572 and granted a small pension of no more than fifteen thousand réis a year to "Luís de Camões, noble knight of my House". For context, ladies-in-waiting at the Royal Palace received around ten thousand réis, which suggests the pension was not contemptible for a veteran soldier. It was, however, paid irregularly, and the grant appears to have lapsed after three years. Camões' final years were spent in a room near the Convent of Santa Ana. He kept a slave named Jau, whom he had brought from the east, and official documents show he had some income. He was embittered by the Portuguese defeat at the Battle of Alcácer Quibir, in which King Sebastian disappeared and Portugal lost its independence to the Spanish crown. He died of bubonic plague on the 10th of June 1580 and was buried in a shallow grave. The receipts for his pension, found at the Torre do Tombo, document the date.

• 6. Os Lusíadas

  ›

  Os Lusíadas takes its name from Lusitania, the ancient Roman name for Portugal. The epic follows Vasco da Gama's fleet sailing around the Cape of Good Hope to India, but classical gods debate the expedition's fate throughout: Venus protects the Portuguese, Bacchus opposes them. The poem opens with a dedication to the teenage King Sebastian and moves through episodes drawn from Portuguese history, including the death of Inês de Castro, the Battle of Aljubarrota, and the apparition of the giant Adamastor at the Cape. The ten cantos comprise 1,102 stanzas and 8,816 decasyllabic verses in ottava rima, the abababcc rhyme scheme. Jorge de Sena demonstrated that the golden section, applied to the whole poem, falls precisely on the verse describing the Portuguese arrival in India. Applied separately to the two resulting portions, the first part's golden section falls on the death of Inês de Castro and the second on the stanza describing Cupid's efforts to unite the Portuguese with the nymphs. Two editions appeared in 1572, but which constitutes the original remained contested for centuries. Edition A, identified by a publisher's mark showing a pelican with its neck turned to the left, is now recognized as the one produced under the author's supervision. Edition B was produced clandestinely, probably around 1584 or 1585, with a fictitious date of 1572 to avoid censorship delays. The distinction mattered enormously: scholars using edition B as the basis for critical analysis were working from a corrupted text.

• 7. Lyric and Stage

  ›

  Camões' lyric poems circulated in manuscripts during his lifetime and were only collected posthumously, published in 1595 under the title Rimas. The forms range across sonnets, odes, elegies, eclogues, redondilhas, cantigas, glosses and sextilhas. His sonnets draw from the Italian tradition of Petrarch; his odes blend troubadour poetry with classical models; his sextilhas show Provençal influence; his redondilhas pushed the form into new emotional territory, working antitheses and paradoxes absent from the older tradition of Cantigas de amigo. The collection also absorbed apocryphal poems over the centuries, producing a textual problem of considerable scale: the original 1595 edition contained 65 sonnets, while the 1861 edition of Juromenha listed 352. The 1685 edition of Faria e Sousa introduced systematic alterations to the text. Scientific purging of the canon only began seriously toward the end of the 19th century, led by Wilhelm Storck and Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos. His three dramatic works, El-Rei Seleuco, Filodemo and Anfitriões, combine classical sources with Portuguese nationalist themes. Filodemo, composed in India and dedicated to D. Francisco Barreto, is a five-act comedy of morality whose central story - a servant's love for the daughter of his employer's household - carries autobiographical weight. Anfitriões, published in 1587, adapts Plautus' Amphitryon and uses bilingualism deliberately: the slave Sósia speaks in Castilian to mark his social level. The attribution of El-Rei Seleuco to Camões remains disputed; it was unknown until 1654, runs only a single act, and differs markedly from the other two plays in depth and treatment.

• 8. Beyond Portugal

  ›

  Two Spanish translations of Os Lusíadas appeared in 1580, the year of Camões' death, possibly printed at the behest of Philip II of Spain, who had by then also become king of Portugal. In Luis Gómez de Tápia's edition, Camões is already described as "famous". Philip gave him the honorific title of "Prince of the Poets of Spain"; as the son of a Portuguese princess, Philip had reasons to assimilate the poet into the Spanish cultural orbit rather than suppress him. Torquato Tasso described Camões as the only rival he feared and dedicated a sonnet to him. Cervantes called him the singer of Western civilization. Friedrich Schlegel called him the ultimate exponent of creation in epic poetry. Voltaire criticized the poem's mixing of Christian and pagan mythology but acknowledged the novelties it introduced, helping to drive its popularity in France. Montesquieu found in it something of the charm of the Odyssey and the magnificence of the Aeneid. Between 1735 and 1874, no fewer than twenty French translations appeared, not counting second editions and paraphrases. William Julius Mickle's English poetic version of 1776 brought the poem to wider attention in Britain, though a translation by Fanshawe had arrived there as early as 1655. A crater on Mercury and an asteroid in the main belt carry his name. The film Camões, directed by José Leitão de Barros, became the first Portuguese film to compete at the Cannes Film Festival, in 1946. The great Monument to Camões was installed in Praça de Luís de Camões in Lisbon in 1867, sculpted by Victor Bastos, and it remains the center of official ceremonies on the 10th of June.