Luís de Camões

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Luis Vaz de Camões

Born:	c.1524
Died:	June, 10, 1580 Lisbon
Occupation:	Writer
Genres:	Poetry

Monument to Luís de Camões, Lisbon

Luís Vaz de Camões (pron. IPA /lu'iʃ vaʃ dɨ ka'mõĩʃ/; sometimes rendered in English as Camoens) (c. 1524 – June 10, 1580) is considered Portugal's greatest poet. His mastery of verse has been compared to that of Homer, Virgil, and Dante. He wrote a considerable amount of lyrical poetry and drama but is best remembered for his epic work Os Lusíadas. His philosophical work The Parnasum of Luís Vaz was lost.

1 Biography
2 Os Lusíadas
3 Lyric Poetry
4 Works
5 Bibliography
- 5.1 English
- 5.2 Spanish
6 Trivia
7 External links

[edit] Biography

Many details concerning the life of Camões remain unknown, but he is thought to have been born around 1524. Luís Vaz de Camões, the son of Simão Vaz de Camões (son of António Vaz de Camões (himself the son of João Vaz de Camões and wife Inês Gomes da Silva, older sister of Brites da Silva and Catarina da Silva, natural daughters of Jorge da Silva, himself the bastard son of Gonçalo Gomes da Silva, Alcaide-Mór de Soure, son of the 1st Lords da Chamusca and descendant from King Afonso III of Portugal by his mistress Madragana whose Jewish ancestry go as far as to King David, and King Fernando III of Castile by his first wife Elisabeth of Hohenstaufen) and wife Guiomar Vaz da Gama, a distant relative of Vasco da Gama) and Ana de Sá de Macedo [1], was likely born in Lisbon, to a family from the northern Portuguese region of Chaves near Galicia. At an early age, Simão Vaz left his son and wife to discover personal riches in India, only to die in Goa in the following years. His mother later re-married.

Luis Vaz lived a semi-privileged life and was educated by Dominicans and Jesuits. For a period, due to his familial relations he attended the University of Coimbra, although records do not show him registered (he participated in courses in the Humanities). His uncle, Bento de Camões, is credited with this education, owing to his position as Prior at the Monastery of Santa Cruz and Chancellor at the University of Coimbra. He frequently had access to exclusive literature, including classical Greek, Roman and Latin works, read Latin, Italian and wrote in Spanish.

Camões, as his love poetry can attest, was a romantic and idealist. It was rumored that he fell in love with Catherine of Ataíde, lady-in-waiting to the Queen, and also the Princess Maria, sister of John III of Portugal. It is also likely that an indiscreet allusion to the king in his play El-Rei Seleuco, as well as these other incidents may have played a part in his exile from Lisbon in 1548. He traveled to the Ribatejo where he stayed in the company of friends who sheltered and fed him. He stayed in the province for about six months.

He enlisted in the overseas militia, and traveled to Ceuta in the fall of 1549. During a battle with the Moors, he lost his right eye. He eventually returned to Lisbon in 1551, a changed man, living a bohemian lifestyle. In 1552, during the religious festival of Corpus Christi, in the Largo do Rossaio, he injured Gaspar Borges, a member of the Royal Stables. Camões was imprisoned. His mother pleaded for his release, visiting royal ministers and the Borges family for a pardon. Released, Camões was ordered to pay 4,000 réis and serve three-years in the militia in the Orient.

He departed in 1553 for Goa on board the São Bento, commanded by Fernão Alves Cabral. The ship arrived six months later. In Goa, Camões was imprisoned for debt. He found Goa "a step-mother of all honest men" but he studied local customs and mastered the local geography and history. On his first expedition, he joined a battle along the Malabar Coast. The battle was followed by skirmishes along the trading routes between Egypt and India. The fleet eventually returned to Goa by November 1554. During his time ashore, he continued his writing publicly, as well as writing correspondence for the uneducated men of the fleet.

At the end of his obligatory service, he was given the position of chief warrant officer in Macau. He was charged with managing the missing and deceased properties of soldiers in the Orient. During this time he worked on his epic poem Os Lusíadas ("The Lusiads") in a grotto. He was later accused of misappropriations and traveled to Goa to respond to the accusations of the tribunal. During his return journey, near the Mekong River along the Cambodian coast, he was shipwrecked, saving his manuscript but losing his Chinese lover. His shipwreck survival in the Mekong Delta was enhanced by the legendary detail that he succeeded in swimming ashore while holding aloft the manuscript of his still-unfinished epic.

In 1570 Camões finally made it back to Lisbon, where two years later he published Os Lusíadas. In recompense for his poem or perhaps for services in the Far East, he was granted a small royal pension by the young and ill-fated King Sebastian (ruled 1557–1578).

In 1578 he heard of the appalling defeat of the Battle of Alcazarquivir, where King Sebastian was killed and the Portuguese army destroyed. The Spanish troops were approaching Lisbon when Camões wrote to the Captain General of Lamego: "All will see that so dear to me was my country that I was content to die not only in it but with it". Camões died in Lisbon in 1580, at the age of 56.

[edit] Os Lusíadas

Camões begun composing his Os Lusiadas in 1550; he completed his masterpiece by 1570. He finished most of it in the period between 1555 and 1558. He published the work in October 1571. More editions followed in 1572. The poem, for Camões, was a glorification of the Portuguese people. In the 15th century, Portugal had reached its Golden Age. The poem itself narrates the history of Portugal at its apex, focusing on Vasco da Gama's trip to establish a maritime contract with the Indies. Vasco da Gama represents the Portuguese nation, the hero of the poem.

[edit] Lyric Poetry

Although Camões has primarily been recognized as an epic poet outside of Portugal and Brazil, he also left a large and impressive body of lyric poetry. His sonnets are classics of the Portuguese language, and although sometimes repetitive in ideas, they exhibit enormous variety, from a breathtaking paraphrasis of Job ("That the day of my birth shall perish and decay") to laments about the disillusionment, the mutability, and the human weakness in the face of the great theatre of the world. Also worthy of mention are his poignant remembrances of his beloved Dinamene (Ti-Na-Men), his Chinese lover who supposedly drowned before his very eye.

His ten (or more, depending on the source—the authority on the matter, however, has been Jorge de Sena) Canções (Songs) are a very impressive psychological and emotional dissection through poetic rhetoric, the complete dramatization of the inner self and one's own consciousness—qualities most often thought of as pertaining originarily to Shakespeare (Bloom) or Donne (Eliot)—making Camões a kind of precursor of that line of poetry which would culminate in William Wordsworth, even more so than, say, Petrarch or Auzias March. There are still many others of his lyric works that could be brought to the table; Camões was, despite later Parnassian attacks, extremely well-versed in the language and skilled with an impressive array of poetic forms.

[edit] Works

Os Lusíadas
The Parnasum of Luís Vaz (lost)

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] English

Luis de Camões: Epic and Lyric, ed. Keith Bosley (1990)
Camoens: His Life and his Lusiads, 1881
The Place of Camoens in Literature / Nabuco, Joaquim., 1908
Luis de Camões / Bell, Aubrey F. G., 1923
Camoens, Central Figure of Portuguese Lit. / Goldberg, Isaac., 1924
From Virgil to Milton / Bowra, C. M., 1945
Camoens and the Epic of the Lusiads / Hart, Henry Hersch., 1962
The Lusiads of Luiz de Camões / Bacon, Leonard., 1966
The Presence of Camões / Monteiro, George., 1996
The Lusiads / White, Landeg., 2002

[edit] Spanish

Camoens y Cervantes / Orico, Osvaldo., 1948
Camoens / Filgueira Valverde, Jose., 1958
Homenaje a Camoens: Estudios y Ensayos., 1980
Cuatro Lecciones Sobre Camoens / Alonso Zamora Vicente., 1981

[edit] Trivia

Camões figures prominently in the book Het verboden rijk (The Forbidden Empire) by the Dutch writer J. Slauerhoff, who himself made several voyages to the Far East as a ship's doctor.