Camões, Luís de
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Wikipedia-Article "Luís de Camões"
Luís Vaz de Camões (pron. IPA /lu.'iʃ vaʃ dɨ ka.'mõj̃ʃ/; 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, Dante and Shakespeare. 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.
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Biography
Many details concerning the life of Camões (pronounced cam-oynsh) remain unknown, but he is thought to have been born around 1524. He was the son of Simão Vaz de Camões and Anna de Sá e Macedo, a family from the northern Portuguese region of Chaves.
He probably studied humanities in Coimbra, where his uncle D. Bento de Camões was a priest at the renowned Monastery of Santa Cruz. Camões moved back to Lisbon in 1542, where he led a bohemian lifestyle.
As a young man he fought the Moors in Morocco and lost one eye. In 1552, he returned to Lisbon, where he is reported to have stabbed an officer of the court in the neck. He was jailed until March 1553, but he was released on the condition that he serve the king in India. 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. Camões took part in military expeditions to the Malabar Coast and the Red Sea. In 1556. he sailed to Macao, where he was given an office. In 1558, he began his long voyage home. He was shipwrecked in the Mekong and was saved by floating on a board, saving his manuscript but losing his Chinese lover. He was delayed at Mozambique and did not arrive in Lisbon until 1570. He published Os Lusíadas in 1572. The king gave him a pension, but when the king died, the pension ended. Thereafter, Camões lived in poverty, cared for by a servant called Jao who had followed him from Macao.
In 1578 he heard of the appalling disaster of Alcacer-Kibir, where King Sebastiao 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.
Os Lusiadas
Os Lusíadas are named from the fabled hero Lusus, who is said to have come with Ulysses to what is now Portugal and called it Lusitania. Os Lusíadas tells the story of Vasco da Gama and the Portuguese heroes who sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and opened a new route to the Indies. It is a humanist epic in its association of pagan mythology with a Christian outlook, in its conflicting feelings about war and empire, in its love of home and desire of adventure, in its appreciation of pleasure and the demands of an heroic outlook.
Os Lusíadas is considered a major epic poem of modern times on account of its grandeur and universality. The poem adapts the classical spirit of Homer's and Vergil's epics. Camões' ambition was to create a national epic that would rival those of his two primary precursors. The achievements of Portugal since Prince Henry the Navigator until its annexation by Spain in 1580 are a landmark in history, marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity. Camões begun composing his Os Lusiadas in 1550; he completed his masterpiece by 1570. He finished most of it in the period 1555-1558. 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, which is the hero of the poem.
Critical Overview:
Camões had the ambition to rival the two greatest epic writers up to that time: Homer and Vergil. A few lines into Os Lusíadas Camões has the audacity to proclaim: "Let us hear no more then of Ulysses and Aeneas and their long journeying." The chief difference between Camões's epic and Homer's and Vergil's is that the Os Lusíadas is based on historically true events. The events which Homer's and Vergil's epics are based on are fictions, despite the contention of scholars who assert that there really was a Trojan War. In Camões's epic we sense an added aura of reality, of strangeness. This aura is quite inexplicable: the reader has to go directly to the text.
The critic Alexander Parker notes how "No poem is so fully of its age as The Lusiads, not only in its artistic structure and poetic form, but also in its content. It is, in fact, a poem about its age, about the first voyage of Europeans to India, the expedition of Vasco da Gama in 1497-99; it is the great epic of the age as experienced by Portugal." Camões's translator Leonard Bacon observes how the epic is an excellent introduction to the history of Portugal in its Golden Age.
Harold Bloom observes how today The Lusiads of Camões is the most politically incorrect of poems. Camões himself was Catholic; his poem is (among other things) a call to arms against the enemies of the Christian faith. Vasco da Gama and the Portuguese are not only looking for trade routes to India, but are intent on propagating the Christian faith among "infidels." In addition to this the poem is markedly nationalistic: it is a glorification of the portuguese nation; it is a call to a renewal of heroic endeavour among the portuguese people.
Alexander Parker asserts that "the Age of Camões, moving from hope to disillusion, may well be the pattern of the lives of most individual men; it is certainly the recurring pattern of human history." This is, I believe, what makes The Lusiads so universal a poem. In my judgement Camões surpasses Vergil and Tasso. His eminence over Homer and Milton is more doubtful; he would not, however, be destroyed if juxtaposed with those giants. The Aeneid is a marvelous poem and yet it lacks that otherness, that strangeness which is everpresent in Os Lusíadas.
Camões--unlike Vergil--travelled the world over. He was deeply acquainted with navigation and the sea. The critic Joaquim Nabuco remarks how "Camões spent years of his life on the sea in times when sailing created an intimacy with it, both in calm and in tempest, quite unknown now that the reign of the winds has come to an end. That long, silent and deep communion shows itself in nearly every stanza of his. The Lusiads is a Poem to be read on deck, under the sails....Camões drew from the ocean all the inspiration it contains and passed it to his readers...One feels as if on the sea itself, so much so that to read him is really like sailing, as far as imagination is concerned."
This really captures my own reading experience of Camões... What makes for a truly great canonical writer? A prerequisite, no doubt, is strength of imagination. How well we "see" events in a work of imaginative literature depends on the force with which the author imagined them. Homer, Dante, and Camões are masters of vision. Long after we've read them we cannot shake off the images their works evoke. In Camões the idea that what we're seeing is historically true never abandons us. This is what constitutes the strangeness of the poem.
The critic Joaquim Nabuco remarks how "In no other Poem will you find more perfect pictures, in a few touches only, of the rising and setting of the sun, of the moonlight, of every aspect of the sea, of departure and return, of all that makes the sailor's life, till his burying in a wave." This Nabuco attributes to the poet's own maritime experiences: "The Poet lived his inspiration; his work comprises both poetry and action of the highest order."
In the second part of Don Quixote we find the following reference to Camões: "the most excellent Camões." Short, it is true, but it could not have been put better. The Spanish playwright Lope de Vega called Camões "the divine." The German aphorist Friedrich Schlegel considered Camões to be "in himself a literature." The historian Jacques Barzun contended that the Os Lusíadas "withstands comparison with Vergil's imperial Aeneid."
As is well known the Portuguese and Spanish languages are very similar to each other. Anyone who understands Spanish is well advised to tackle the original. Perhaps a short course on Portuguese is called for. Or a book that explains the essential grammatical differences between the languages. It is certainly worth the trouble. A Spanish-Portuguese dictionary is also helpful. Critics have complained of the English translations that have been made of Camões. The best translation in English is Leonard Bacon's, which is recommended to those who don't understand Portuguese or Spanish.
To access the original article (written by the original author) see: | Literary Genius: Luis Vaz de Camões
Works
Selected criticism
English
- The Lusiads / White, Landeg., 2002
- The Presence of Camões / Monteiro, George., 1996
- The Lusiads of Luiz de Camões / Bacon, Leonard., 1966
- Camoens and the Epic of the Lusiads / Hart, Henry Hersch., 1962
- From Virgil to Milton / Bowra, C. M., 1945
- Camoens, Central Figure of Portuguese Lit. / Goldberg, Isaac., 1924
- Luis de Camões / Bell, Aubrey F. G., 1923
- The Place of Camoens in Literature / Nabuco, Joaquim., 1908
- Camoens: His Life and his Lusiads. / Burton, Richard Francis., 1881
Spanish
Cuatro Lecciones Sobre Camoens / Alonso Zamora Vicente., 1981
- Homenaje a Camoens: Estudios y Ensayos., 1980
- Camoens / Filgueira Valverde, Jose., 1958
- Camoens y Cervantes / Orico, Osvaldo., 1948