Luís Vaz de Camões 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.
Biography
Many details concerning the life of Camões 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 officership. 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 defeat of the Battle
of Alcazarquivir, where King
Sebastião 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 Lusíadas
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, its conflicting feelings about war and empire, its love of home and
desire of adventure, and its appreciation of pleasure and the demands of a
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 Virgil's epics. Camões' ambition was to create a national epic
that would rival those of his two classical precursors. The poem tells the
achievements of Portugal since its independence, in the 12th century, until the
moment when the Portuguese kingdom is united to the one of Spain, keeping its
formal independence, but being ruled by the same king, Filipe the first of
Portugal and the second of Spain, in 1580. The poem, therefore, marks 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 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.
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 eyes.
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.
He is buryed in the
Monastery
of the Hieronymites (Mosteiro dos Jerónimos )
Notes: The birth day and month are unknown.
The Tomb is inside the Church.
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