Today we consider one of the greatest Portuguese geniuses of all time, of whom most non-Portuguese speakers have sadly never heard.
Today, June 10, Portugal celebrates a triple holiday: the day of Portugal, Camões, and the Portuguese Communities. This is enough to show how central Luís Vaz de Camões, the Portuguese national poet, is to our national identity. Indeed, it is hard to overstate how big a shadow Camões casts over all Portuguese-speaking culture.
In Portugal, if you annoy someone you may very well be instructed to go annoy Camões. Crimes against the Portuguese language are bound to make Camões turn in his grave. The highest honour in Portuguese literature is the Camões Award.
It speaks volumes that Bocage, himself a giant of Portuguese literature whose ego was unmatched in his generation (and who has also become somewhat of a cultural icon in Portugal and Brazil, mostly due to his erotic poetry and colourful personality), wrote1 of Camões:
Camões, o great Camões, how alike are, Your fate and mine to me, when both I trace! Equal cause did us, losing Tagus far, The sacriligeous giant to face. As you, I too by whispering Ganges tire From cruel penury in newfound horror; As you, for vain likes, that in vain desire, Weeping I am too, made yearning lover. A trickster, as you were, of harshest doom, My end I ask heaven, for sureness That peace I will find only in the tomb. Model of mine you are... but o sadness!... If I mimic the trances of your venture I do not mimic the gifts of your nature.
So here goes a quick introduction to Camões: his life, his work, and his ubiquitous legacy.
Camões, the pauper nobleman
The Camões name originally hails from Galicia, whence the troubadour Vasco Pires de Camões migrated due to having taken the side of the Portuguese king D. Fernando in his wars against the Castilian king Enrique II2, which earned him considerable lands at the time. Our Camões was born (possibly) in Lisbon in 1524, the year his most famous cousin and the protagonist of his magnum opus, Vasco da Gama, died in India.
Camões’ noble lineage no doubt afforded him a humanist education and access to the royal court of D. João III. Nevertheless, by all accounts he was never exactly in the black; mostly because his bohemian lifestyle drained his purse faster than available sources of income appropriate for a man of his standing could replenish it. Certainly at least by the end of his life he was living in poverty despite a royal pension from king D. Sebastião.
Camões, the ill-fated lover
As you would expect from a bohemian poet, Camões’ poems are filled with burning but usually ephemeral loves, with varying degrees of seriousness. While most affairs were easily forgotten, a few left lasting scars and may have even led to momentous junctions in the poet’s life. Here is a little bit about a few women found in Camões’ poetry:
Bárbara the slave
Most of Camões’ love poems describe typical Renaissance ideals of beauty, which included pale skin (a sign one did not need to labour under the Sun) and almost always blond hair too. It is however remarkable that he also produced the earliest poem known to me in which a white European praises a black woman’s beauty: Endechas to Bárbara the slave (which is also one of my favourite love poems for its simple yet subversive style). It includes the telling verses1
«(...) Black her hair, Where the vain folk Lose their opinion That blondes are fair. Blackness of Love, Such sweet demeanour That snow itself swears It would trade its colour. (...)»
Infanta D. Maria
It is said3 that the most notable of Camões’ muses was none other than infanta D. Maria, the youngest daughter of king D. Manuel I. As the story goes, Camões would have seen in her a possibility for climbing the social ladder; only to be harshly brought back down to Earth when the affair was discovered and he spent a stint in prison. This experience is often shown as the one behind a famous poem where a bird striving for a “high tower” finds itself featherless and falling helplessly.
Dinamene
Tradition says Dinamene was a Chinese girl and the great love of Camões’ life4. They met in Macau, where it is said Camões lived in a cave while writing part of Os Lusíadas, the epic poem that catapulted him to stardom. Sailing back from Macau to Goa, their ship was wrecked leaving no survivors but Camões. He did manage to salvage the unfinished manuscript of Os Lusíadas, but the trauma of losing Dinamene and waiting for rescue were said to deeply impact him; even to the point of affecting the focus of the epic poem.
Camões, the poet soldier
For significant periods of his life, warfare was how Camões made a living. Presumably he first worked as a soldier in Ceuta, where he self-exiled following an affair gone wrong with an illustrious Portuguese lady. There he lost his right eye in a naval battle by the strait of Gibraltar, thereby gaining a very recognisable trademark.
Camões returned to Lisbon after a few years, but found himself contemplating the life of a soldier again following his imprisonment as a result of injuring a Palace employee at a tavern fight (with a sword). He was pardoned and honourably assigned to “serve the Crown” in India, which is how he came to see the Overseas Empire first-hand, and even a fearsome storm at the Cape of Good Hope. This was extremely important for the writing of Os Lusíadas, as it allowed him to see the strange lands and peoples he described and to experience a dangerous sea voyage himself, including something comparable to the pivotal moment in his narrative when Vasco da Gama crosses into the Indian Ocean.
A life’s work
Os Lusíadas is the epic poem which made Camões the Portuguese national poet. Without a doubt, it has influenced the Portuguese language and the Portuguese national identity more than any book ever written.
The story narrated in this epic poem is ostensibly about Vasco da Gama’s discovery of the sea route from Europe to India. At the time, this was a very modern adaptation of the epic style of Homer and company: showing Man triumphing over the classical gods (seen in Nature’s forces as well as the hearts of the enemies the Portuguese sailors encounter). However, it is so much more. Eventually Vasco da Gama finds himself in Calicut before the city’s ruler, and in order to make a case for his and his crew’s freedom goes into a very long recounting of all the history of Portugal since pre-Roman times until that point. Basically every meaningful Portuguese national myth is packed into this narrative! Additionally, the epic tone is often tempered by sharp insights into timeless issues of corruption and human pettiness. The plot is so rich that it almost seems secondary that every stanza adheres to a strict rhyming and metric structure and that through it Camões changed the language itself by introducing a number of original words.
The story’s climax (pun intended) comes on the voyage back to Portugal, when the goddess Venus decides to congratulate the triumphant fleet by welcoming it into the Island of Loves (yes, you can really tell this was written by a man). There the sailors enjoy the “company” of a host of beautiful nymphs and Gama – being the captain – enjoys the company of the nereid Thetis5. Note that this is meant as more than just gratuitous eroticism: it is part of a process of literal apotheosis thereby the Portuguese sailors are made the classical gods’ equals6. As such, they eventually take a break to contemplate the “engine of the world” (which here is a description of Ptolomy’s model of the Universe) and to learn about the future of their nation (including real events that took place between this voyage and the writing of Os Lusíadas). Interestingly, even though the whole poem was acceptable to the 16th century’s Inquisition, this part was deemed pornographic and censured by our 20th century dictatorship.
Apart from Os Lusíadas, Camões also left us a collection of magnificent sonnets (at the time a modern device, of which Camões made expert use to capture universal aspects of love, suffering, and disillusionment) and the finest examples of Portuguese medieval poetic forms.
Camões, the wretched patriot
Camões eventually managed to return to Lisbon and publish the finished version of Os Lusíadas7, which earned him the favour of king D. Sebastião – to whom it was dedicated. His genius was finally recognised, even if his standard of living didn’t improve (the king did offer him an honourable pension, but it seems to have been paid rather irregularly after a time).
In 1578, D. Sebastião disappeared in the midst of the battle of Alcácer Quibir, triggering a succession crisis which would lead to the loss of Portuguese independence three years later. Camões died in 1580, on June 10, at the height of the succession crisis and when the rule of Philip II of Spain was months away from effectively beginning. Tradition states that, as he laid on his dying bed sensing the demise of his beloved fatherland, Camões declared “I die, but I die with the fatherland”.
Philip II was actually quite appreciative of Os Lusíadas, and posthumously declared Camões “prince of the poets of Spain”. The title stuck (the first half, at least), and now everyone in Portugal knows who the prince of poets is.
Epilogue: a PhD thesis
Centuries later, when I wrote my PhD thesis, I picked two quotes from Portuguese authors to feature at the opening of the Introduction. One of them came from Os Lusíadas, from the Island of Loves, just before Thetis shows Gama the “engine of the world”:
«"To thee supremest wisdom guerdon gave, Baron ! who hast beheld with fleshly eyne what things the Future hath the pow'er to save from Mortal' petty pride and science vain. Follow me firmly, prudent as thou't brave, to yonder craggy brake with all thy train!" Thus she, and straightway through a long wood led arduous, gloomy, fere for foot to tread.»
This translation came from Richard Francis Burton’s “ambition to write as Camões would have written had he been born English in 1524 – that is, pre-Shakespeare, pre-Spenser, using a language he has to cobble together from such sources as Wyatt and Surrey”. The final result is available online for free here. It is not an easy read (then again, neither is it in Portuguese), but the bits I’ve seen seem rewarding enough once one gets the hang of the treacherous syntax. If you want to read Camões and aren’t afraid to put in some work, yet aren’t willing to wait until your Portuguese is perfect, I can recommend this alternative.
Footnotes
1. I am not a translator, OK? In any case, here I thought clarity of meaning was more important than preserving the aesthetic feel.
2. According to this Portuguese source, Vasco Pires remained loyal not only to D. Fernando but also, after his death, to his regent wife’s attempts to install their daughter Beatriz on the throne (which led to the loss of many but not all of his landed titles). I find it somewhat ironic that a couple of generations later our Camões was highly critical of D. Fernando and his performance in the wars that brought his ancestor to Portugal. In his magnum opus, he famously summarised D. Fernando’s reign in the verses (here translated by Richard Francis Burton)
«Pedro, the harshly just, begets the bland, (see what exceptions lurk in Nature's laws!) remiss, and all-regardless prince, Fernand, who ran his realm in danger's open jaws: For soon against the weak, defenceless land came the Castilian, who came nigh to cause the very ruin of the Lusian reign; for feeble Kings enfeeble strongest strain.»
3. This connection is assumed almost everywhere in Portuguese sources, but it appears it may be apocryphal. Regardless, this affair is central to the popular myth of the poet’s life.
4. Further investigation, annoyingly rigorous as it is, suggests Dinamene too may have been overly romanticised. She is mentioned by this name (which probably was imported from Greek mythology), but apparently it may have been a cryptic way to refer to a very non-Chinese Portuguese lady (it is, after all, accepted that Camões sometimes resorted to the likes of anagrams to obscure some lovers’ identities).
5. In the story, Thetis is also the object of the deep unrequited love of the giant Adamastor, who personifies the Cape of Good Hope.
6. Camões explicitly maintains they remain inferior to the Christian God. His exaltation of Christian faith was likely sincere, but let us not forget that the Inquisition wouldn’t have allowed the book without such explicit mentions.
7. He is also said to have brought a philosophical treatise with him, which was lost or stolen at some point on the way.
Aetherial Porosity 
Em dia de Portugal, de Camões e das Comunidades Portuguesas, felicito-te na nossa língua materna.
Obrigada José Pedro, pela lição dada.
Sempre a aprender.
Hoje, contigo, ao teu jeito!
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Brilhante! Obrigado, José Pedro.
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