General Info On L. Camões:
Luís Vaz de Camões (
Portuguese
pronunciation: [luˈiʒ ˈvaʒ dɨ
kaˈmõjʃ]; sometimes rendered in
English as
Camoens /ˈkæm oʊˌənz/; c. 1524 – 10 June 1580)
is considered
Portugal's and the
Portuguese language's greatest
poet. His
mastery of verse has been compared to that of
Shakespeare,
Vondel,
Homer,
Virgil and
Dante. He wrote a considerable amount of
lyrical poetry and drama but is best remembered for his epic work
Os Lusíadas (
The
Lusiads). His recollection of poetry
The Parnasum of Luís de Camões
was lost in his lifetime. The influence of his masterpiece
Os Lusíadas in
Portuguese is so profound that it is called the "language of Camões".
[1]
Life
Many details concerning the life of Camões remain unknown, but he is thought
to have been born around 1524. Luís Vaz de Camões was the only child of
Simão Vaz de Camões
and wife Ana de Sá de Macedo.
[2] His birthplace is
unknown.
Lisbon,
Coimbra or
Alenquer are frequently
presented as his birthplace, although the latter is based on a disputable
interpretation of one of his poems.
Constância is also considered a possibility as
his place of birth: a statue of him can be found in the town.
Camões belongs to a family originating from the northern Portuguese region of
Chaves near
Galicia. At an early age, his father Simão Vaz
left his family to discover personal riches in
India, only to die in
Goa in the following years. His mother later
re-married.
Camões 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.
[citation
needed]
Camões, as his love of 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 the sight in 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 Rossio, he injured Gonçalo 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 stepmother to 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 properties of missing and deceased 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
Sebastian of
Portugal (ruled 1557–1578).
In 1578 he heard of the appalling defeat of the
Battle of
Ksar El Kebir, where King Sebastian was killed and the Portuguese army
destroyed. The Castilian troops were approaching Lisbon
[citation
needed] 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. The
day of his death, 10 June, is Portugal's
national day. He is buried
near
Vasco da Gama in
the
Jerónimos Monastery in the Belém
district of Lisbon.
Bibliography
Works by Camões
- The
Lusiads
- The Parnasum of Luís Vaz (lost)
- Lyric Poems
- Auto dos Anfitriões
- Auto El-rei Seleuco
- Auto do Filodemo
- Letters
English translations
- The Lusiadas of Luiz de Camões. Leonard Bacon. 1966.
- Luis de Camões: Epic and Lyric. Keith Bosley. Carcanet, 1990.
- The Lusiads. Trans. Landeg White. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. ISBN 0-19-280151-1.
- Luis de Camoes, Selected Sonnets: A Bilingual Edition. Ed. and trans.
William Baer. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005. ISBN 978-0-226-09266-9.
(Paperback publ. 2008, ISBN 978-0-226-09286-7)
- The Collected Lyric Poems of Luís de Camões Trans. Landeg White.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008. ISBN [3]
Biography and textual study in English
- Camoens: His Life and his Lusiads: A Commentary. Richard Francis
Burton. 2 vols. London: Quaritch, 1881.[4]
- The Place of Camoens in Literature. Joaquim Nabuco. Washington, D.C.
[?], 1908.[5]
- Luis de Camões. Aubrey F.G. Bell. London: 1923.
- Camoens, Central Figure of Portuguese Literature. Isaac Goldberg. Girard:
Haldeman-Julius, 1924.
- From Virgil to Milton. Cecil M. Bowra. 1945.
- Camoens and the Epic of the Lusiads. Henry Hersch Hart. 1962.
- The Presence of Camões: Influences on the Literature of England, America
& Southern Africa. George Monteiro. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press,
1996. ISBN 0-8131-1952-9.
- Ordering Empire: The Poetry of Camões, Pringle and Campbell. Nicholas
Meihuizen. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. ISBN
978-3-03911-023-0.
Biography and textual study in 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
In culture
- Camões is the subject of the first romantic painting from a Portuguese
painter, A Morte de Camões (1825), by Domingos Sequeira, now lost.
- He is one of the characters in Gaetano Donizetti's grand opera Dom Sébastien, Roi de Portugal.
- 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.
- A museum dedicated to Camões can be found in Macau, the Museu Luís de Camões.
- In Goa, India the Archeological Museum at Old Goa (which used to be a
Franciscan monastery) houses a 3 meters high bronze statue of Luís de Camões.
The statue was originally installed in the garden in year 1960 but was moved
into the museum due to public protest after Goa's annexation to India. Another
Camoes monument in Goa, India – "Jardim de Garcia da Orta Garden" (popularly
known as Panaji Municipal Garden) has a 12 meter high pillar in the
center.
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Monument to Luís de Camões, Lisbon
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