SOURCE: “Luís de Camões: The Eventful Life and Times of Portugal's Great Epic Poet,” in UNESCO Courier, No. 4, April, 1989, pp. 17-25.

The little that is known about the life of Luís de Camões can be summed up in a few lines. He was probably born in Lisbon in 1525, but even this is not known for certain. Nothing is known about what he studied or where (possibly in Coimbra) and next to nothing about his life until he set sail for the Orient, where he spent seventeen equally obscure years. A few biographical hints can be gleaned from his writings. It seems, for example, that he had a rather hectic love-life, and it was perhaps because of his way of life that he was banished from the court as a young man. He is known to have served as a soldier in Ceuta, Morocco, around 1547-1548 and to have lost his right eye there.

In 1552, he spent several months in prison in Lisbon for taking part in a brawl and after his release in the spring of 1553 embarked for India on three years' service, as was the rule at the time. While in India, he took part in a number of military expeditions. Sometime between 1556 and 1558, he set out for the Far East, perhaps as a junior official responsible for taking care of the effects of people who died on the voyage. It is not known with certainty whether it was on the outward or return voyage that he was shipwrecked in the Mekong estuary, swimming ashore carrying nothing but his manuscript.

When he returned to Goa, he was again thrown into prison. After his release he lived on the island of Mozambique between 1567 and 1569, returning to Portugal in 1570 in a state of dire poverty. By then, however, the text of his epic poem was virtually ready for publication.

He published Os Lusíadas (The Lusiads) in Lisbon in 1572, and then two short poems in 1576. In 1572, the king granted him a small pension, but Camões later had to submit a claim for arrears of payment.

Nothing more is known about his life in Portugal after 1570. He appears to have been the butt of epigrams composed by authors who were in favour at court, which may suggest that he was envied either on account of the stature of his work or because of his pension. He may then have gone through a mystical, “penitential” phase if, as is supposed, his magnificent verse commentary on Psalm 137 (“By the waters of Babylon”) was written after The Lusiads. In 1574, a short but enthusiastic critique of his work was published, in which the author, Pero de Magalhães Gândavo, wrote: “Look at the work of our celebrated poet Luís de Camões, whose fame will outlast time.”

We know neither the precise date of his death (sometime between 1579 and 1580) nor the location of his tomb in the Santa Ana church, which was destroyed in the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Not a single manuscript in his own hand has survived, and even the portraits of him are disputed.

In the sixteenth century, The Lusiads was twice translated into Spanish, and there appeared a collection of his unpublished writings, editions of his lyric poetry (1595 and 1598) and two more editions of The Lusiads, one (severely mutilated) in 1584 and the other in 1597. From then on a strong and still continuing interest began to be taken in Camões' life and work and attempts began to be made to decipher the mysteries in which they were veiled.

Camões lived during the last phase of Portuguese expansion, at a time when his country was on the verge of decline and political collapse. His death one or two years after the defeat of Alcazarquivir (1578) more or less coincided with Portugal's loss of independence to Spain, a situation which was to last until 1640. Yet, at the same time, Camões lived through a period of intellectual activity which has a remarkable place in the social, cultural, economic and political history of Portugal, Europe, and the world.

The values enshrined in the classical humanism of the Renaissance, which began to spread through Europe from Italy at the end of the fifteenth century, came to be blended with echoes from the teachings of the Dutch humanist Erasmus and with the multifarious debates and conflicts sparked off by the Reformation and by the growing theoretical and practical consolidation of centralized power. The geographical discoveries brought in their wake a mass of new information about the extent and true appearance of the world. They led to encounters with many other peoples, and brought into contact a profusion of different cultures and civilizations. Much-coveted produce and new sources of wealth arrived daily in the ports of Europe. The secrets of the planet were gradually being discovered. The circulation of printed information was increasing.

These upheavals brought with them a growing sense of unease which was reflected in the arts by a transition from classicism to mannerism, in politics by increasingly authoritarian forms of government, and in civil and intellectual life by censorship, the repression exercised by the Inquisition, the concealment of unorthodox thinking, and fear. But they also led to rapid changes in customs, attitudes and social structures, greed, the discovery of new ways of making easy money, changes in patterns of consumption, and the depopulation of inland areas due to the attraction exercised by commercial life in the capital and overseas.

Science in turn began to concern itself with the quantifiable aspects of the world and with the criticism of empirical data, while emphasis was placed on experience and new ideas which would prove the Ancients wrong.

AN AGE OF FERMENT

The voyages of discovery opened up new and often contradictory ways of thinking, and new and sometimes startling horizons beckoned to those with a taste for adventure and enterprise, will-power and daring, speculation and wealth, travel and danger, freedom of action and fatalism. The times incited men to live dramatic lives in an age in which the most clear-sighted of them saw the Portuguese venture as a form of European expansion whose common denominator was the propagation of the Christian faith, even though, like Camões, they criticized the divisions among the Christians and claimed for Portugal the role of prime agent of Catholicism outside Europe. Camões was undeniably the poet of a system of values proper to the European culture and civilization of his age.

The dominant ideology took full measure of the universal impact of the Portuguese discoveries, compared them and found them superior to the legendary exploits of the heroes of classical Antiquity, and wished to hear them celebrated in the classical form of the epic poem.

The voyage of Bartolomeu Dias round the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, four years before that of Columbus, revolutionized geographical concepts and marked the threshold of a new era. Ten years later, the voyage of Vasco da Gama made an even more radical contribution to the transformation of European civilization and world history. In the ensuing decades there were many other Portuguese voyages of major importance. But there was no creative work of art to extol the feats responsible for these sweeping changes.

A POET OF HIS TIME

It was against this background that Camões lived and wrote his epic and lyrical work, in which so many contradictory elements coexist: tradition and innovation; Platonism and Aristotelianism; erudition and raw experience; mythology and Christianity; piety and cruelty; feudal nostalgia and the concept of the modern state; a sense of order and disorder; joy and anguish; the Renaissance and Mannerism. In Camões, there is a tension between the concept of man as a “mean creature of clay” and the grandeur of his accomplishments on a global scale, between the frail microcosm who can overcome obstacles when aided by heaven or by valour and daring, and all the harm that can befall him if he becomes the mere plaything of the occult forces of Nature, fortune or destiny.

At sea by such rough storms and griefs forespent!
So many a moment when Death stands alert!
Ashore such strife and treacherous intent,
Where horrible necessity can hurt!
How can weak man escape the harsh event,
And how misfortune from brief life avert,
Where calm Skies range not nor take arms alway
Against so mean a creature of the clay?

The Lusiads, I, 106

However, a similar tension also exists between Camões' national pride and his harsh and biting criticism of the very human reality whose praises he is singing:

Alas! my Muse, alas! because my lyre
Is wholly out of tune and my voice hoarse,
Not from my song, but knowing I must quire
Always for a people who are deaf and coarse.
The favour which sets genius all on fire
My land grants not to song, but runs perforce
After its envious lusts and brutishness,
Sunken in harsh, depraved, and gross distress.

The Lusiads, X, 145

These antagonistic ideas are repeated again and again throughout the complex structure of a poem in which the symbolic linking of different levels of meaning represents a striking and innovative feat of literary “engineering”.

Thus Camões' account of the Portuguese discoveries is based on the unique relationship which he established between the tradition of classical Graeco-Roman culture as it was expressed in the literary forms imported from Italy and the renewal of the literary language, and the historical events of his time, especially the information accumulated about the great ocean voyages.

Camões made use of the epic form in a new way, so that actual geographical regions and mythical regions, real or contemporary time and mythical or absolute time, historical events and cosmic destiny, were all welded together and “contaminated” one another. Even the hero, who, in the grand tradition of the classical epic, personifies an entire people, is here not so much Vasco da Gama alone as a host of figures represented by the “illustrious Lusitanian breast, to which Neptune and Mars bowed down in obedience”. With those figures are connected a series of events, facts, individual and collective deeds indissociable from the course of Portuguese history.

Camões witnessed the world-shaking events of his time with classical eyes in both life and literature, blending the magic of paganism with the tenets of the Christian faith and indeed—in a daring and brilliant stroke—transporting the mainsprings of his plot to the plane of action of the pagan gods who symbolized the forces of Nature, some favourable and some hostile to the Portuguese venture.

At the same time, however, he witnessed the planetary revolution of his time with a modern outlook that enabled him to reject earlier models and to strike a new balance between what his genius could extract from them and what the age required him to introduce and treat in an original and concrete manner. His aim was to set the literal truth of recent historical events and exploits against the legendary character of the ancient epics and, in so doing, to underscore the role which the Portuguese had played in the discovery of the world (“… and if there are other worlds, they will reach them …”).

He clearly saw the revolution of his time in terms of the then geocentric view of the structure of the universe, and this enabled him to construct one of the most moving episodes in the poem, that in which Vasco da Gama's sailors are welcomed to the Island of Love by the goddess Thetis and the navigator is allowed to cast his eyes on the “universal machine” and to know the future in a cosmogonic vision which is the culminating point of the apotheosis of love and glory, rewards reserved for heroes:

This universal vast machine you see,
Ethereal, elemental, He could found
By deep, high wisdom of infinity,
Who no beginning has, or mete or bound.
He, in His circle set eternally,
The whole sphere's well-smoothed surface, hedging round,
Is God, Whose nature none can comprehend
For human wit cannot so far extend.

The Lusiads, X, 80

AN ENCYCLOPAEDIC WORK

Since Camões was singing of real things rather than of “vain and fantastic exploits that are false and deceitful”, he attached the highest importance to historical narratives and authentic eyewitness accounts of voyages by Vasco da Gama and other navigators, to details of navigation, technology, the calendar, wind systems, climates, natural phenomena, peoples and their customs, and to the accuracy of other aspects of Portuguese history.

Thus, apart from its inestimable literary and aesthetic merits, The Lusiads is a kind of encyclopaedia or compendium of much of the theoretical and practical knowledge available in its author's lifetime. It contains information on history and geography, anthropology, technology and science—ranging from flora and fauna to astronomy—and especially on the data gathered as a result of the ocean voyages and discoveries. Even when he refers to such natural phenomena as waterspouts and St. Elmo's fire, it can be assumed that he does so because they were recorded by João de Castro (1500-1548), a Portuguese naval officer who made important contributions to the science of navigation.

Almost every time he describes peoples, landscape, geography, the exotic features of Africa or the Orient, or incidents during Vasco da Gama's voyage, he bases his account on a chronicle, travelogue or some other document in an attempt to achieve strict accuracy combined with the mythological transpositions mentioned above.

As the poet of the discoveries and of the epic of modern man, Camões did not lose sight of the two main driving forces behind maritime expansion. The first of these was the propagation of the faith, which was not to be construed exclusively as a crusading ideal dictated by the Ottoman threat to the eastern approaches to Europe, but also as the starting-point for the dissemination of a European culture. The second was the organization of trade on a worldwide scale for the benefit of all peoples. Camões was a European poet in the temporal sense, in that he enhanced, used and re-created a cultural heritage many centuries old. In a spatial, geo-political and economic sense, he was also a European poet who singled out Europe as a region with specific ties of solidarity and interests.

This is why Camões saw the voyage of Vasco da Gama not only as an expedition “to the greater glory of God” but also as a commercial venture, at the outcome of which the navigator presented the ruler of Calicut with proposals for engaging in peaceful trade to the mutual benefit of the King of Portugal and himself:

And if thou wilt with treaty and with pact
Of peace and friendship, open and divine,
Trade out of superfluity enact
Between his country's merchandise and thine,
Thus greater gain and plenty to attract
(For which in toil and sweat men chiefly pine);
Unto thy realms, then there will surely be
For him great glory, and great wealth for thee.

The Lusiads, VII, 62

This epitomizes the idea of trade between distant peoples as a source of wealth and abundance, of profit and glory. Here again, Camões' viewpoint is highly topical, in that he extols the skills and dignity of enrichment through trade based on the principle of reciprocity (while also seeking to impose moral constraints on such trade). Vasco da Gama showed determination and discipline in executing the orders given by the king, who became one of the world's leading traders when the era of major trading networks began.

Camões lived a full life. For seventeen years, he knew the fluctuating fortunes of a voyage to India, went to war, travelled to the Far East and experienced exile, adversity, disgrace, suffering and despair. In short, he paid a personal toll for the great discoveries.

Traces of his experience can be found in a number of main themes of The Lusiads. Equally skilled with the sword and the pen, he bitterly laments the oblivion or injustice of which he is the victim. He mentions the shipwreck he survived. He refers to the crises of his love affairs, which he personifies in the pathetic figure of the giant Adamastor and in the persecution of the nymphs on the Island of Love by the soldier Leonardo Ribeiro. He asserts his awareness of his genius and abilities and his readiness to continue singing to the present and future glory of his native land.

The entire corpus of Camões' work, with its hundreds of lyric poems, its letters and plays, highlights the contradictions inherent in a man who was torn between nostalgia for a supreme harmony and an acute sense of the absurdity and confusion of the world, between an affirmation of the values enshrined in human liberty and a sense of outrage at being nothing more than a puppet in the hands of fate, and between the inescapable and everlasting presence of unhappiness and the all too fleeting moments of life and human happiness. The ultimate contrast is that between the evil of the present and the good of the past, which inspires some of the most poignant features of Camões' work.