Luís Vaz de Camões is a Portuguese poet and playwright. He was born in Lisbon in 1524 and died in 1580. For 17 years he was away from Portugal. In foreign lands he was a soldier, lost an eye in battle and wrote your masterpiece You Lused, published in 1572, two years after the poet's return to his native country.
O author belongs to portuguese classicism. His works are marked by an anthropocentric vision. His poems are composed in regular verses. In the case of sonnets, the poet also uses the new measure (decasyllable). adept at neoplatonism, his poetry idealizes love and the woman he loves. In addition, it presents themes such as the bewilderment of the world and love suffering.
Read too: Humanism: the aesthetics of the transition between medieval and renaissance
Biography of Luís Vaz de Camões
Luís Vaz de Camões is considered the greatest poet in the Portuguese language. There are not many certainties about the facts of your life. Most of them are based on hypotheses alone, often derived from interpretations of his poems.
Thus, was born in Lisbon in 1524 and died in 1580. After attending the University of Coimbra, he served as a soldier when he lost an eye during combat in Morocco. He lived in India for three years and was also in Arabia, Macau and Mozambique. Thus, he lived, on the whole, 17 years in foreign lands, from 1553 to 1570.
His masterpiece,You Lused, was published in 1572 and he was successful, so that the Portuguese Crown began to pay a pension to the author. However, died poor and was buried in a mass grave. Before that, in his youth, Camões, a brawler and a bohemian, was arrested, in Lisbon, for aggression and, later, in Goa, for debts.
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It is also known that he was always sexually involved with women, both nobles and prostitutes, but at the end of his life he gave himself over to Catholicism and repentance.
Another remarkable fact of his existence was the shipwreck he suffered while on his way to Goa. On this occasion, Camões managed to save-if and the manuscript in You Lused. Legend has it that, on that trip, his beloved Dinamene was also present and that Camões had to choose between her life and his masterpiece. Dinamene then drowned.
Read too: José Saramago – Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese author for literature
Literary characteristics of Luís Vaz de Camões
In the works of Luís Vaz de Camões, it is possible to point out the following characteristics:
Anthropocentrism: valorization of human beings and their rationality.
Formal rigor: regular verses (metrification and rhymes).
New measure: use of decasyllable verses (10 poetic syllables), mainly in sonnets — a feature of classical poetry.
Old measure: use of rounds (five or seven poetic syllables)—a feature reminiscent of the medieval period.
Idealization of women: perfect physically and morally.
Idealization of love: neoplatonism, spiritualized love.
Valorization of Greco-Latin elements: mythology, art and poetry.
Figures of speech: antithesis and paradox.
Main topics:
bewilderment of the world: distrust of reality due to the lack of logic in the events.
Changes, ephemerality, transience: nature and human beings are subject to change, they do not remain constant.
loving suffering: conflict between carnal and spiritual love.
Works by Luís Vaz de Camões
Camões wrote hundreds of poems, among sonnets, eclogues, songs, rounds, sextinas, elegies, epistles, octaves and odes. He is the author of theater performancesel king seleucus (1645), hosts (1587) and Philodemus (1587). In addition, of course, to your epic poemYou Lused. However, only the latter was published in life.
The first edition of his lyrical poetry it only became public 15 years after his death, in 1595, at the hands of Fernão Rodrigues Lobo Soropita (1560-?), with the title of rhymes, expanded with more poems in later editions.
It fell to intellectuals, such as the literary critic Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos (1851-1925), to identify the poems that were not by Camões in these editions. According to her, in 1882:
“[...] For nearly two centuries, a great amount of poetry that does not belong to him has been printed in Camões' works; it has been nearly two centuries since numerous authors have been deprived of their legitimate property, stamping on their fronts the tool used by thieves of other people's work. Numerous critics have repeated the accusation formulated by Faria e Sousa to this day, almost always unaware of the fact, without having their own examination.|1|”
Also access: Romanticism in Portugal – characteristics and authors
The Lusiads
![Cover of the book “Os Lusíadas”, by Luís Vaz de Camões, considered the author's masterpiece. [1]](/f/14b362d74e8e358cfc2391b6ab48f9d7.jpg)
However, it is the epic poem You Lused Camões' work most appreciated by critics, who considers this book one of the most important literary works in the Portuguese language. such poem is divided in 10 corners, with a total of 8816 decasyllable verses (10 poetic syllables), distributed among 1102 stanzas, composed in an eighth rhyme (a stanza of eight verses with the rhythmic scheme ABABABCC). Çon the history of the Portuguese people by adventures of the hero Vasco da Gama (1469-1524), representative of the Portuguese heroics.
At the beginning of this narrative poem, the narrator, in “Canto I”, makes the proposition (introduces the theme and the hero):
The arms and Barons marked
That of Western Lusitanian beach
By seas never sailed before
They also went beyond Taprobana,
In peril and hard wars
More than human strength promised,
And among remote people they built
New Kingdom, which so sublimated;
And also the glorious memories
Of those Kings who were dilating
The Faith, the Empire, and the Vicious Lands
From Africa and Asia have been devastating,
And those who by worthy works
If they go away from the law of Death releasing,
Singing will spread everywhere,
If my ingenuity and art help me so much.
[...]
Vasco da Gama, the strong Captain,
That such companies offer themselves,
Of haughty and haughty heart,
Whom Fortuna always favors,
Wait, if you stop here you don't see the point,
How uninhabited the land seems to you.
Onwards to pass determined,
But it didn't happen to him how he cared.
Still in "Canto I", it is possible to locate the invocation and the dedication:
And you Tagides|2| mine, because created
You have in me a new burning device,
If ever in humble verse celebrated
It was from my river happily,
Now give me a loud and sublime sound,
A grand and current style,
Why from your waters Phoebus command
May they not be envious of the Hippocrene.
Give me a great and loud fury,
And not the rough avena or flute,
But with a bellicose tuba,
That the chest lights up and the color to the gesture changes;
Give me the same song as the famous
Your people, that Mars helps so much;
Let it spread and sing in the universe,
If such a sublime price fits in verse.
[...]
You, mighty king|3|, whose high empire
The sun, just at rising, sees first,
Also see it in the middle of the hemisphere,
And when it comes down it leaves you last;
Ye who expect yoke and reproach
Of the vile Ishmaelite knight,
From the Eastern Turk and the Gentile
Who still drinks the liquor of the holy Rio:
I tilted the majesty a little
That in this tender gesture I contemplate you,
Which already shows which at full age,
When ascending you will go to the eternal temple;
the eyes of real kindness
Put it down: you will see a new example
From the love of the fathers, worthy deeds,
In verses disclosed numerous.
[...]
But while this time passes slowly
To govern the peoples, who desire it,
Give yourselves favor to the new daring,
I hope these my verses are of yours,
And you'll see the Argentinian slashing
Your Argonauts, why see
Which are seen of you in the angry sea,
And get used to being invoked already.
From there, from “Canto I” to “Canto X”, it is narrated the historical journey of Vasco da Gama:
Are the maritime people of Luso
Ascending through the rigging, astonished,
Noting the Alien Mode and Usage
And the language so barbaric and entangled.
Also the cunning Moor is confused,
Looking at the color, the costume and the strong armada;
And, asking everything, I told him
If by chance they came from Turkey.
And more also tells you what to see you want
The books of your Law, precept or faith,
Wait to see if it suits yours,
Or whether they are of Christ, as he believes;
And because everything notices and everything sees,
I asked the captain to give him
Show of the strong weapons they used
When enemy dogs fought.
Answers the valiant Captain,
By one the dark tongue knew well:
— “I will give you, illustrious Lord, relationship
From me, from the Law, from the weapons he carried.
I'm neither of the land nor of the generation
From the disgusting people of Turkey,
But I am from strong warlike Europe;
I seek the lands of India so famous.
[...]
In "Canto X", the epilogue (end of story):
Wait to serve you, arm in arms made,
Please sing to you, mind to the Muses given;
I just pass away to be accepted by you,
Whose virtue is to be cherished.
If Heaven grants this to me, and your chest
Worthy company to be sung,
As the harbinger foretells
Looking at your divine inclination,
Or doing that, more than Medusa's,
The view of your theme to Mount Atlante,
Or breaking through the fields of Ampelusa
The walls of Morocco and Trudante,
My already esteemed and led Musa
I stay that all over the world of you sing,
So that Alexandro can be seen in you,
Without Achilles' bliss to be envious.
See too: Castro Alves – author of the long narrative poem “Navio negreiro”
Poetry Examples
Next, we are going to read and analyze two sonnets by Camões. In the first, the lyrical self dialogues with love, understood here as a Greco-Latin deity, and tells him that, without hope, he visited his temple, that is, he ended up falling in love, but went through a wreck, which he survived.
He asks Love what more this divinity wants from him, since all the glory that the lyrical self has achieved no longer exists, and he asks the god not to force him to enter "where there is no way out", that is, to fall in love with new. So we understand that the lyrical self suffered when losing his beloved and he was left with only the remains of his soul, life and hope.
It is through the "sweet spoils", that is, "soul, life and hope", that the love can avenge-if of the lyrical self, and if this revenge does not satisfy him, the god must be content with the tears he cries:
Love, with hope already lost,
Your sovereign temple I visited;
By the way of the shipwreck I went through,
In place of dresses, I put life.
that you want more from me, that destroyed
Do you have all the glory I've achieved?
Don't try to force me, I don't know
Reenter where there is no exit.
See here soul, life and hope,
Sweet spoils of my well-done,
While I wanted the one I love:
In them you can take revenge on me;
And if you're still not avenged on me,
Be content with the tears I cry.
Everything indicates, since Camões refers toif to a wreck, that the woman he refers to, when he says "the one I adore", is his beloved dynamic, who died in a shipwreck. In this sense, the end of the sonnet, when talking about revenge, may be referring to the fact that Camões preferred to save his manuscript fromYou Lused instead of the beloved, a fact that would motivate Love's revenge. However, this is just speculation.
From this perspective, dynamic appears again in the second sonnet that we are going to analyze. In it, the lyrical self calls her “enemy”. In this case, because the loved one is also an enemy, since it causes the suffering of those who love him. Thus, the lyrical self dialogues with her, in the hands of whom fate has placed its happiness.
The enemy, the beloved, is dead. It seems, her death occurred in a shipwreck, since she lacks “a grave on earth”, since her body is in the sea, and as there is no grave, the lyrical self does not have a tomb to visit and thus console itself. The beloved's death by drowning is evident in the second stanza, when the lyrical self says that “Forever the waters will succeed / Your pilgrim beauty”, that is, the waters will have their beauty forever.
However, the lyrical self promise that as long as he is alive, the dead beloved will always be alive in his soul, and his verses, if they survive time, will celebrate your beloved and the “love so pure and true” they had. So, as long as his poems survive, she will be remembered:
Dear my enemy, in whose hand
I put my joys to good fortune,
You lacked in the grave ground,
Because I lack consolation.
Eternally the waters will succeed
Your pilgrim beauty;
But while life lasts for me,
Always live in my soul they will find you.
And if my rude verses can so much
May they promise you a long story
That love so pure and true,
You will always be celebrated in my corner;
Because as long as there is memory in the world,
Your sign will be my writing.
See too: five poems from portuguese literature
Luís de Camões Literary School
Classicism takes up the heroism of the epic poems of antiquity.
The work of Luís Vaz de Camões belongs to the çlassicism, style of the Renaissance period and that, therefore, presents, in general lines, the following characteristics:
- Materialism.
- Idealization of reality.
- Valuing reason, science.
- Affirmation of human superiority.
- Appreciation of balance, harmony.
- Resume of themes from Antique classic.
As Audemaro Taranto Goulart informs us|4| and Oscar Vieira da Silva|5|, this kind of:
“[...] literature, like everything else, suffers the consequences both of changing the way of being of man and of revaluation of the Greco-Latin past. The authors of classical antiquity became models worthy of being imitated, starting to dictate the attitudes, the artifices, the literary rules. [...]. Valuing the human, the author of the Renaissance would inevitably value the maximum attribute of man, the reason, which starts to guide all your actions and which you can trust blindly. [...]. Hence the direction of the spirit towards the creation of an aesthetic of an intellectualist character rather than based on inspiration, [...]. In addition, the aesthetic principle of the timelessness of the beautiful is accepted, which would then always be the same at any time: what was beautiful for classical antiquity it would be beautiful for the Renaissance or any other time.”
Based on this quote, it is possible to understand the creation of The Lusiads by Camões. After all, since the Antique left epic poems for humanity, such as Iliad and Odyssey, of Homer, besides the Aeneid, by Virgil (70 BC C.-19 a. C.), Camões, influenced by these classic authors, was impelled to extol human superiority in the figure of Vasco da Gama, an epic hero in the manner of antiquity. For more details about Luís Vaz de Camões' literary school, read: Çlassicism.
Reviews of the work of Luís Vaz de Camões
In 1872, Joaquim Nabuco (1849-1910) made the following observation about You Lused, by Luís Vaz de Camões:
“When you read it for the first time, it seems that you are looking at a starry sky on a summer night; feels spread all over it an air of majesty and grandeur, which makes us say — there is the genius. We have the vertigo of infinity. But reading it again, we seize the poet's plan, we follow the march of your genius, we discover the laws of attraction and poetic mechanics. It is as if in that sky, from which the limitless extension dazzled us at first, we discovered the law of its movement and its relationships, and we penetrated the secret of God.”
The university professor Salvatore D’Onofrio, in 1970, on the episode of Velho do Restelo, from You thereused, stated:
“[...], despite all possible classical inspirations, there is something in this episode that escapes any classical influence and that is typical of Camões, 16th century epic poet. It is the 'critical spirit', which, together with the Poet's human feeling, at a certain point reveals itself and asserts itself, in contrast with all the demands of the classic epic, to create a moment of crisis about the values of the epic Portuguese.
We think that the episode of Velho do Restelo, as to its meaning, has no historical precedent in the field of epic poetry.. Examining the poems of Homer and Virgil, we can observe that no episode has such a fundamental critical value as that of Velho do Restelo. nowhere in the Iliad, whose aim is the exaltation of the warlike value of the Greeks, we find invectives or lamentations directly directed at the horrors of war; at Odyssey, which extols Odysseus' courage and moral strength on his return journey to Ithaca, we find nothing to invalidate this aim; on the contrary, the hero, returning at last to his land, finds a faithful wife and a devoted son, deserved rewards of such sacrifice. In Virgil's poem, which aims at the glorification of Aeneas and the Roman Empire, we also do not find anything that could minimize this great dream or suggest the uselessness of such a great work.”
In 1973, university professor Cleonice Berardinelli said about Camões:
"Like all exceptional artist, he is the vate, the one who anticipates, making it impossible for us to put a label on him, as many suit him and none define him. And this is exactly what makes it difficult for us to grasp only the traditional dimension: the various dimensions of his work coexist, interpenetrate, complement each other and can rarely isolate one another.|6|”
Roberta Andréa dos Santos Colombo, Master of Letters, in a 2011 article, noted that Camões:
“[…] He is considered the greatest Portuguese Renaissance poet and one of the most expressive voices in our language. [...] Camo's study is of paramount importance for the understanding of the Portuguese language, because Camões is considered the divider between archaic and modern times. His texts, his 'ingenuity and art' are indisputable. His best classic production was, for most critics, The Lusiads, outstanding work in Portuguese literature for its expressiveness, historical importance of Portugal, structural complexity, mythological erudition and rhetorical-poetic fluency.”
Finally, Hélio Alves, PhD in Portuguese Literature, in a 2015 essay, made the following consideration:
“Camões' prestige as a pillar of literature and, by extension, of the Portuguese nation, obtained and successively reinforced over the centuries, it generated, in new and more globalized times, some critical scrutiny. Perhaps the most famous and influential moment of an allegory that not only 'saves' Camões from the position of champion of Faith and Empire, but directly invests in the idea that Camo's work is subversive, meet in Jorge de Sena's essays|7|”.
Grades
|1| Quoted by Maria Ana Ramos (professor at the University of Zurich).
|2| Nymphs of the Tagus River.
|3| D. Sebastião I (1554-1578), King of Portugal.
|4|Audemaro Taranto Goulart holds a Ph.D. in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from the University of São Paulo (USP).
|5|Oscar Vieira da Silva holds a bachelor's degree in Neo-Latin Letters from the Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences and Letters Santa Maria.
|6| Quoted by André Luiz de Freitas Dias and Maria Luiza Scher Pereira.
|7| Jorge de Sena (1919-1978) was a Portuguese poet.
Image credit
[1]LP&M (Reproduction)
by Warley Souza
Literature teacher