When we study the formation of a given civilization, the tongue and the literature occupy a central place, given that a nation, or a people, has as one of its unifying elements the mother tongue – it is from the language and other cultural elements that the identity of a civilization. At Western Classical Antiquity, that is, in the Greco-Roman universe, the prominent languages were, of course, the Greek it's the Latin. The main Greek city-states, such as Thebes, Antennae and Sparta, were greatly influenced by the Homeric poems – that were memorized and recited from childhood. In Rome, this also happened in relation to the texts of Virgil,Horace,Cicero, between others.
When, in the transition from the Middle Ages to the Modern Age (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), the first modern nations began to form, such as Portugal, Spain and the various Italian principalities, a process of cultural effervescence also began, which sought to recover the classical tradition of Western Antiquity, mentioned in the paragraph previous. This cultural effervescence would receive by historians the name of
RebirthCultural and it would echo in the visual arts (painting and sculpture), in architecture, in political and philosophical thought, in scientific investigation and, of course, in literature. With the literary development during the Renaissance period, the languagesvernaculars derivatives of Latin, such as Portuguese, Italian, French (Provencal) and Spanish, gained a systematic and careful contour.In the specific case of Portugal, the Portuguese national identity began to be defined in the 15th and XVI, amidst the ambience of maritime expansion, which implied the formation of an immense empire overseas. This ambience started to give rise to a narrative organization of the great Portuguese deeds. These narratives started to be made by great poets, such as Luís de Camões, which in his epic poem The Lusiads, tells the entire history of Portugal from its origins to the middle of the 16th century, as is well explained in the first two stanzas of the poem:
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
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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 valiant works
If they go away from the law of Death releasing,
Singing will spread everywhere,
If my ingenuity and art help me so much.
Here is the announcement that the glories and dramas of Portugal will be sung (narrated). The structure of the verse is the heroic decasyllable (verse with ten metric syllables, the sixth and tenth syllables being stressed). This would be the main verse of this period, also used in sonnets and other poetic variations. In the last verse of the second stanza, Camões makes a direct allusion to the classic conception of “poetic art”, that is, he speaks of "engine" and "art" (in the sense of “inspiration” and “technique/style”), which are terms explored by the Roman poet Horace in his work ars poetic. The use of this notion, which also appears in many other poems by Camões, denotes a solid affiliation with classical art. Therefore, this period of Portuguese literature is also defined as "Classicism", in addition to being also defined by a term relating to temporal dating: “Fifteenthism” (alluding to the 16th century, 1500).
In addition to Camões' work, there is another great Portuguese poet from the Renaissance period, Francisco Sá de Miranda, who was responsible for introducing the structure of the sonnet (two quartets – four-line stanzas – and two triplets – stanzas of three lines) in Portuguese from an Italian Renaissance matrix call Dolce Stil Nuovo, which had the figure of Petrarch its main representative.
In the field of prose, the so-called "literaturecatechetical”, that is, related to the preaching of the Catholic faith. José de Anchieta and Friar Vicente de Salvador are among the top names. There was also, in prose, the type of travel report, which is in the Letter from Pero Vaz de Caminha a document of great importance for the Portuguese language and literature. In the field of dramatic art (theatre), the work of Gil Vicente, which cannot but be related to the great names of Portuguese literature from the Renaissance period.
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
