George Monteiro   

 Of the great Western poets, Luis Vaz de Camões (c 1524-1580) remains the least known outside of his native land, and the premier Western epic, his Os Lusíadas (1572), has the unenviable distinction of continuing to be poetry’s best kept secret.  Yet a century and a half after the Portuguese poet’s death Voltaire named him the ‘Portuguese Virgil,’ and the nineteenth century, valuing the history and biography embodied in the poem called him the ‘Portuguese Plutarch.’ 

         Camões has always had the respect of poets and critics.  Camões’s poetic eminence was noted by poets such as Torquato Tasso, Góngora and Goethe, and the dramatist Lope de Vega. In the twentieth century Erich Auerbach called the Lusíadas ‘the most beautiful epic of the Iberian Peninsula.’ It is ‘the great epic of the ocean,’ he adds, ‘which sings of Vasco da Gama’s voyage around Africa and the Portuguese colonization of the Indies.’[1]  The Lusíadas is universally taken as Portugal’s national epic, its ten cantos celebrating the voyages of discovery that, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, made that country a great maritime and imperial power. The ‘Lusíadas’ of the title are the sons or people of Lusus (the legendary founder of the province the Romans had named Lusitania), that is to say, the Portuguese.  Much like Virgil, Camões celebrates the heroic deeds of his people in their foundation of a great empire, but where Virgil, in celebrating the Roman Empire, had looked back to its foundation many hundreds of years previously in the story of Aeneas, Camões describes the business of empire-building, a thing of the recent past, historically a moment of national greatness already in decline even as the poem itself was being written, published, and read.  Including it among the four chief examples of the literary epic, the others being the Aeneid, Gerusalemme Liberata, and Paradise Lost, C. M. Bowra singled out the Lusíadas as ‘the first epic poem which in its grandeur and its universality speaks for the modern world.’[2] 

          In the twentieth century, however, Camões’s poem came in for critical attention of a different, less approving sort. In The Descent from Heaven (1963) the scholar Thomas Greene assesses the matter this way: 

The history represented in his poem [the Lusíadas] is authentic; he introduces few people who did not once exist, and he pronounces the exotic names of African and Indian places with the assurance of a man who has seen them. This sturdy spine of wahrheit amid the surrounding dichtung makes of the poem an historical artifact which is subject to the abrupt reverses of history, and thus the Lusíadas today seems almost swamped by the twentieth century. Of the two great forces which animate it, imperialism and nationalism, the first is largely discredited in our time, and the second is beginning to be suspect.[3] 

While one would not argue that the critical reader must grant Camões his subject both uncritically and without reservations, it can be affirmed nevertheless that a disinterested reader of the poem cannot fail to acknowledge that the poem is remarkable both for its time and ours-full of striking incidents marked by poetic language and imagery of high order.              

          ‘The natural and usual setting for an epic is a time commonly thought of as marked by greatness of achievement: ‘there were giants in those days.’ Such was the period of discovery and exploration which began in the late 15^th c., and the great Port[uguese] epic of the next c., the Lusiads, celebrates its achievements.’[4]   If there is a caveat, this entry continues, it is that ‘the immediate past rarely serves as matter for an epic.’  Camões’s closeness to the ‘immediate past,’ in fact, becomes clear when it is noted that Gama, who would become the central historical figure of the Lusíadas, died just around the time that Camões was born.  In Gama the poet took a figure whose historical significance, given the nature of his troubled and troublesome career, not to mention his questionable character, was still far from settled, creating, single-handedly, the legendary figure that to this day is enshrined in Portuguese history.  As Gama’s recent biographer puts it, ‘Camões transforms Gama’s voyage in tone and content, from the mundane to the divine.’ [5]  

        The Lusiads was almost immediately recognized as a great work by Torquato Tasso, whose own epic, Gerusalemme Liberata, appeared in print a decade after the Lusíadas.  His acknowledgement of Camões’s achievement was broadcast in a sonnet that begins as a tribute to Vasco da Gama (c 1460-1524) and ends with a paean to Camões, the poet whose genius gave the Portuguese adventurer the ‘splendour of his name.’  The poet addresses Gama: 

    Great as thou art, and peerless in renown,
    Yet thou to Camoens ow’st thy noblest fame;
    Further than thou didst sail, his deathless song
    Shall bear the dazzling splendour of thy name…[6] 

Three centuries later, in the novel White-Jacket, Herman Melville introduced in the fictional Jack Chase, ‘an ardent admirer’ of the Lusíadas who would sing out verses (‘in the original’) from the epic by his ‘Commodore’ Camões. 

          The first modern epic extolled discovery, religious conversion, trade, and empire.  Published in Lisbon eight years before its author’s death, the Lusíadas is the magnum opus of the soldier, sailor, poet and playwright who was Camões.  Now praised just as highly, if not more so, for his lyric poetry, including his many sonnets in the tradition that began with Petrarch, Camões first achieved international fame as a great poet through his achievement in the epic genre. Spanish translations appeared in Castile in the year of Camões’s death.  ‘Cervantes spoke of ‘the most excellent Camões, Lope de Vega called him ‘divine,’ Calderón, Tirso de Molina, and Herrera appreciated his work, Gracián referred to him as ‘immortal,” writes Aubrey Bell, ‘and Montesquieu, in a passage of L’Esprit des Lois, declared that Camões’ epic ‘fait sentir quelque chose des charmes de l’Odyssée et de la magnificence de l’Énéide.”[7]  In Portugal, of course the Lusíadas became almost immediately the centerpiece of Portuguese culture, inspiring numerous imitations.

          Tradition has it that Camões worked on his great poem for twenty years while he was in exile from Portugal and legend has it that he very nearly lost his manuscript in a shipwreck in the Mecon river delta, from which he managed to swim to shore, one arm held aloft with a copy of his work, thus saving his manuscript (and himself) from a watery grave.  But the facts of his life are no less dramatic.  As a student (probably at Coimbra) Camões became known for his poetry, a reputation that he seems to have carried with him to court.  As a professional soldier, he served a stint in Africa, losing an eye in Portugal’s victory at Ceuta.  Upon his return to Lisbon, he fell out of favor at home and was sent into exile in the Far East, namely India and Macau, where he filled several private and governmental offices.  Finally determined to return home, he suffered through a set of long, precarious and often interrupted voyages, including being stuck penniless on the island of Moçambique, before arriving in Lisbon in 1870 or thereabouts.  He did not return empty-handed, though his triumph had to await the publication of his poem, an event that should have provided him with adequate financial support to see him through his last years.  He dedicated his poem to the young king, Sebastian, and was granted a small pension.  But to Camões’s personal misfortune, the enthusiastically pious king went off to Africa, where he was (presumably) killed in battle (his body was never found).  The pension, meager though it was, was stopped, and, as tradition has it, the impoverished Camões died in an almshouse. 

          In choosing to write an epic that might be accepted as his nation’s grand poem-something that others, especially the poet Antonio Ferreira, had been urging upon Portugal’s poets-Camões had, of course, models outside of Portuguese literature.  The conventions of the epic were already well-established in Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad but especially so in Virgil’s Aeneid.  Camões took what he found useful, followed some conventions faithfully, adapted others, and in almost every way renovated what was long established.  He organized his poem into cantos, employed ottava rima (eight-line stanza in iambic pentameter and rhyming abababcc), and like Homer and Virgil, introduced a hero, whose functions is to narrate the events of his country’s glorious past rather than always his own adventures.  In settling on Gama, Camões is able to avail himself of the journey away from and return to home employed in the earlier epics, most notably the Odyssey.   In doing so, he foregoes the theme of the founding of the city-Virgil’s theme-that would have seemed to be an attractive choice, given the fact that legend has it that it was Ulysses who founded the city of Lisbon.  Thus Camões will celebrate not Virgil’s ‘arms and the man I sing’ (arma virumque cano) but the whole of Portugal’s people (Canto I, stanza 1).             

    Armes, and the Men above the vulgar File,
    Who from the Western Lusitanian shore
    Past ev’n beyond the Trapobanian-Isle,
    Through Seas which never Ship had sayld before;
    Who (brave in action, patient in long Toyle,
    Beyond what strength of humane nature bore)
    ‘Mongst Nations, under other Stars, acquir’d
    A modern Scepter which to Heaven aspir’d.[8] 

Echoing the many before him, the twentieth-century Southern African poet Roy Campbell pointed to the fact that Camões, man of action as well as poet, drew upon his own experiences of dangerous and sometimes electrifying sea-travel, along with the drudgeries and braveries of warfare-a poet who ‘had left his life in pieces scattered about the world’[9]-when he imagined what Gama and his men had undergone. In lines written on the slopes of Mt Kilimanjaro in the 1940s, Campbell expresses what he characterizes as the ‘real comradeship’ of one who ‘alone, of all the lyric race’ ‘can look a common soldier in the face’:             

    Through fire and shipwreck, pestilence and loss,
    Led by the ignis fatuus of duty
    To a dog’s death-yet of his sorrows king-
    He shouldered high his voluntary cross,
    Wrestled his hardships into forms of beauty,
    And taught his gorgon destinies to sing.[10]

‘If Tasso knew history and geography from the printed page,’ writes Thomas Greene, ‘Camoens knew them to the marrow of his ravaged body.’[11]  Indeed, so convincing have some readers found Camões’s accounts of encounters and incidents, not knowing that Camões was born some decades after Gama had made his famous journeys, that they have placed Camões aboard one of Gama’s ships.  That mistake was made by Voltaire no less.

          In choosing Gama as his hero, Camões rejected other possibilities, among them, notably, the soldier-administrator Alfonso de Albuquerque or Prince Henry the Navigator.  But in the Prince’s case, he was himself no sailor, only too willing, as he was, to send out others to fulfill his dream to discover and his fantasy to conquer.  To what extent Gama was Camões’s own beau ideal of the successful adventurer-in sharp contrast with the poet’s own record of small successes and large failures during his years of exile in the Far East-is matter for speculation that I will leave for others.  Similarly, with his decision to retell the legend of Inez de Castro’s murder, exhumation, and posthumous coronation as Portugal’s queen, one can only wonder how this signature event in the way Portugal still wishes to talk about its virtue actually fulfilled some need in Camões’s view of his own sentimental life.  One thing is certain, however.  In hitting upon the happy notion of having Gama, acting as if he were his king’s ambassador, retell the history of his country to the king of Melinde, Camões successfully, through choice and emphasis, gave shape to Portugal’s historic past.  It became the country’s narrative about itself, a mythology built, basically, on a substratum of bare facts.  Audaciously, by way of ‘prophecy,’ Camões even includes accounts of historical events that, in the biographical Gama’s real time, had not yet happened.

          Having chosen to practice his art in the genre of the epic, Camões was willing to adhere to the conventions of the epic whenever possible.  His greatest challenge in this regard was whether to introduce the Olympian gods into his poem about ‘modern’ and Christian Portugal.  He pared their number down almost exclusively to Jupiter, Venus, and Bacchus and gave them vital roles in determining the fate of Gama and his men.   In later centuries critics would object to Camões’s having included pagan gods in this poem devoted to the history and virtues of a Christian people.  Other readers objected (prudishly to the modern or neo-pagan mind) to Camões’s introduction, in Canto IX, of the episode of the ‘Isle of Love,’ in which Gama and his sailors are rewarded by Venus with an erotic interlude with beautifully willing maidens.  Venus, the voice of myth, speaks to Gama’s human flesh:             

    There with every kind of food and drink,
    With fragrant wines, and sweet roses,
    In palaces of marvelous crystal,
    On lovely couches, themselves more lovely,
    In short, with countless special delights,
    The amorous nymphs should await them,
    Wounded by love, prepared to be tender
    To those who desire them, and surrender.
    (Canto IX, stanza 41)[12] 

A large body of scholarship has grown up around this part of the poem, with the possibility that the episode reveals something about Camões’s own needs and desires being the most interesting for today’s readers.  

           But this was not the case for all of them.  For the ‘Isle of Love’ section can be read in feminist terms, setting aside as irrelevant to the case the fact that Camões was employing a topos that was well-worn by the time he used it.  Such a reading foregrounds the episode as a clear instance of the prurient exploitation of women as mere implements of erotica and sex, not just by Gama and his men alone but by the poet himself and his approving readers.  One particularly noteworthy criticism of Camões’s ‘Isle of Love’ episode, especially its implications for the way Portuguese history, while sentimentalizing the ‘Inez de Castro’ episode of his royal history, has tended to view ‘other’ women is the poem ‘Brazil, January 1, 1502,’ by the American poet Elizabeth Bishop, long a resident of Brazil.  Re-locating Camões’s ‘Isle of Love’ in time as well as place, to sixteenth-century Rio de Janeiro and re-situating it historically to the moment when the Portuguese outsiders first encountered the native women of the Terra de Santa Cruz (as the Portuguese first called the land they had ‘discovered’), Bishop stresses the notion of pursuit and rape, rather than the fantasy of innocent eroticism, describing the pursuers as ‘Christians, hard as nails, / tiny as nails, and glinting, / in creaking armor.’[13]  It will be recalled that the vision of the fabled ‘Island of Love’ and what happens there are the rewards Venus bestows on the successful Portuguese mariners.  In an episode of free and boundless sex, Gama’s sailors mate with nymphs in a luxuriously pastoral setting (Canto IX, stanza 70).

        Chase we these Goddesses; it shall be seen

        If they be Real or Fantastical.
        This said (more swift than Bucks o’re Pastures green)
        Through the rough Brakes and Woods darted they All.
        The Nymphs went flying the thick boughs between,

        Yet not so Swift as Artificial.

        Shreeking, and laughing softly in the close,

        They let the Greyhounds gain upon the Does.[14] 

          In Bishop’s poem things are different.  The Portuguese mariners ‘came and found it all, / not unfamiliar,’ their old dreams of luxuria recreated as if, anachronistically, they had read Camões’s account of Gama’s sailors sporting on the ‘Island of Love.’  But history does not mesh readily with imagination, not even that romance incorporated into an historical episode.  Surely not the history imagined in ‘Brazil, January 1, 1502,’ which records the actions of lascivious sailors,

        Each out to catch an Indian for himself-

        Those maddening little women who kept calling

        Each to each other (or had the birds waked up?)  

        And retreating, always retreating, behind it. 

If they are always retreating in the fixed sylvan scene-here Bishop echoes Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’-one must assume that beyond the time-frame of Bishop’s poem, rapes would have taken place.  What the poem does not allow for (recall that ‘always’) is that the Indian nymphs acquiesced in the way Camões’s ‘Does’ (being ‘not so Swift as Artificial’) had allowed the pursuing ‘Greyhounds’ to gain on them.  The Indian women in Bishop’s poem-if not in history or in the fantasy of Camões’s ‘Island of Love’-remain forever unravished like the nymphs on the frieze of the urn celebrated in Keats’s poem.  Bishop is not unaware, of course, that in re-historicizing Camões’s idealized version of the ‘Isle of Love’-a ‘powerful and original version of a most popular theme from ancient and contemporary poetry, that is the locus amoenus, the bower of love, the abode of bliss, which in one form or another has an ancestry, in pastoral and narrative, stretching back to Homer’-she subverts something essential to the historical narrative regarding Portugal’s national poem.[15]  If, as Bowra concludes, ‘the pleasures which Camões gives to his sailors are, if literal, unsuitable for heroes and improper for men,’ Bishop gives us the historical reason why that is so.[16] 

       Just about the time Bishop’s poem was published, the pre-eminent Camonian, Jorge de Sena, who, like Bishop, was then living in Brazil, noted that over time much had ‘aged’ in the Lusíadas. [17]  The major way in which the Lusíadas had already ‘aged’ was that at least one school of literary and cultural criticism now deprecated what was once celebrated in the poem: its rather straight-forward account of an historical Portugal that was unapologetically an Imperial state.  There are many routes by which to trace this career from celebration to deprecation of the Lusíadas.  My way of looking at the matter involves the poem’s reputation in the British Isles and English-speaking countries, where translations began as early as 1655, with The Lusiad, or Portugals Historicall Poem: Written in the Portingall Language by Luis de Camoens and now newly put into English by Richard Fanshaw Esq. ‘Now newly put into English’ meant something like ‘for the first time in the English language,’ since Fanshawe’s spirited version was not only the first translation done outside the Iberian Peninsula but the first one done into English-one fully in consonance with a British people in enjoying a country created through the unleashed energies and worldly ambitions of the Age of Elizabeth.[18]

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[1] Erich Auerbach, Introduction to Romance Languages and Literature (New York: Capricorn Books, 1851), p.185.

 [2] C. M. Bowra, From Virgil to Milton (London: Macmillan, 1945), p. 86.

  [3] Thomas Greene, The Descent from Heaven: A Study in Epic Continuity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963), pp. 219-20.

  [4] Dictionary of World Literary Terms, ed. Joseph T. Shipley (Boston: The Writer, 1970), p. 101.

  [5] Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp.17, 155. 

  [6] Quoted in William Julius Mickle, ‘Dissertation on the Lusiad,’ in The Lusiad; The Discovery of India: An Epic Poem, trans. Mickle (London: W. Suttaby, B. Crosby & Co., and Scatcherd & Letterman, 1809), p. xcvii.

  [7] Aubrey F. G. Bell, Luis de Camões (Oxford: Oxford University Press / Humphrey Milford, 1923), pp. 81-2.

  [8] The Lusiad by Luis de Camoens[,] translated by Richard Fanshawe, ed. Jeremiah D. M. Ford (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1940), p. 29.  In the original:            
 As armas e os barões asinalados,
 Que da ocidental praia lusitana,
 Por mares nunca dantes navegados,  
 Passaram ainda além da Taprobana…
 (Os Lusíadas ed. Frank Pierce [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973], 1.)

  [9] Jorge de Sena, ‘Em Creta, com o Minotauro,’ in Peregrinatio ad loca infecta (Lisbon: Portugália, 1969), p.112.  In the original: ‘deixado / a vida pelo mundo em pedaços repartida.’

  [10] ‘Luis de Camões,’ in Roy Campbell, Collected Works, I, Poetry, ed. Peter Alexander, Michael Chapman, and Marcia Leveson ([Craighall]: Ad. Donker, 1985), p. 351.

  [11] Greene, Descent from Heaven, p. 219.  

  [12] Luis Vaz de Camões, The Lusiads, trans. Landeg White (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 185

  [13] Elizabeth Bishop, ‘Brazil, January 1, 1502,’ in Questions of Travel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), pp. 5-7.

  [14] Ford, Lusiad, p. 261.  In the original: ‘Sigamos estas Deusas, e vejamos St fantásticas são, se verdadeiras!’

Se lançam a corer pelas ribeiras.

Fugindo as Ninfas vão por entre os ramos,

Mas, mais industriosas que ligeiras,

Pouco e pouco sorrindo e gritos dando,

Se deixam ir dos galgos ancaçando.’ 

(Pierce, Os Lusíadas, p. 215.)

  [15] Pierce, Os Lusíadas, p. xxxi.  

  [16] Bowra, From Virgil to Milton, p. 130.  For further analysis of Bishop’s ‘corrective’ poem, see George Monteiro, The Presence of Camões: Influences on the Literature of England, America & Southern Africa (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), pp.104-5.

  [17] Jorge de Sena, ‘Camões: the Lyrical Poet,’ in Camões[,] Some Poems Translated from the Portuguese by Jonathan Griffin[,] essays on Camões by Jorge de Sena and Helder Macedo (London: Menard Press, 1976), pp. 13-14.

  [18] Fanshawe’s translation in 1655 was followed by those of William Julius Mickle (1776), Thomas Moore Musgrave (1826), Edward Quillinan (five cantos) (1853), Sir Thomas Livingston Mitchell (1854), J. J. Aubertin (1878), Robert Ffrench Duff (1880), Richard Francis Burton (1880), James Edwin Hewitt (1883), Leonard Bacon (1950), William C. Atkinson (1952), and Landeg White (1997).

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