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Luis de Camões

Statue of Camões, Ilha de Mozambique

«Seen from the sea, or a bird's eye view... the island is a unique woman, lying sensuously in a state of abandon, in a sea of colours, sun-worshipping on the beach, with a plaything at her feet. That toy is the Island of São Lourenço which is flanked by two tiny fantasies made of rock and sand. These are the small islands of Goa and Sena. These are all enclosed within a shell-shaped bay, over which the waters ebb and flow and small boats with white sails can be seen in the distance. The boats look like seagulls, bobbing up and down on the waves. Dry land circles the bay.»

Luís (Vaz) de Camões (1524 - 1580) was Portugal's great national poet, author of the epic poem Os Lusíadas (1572), which describes Vasco da Gama's discovery of the sea route to India. Camões had a permanent and unparalleled impact on Portuguese and Brazilian literature alike, due not only to his epic but also to his posthumously published lyric poetry.

Camões was born in Lisbon, when Portuguese expansion in the East was at its peak. He was a member of the impoverished old aristocracy but well-related to the grandees of Portugal and Spain. Camões has probably studied at the University of Coimbra or has followed any regular studies. Few other European poets of that time achieved such a vast knowledge of both classical and contemporary culture and philosophy.

Camões would go to Africa, India and South Eastern Asia in the king's service, where he spent nearly 17 years. He did not make his fortune like many early Portugeuse travelers, since he complains often in his poetry about his bad luck and the injustices he met with. His years in the East can be assumed to have been like those of thousands of Portuguese scattered at the time from Africa to Japan, whose survival and fortunes were, as he says, always hanging from divine providence's very thin thread.

Diogo do Couto, a 16th-century historian of the Portuguese East, who never included Camões among the nobles he carefully listed for every skirmish, did note, however, that he found "that great poet and old friend of mine" stranded penniless in Mozambique and helped to pay his trip back to Lisbon. Camões returned to Portugal in 1570, and his Os Lusíadas was published in Lisbon in early 1572. In July of that year he was granted a royal pension, probably in recompense for both his service in India and his having written Os Lusíadas.

Camões and Ilha de Mozambique

Statue of Camões on the Ilha de Mozambique

Camões has visited twice Ilha de Mozambique between 1567 - 1569. The Island for him was a place of misery and parasitic friends, an occasional chance to do some work on Os Lusíadas, more concentrated work on his Parnassus, which, according to Couto, was later lost. His life was filled with the erratic wandering of someone forced to wait for a ride back home. It was a life of inner and outward misery, lacking in the most basic necessities, with increasing and irreversible degradation. Nonetheless, there was the never-ending «festival of light».

The texts do not reflect the spellbinding qualities. Instead, they leave us with the feeling that the limited life there tied the poet to the hellish circle of petty survival mechanisms, which robbed him of all pleasure and took away his energy from other things.

This was the reality of the Island of Mozambique to Camões between 1567 and 1569. He is, like all of us, heart-breakingly human, repeating the age-old gestures of the destitute, reduced to animal needs, transformed into a parasite, somehow made brutish, but with one major difference: Camões was able to block out the blinding sun of the island, because there is another light illuminating the texts he left us, thus increasing our cultural heritage. Increasing - and that is what poets do for a living. They increase and enrich the heritage, even when they are sometimes trapped in the middle of a sun-soaked sea - which they turn their backs on, creating a myth (an Island) which others will praise. The island which Camões never saw is today a mythical legacy which he handed down to us without ever knowing he did so.

Camões' Major Works

Poetry:
- Os Lusíadas (1572)
- Rhythmas de Luís de Camões (1595)

Plays:
- Anfitriões and Filodemo, in Primeira Parte dos Autos e Comédias Portuguesas, by António Prestes, Luís de Camõens, et al. (1587);
- El Rei-Seleuco, in Rimas (1645).

More about Luis de Camoes
- Os Lusiadas - Camoes' poems (in portugese)