CAMÕES, LUÍS VAZ DE

CAMÕES, LUÍS VAZ DE (c. 1525–1580), Portuguese poet. Luís Vaz de Camões, Portugal's first great poet, was probably born in Lisbon, and he died in that city on 10 June 1580. The author of his country's national epic, Os Lusíadas (1572; The Lusiads), Camões was also a playwright—Anfitriões (The Amphytrions), El-Rei Seleuco (King Seleucus), and Filodemo—and a prolific lyric poet. His work in all the lyric genres of his age—odes, elegies, eclogues, songs, and sonnets—was collected and published posthumously in Rhytmos (1595; Rhythms).

Facts in Camões's biography are sparse, shadowy, and often indeterminate. It is thought that he came from a noble family from the north of Portugal, probably Galicia (now part of Spain). Because of specific geographical references in his writings as well as his obvious erudition, he was probably university trained, although tradition also has it that he left the University of Coimbra before completing his studies. As a nobleman he was received at court, and as a poet he was invited to aristocratic salons.

In 1546 Camões was banished from Lisbon, putatively because of his forbidden love for Catarina de Ataíde, a lady of the court (celebrated in poetry by Elizabeth Barrett Browning), or, even less likely, because of an indiscreet allusion to the king in his play El-Rei Seleuco. For two years, beginning in 1547, Camões was in military service in Ceuta, the Moroccan setting for the first Portuguese overseas victory in 1415. While there Camões suffered the loss of his right eye in a skirmish or fight. In 1553, back in Lisbon, King John III (ruled 1521–1557) pardoned him for wounding a royal officer in a street fight. At this time Camões was sent to India in the king's service. He spent the next seventeen years exiled from Lisbon, serving in Goa and in Macau (China), where tradition has it that he began to write Os Lusíadas. Evidence culled from his poetry seems to indicate that, during his time in the East, Camões participated in naval expeditions, fought in battles, suffered imprisonment, and survived shipwreck. His shipwreck survival in the Mekong Delta is enhanced by the legendary detail that he succeeded in swimming ashore while holding aloft the manuscript of his still-unfinished epic.

In 1570 Camões finally made it back to Lisbon, where two years later he published Os Lusíadas. In recompense for his poem or perhaps for services in the Far East, he was granted a small royal pension by the young and ill-fated King Sebastian (ruled 1557–1578). Tradition has it that, his pension notwithstanding, Camões died improvident in a Lisbon poorhouse—a fate the American writer Herman Melville memorialized in poetry three centuries later.

Os Lusíadas, which was soon translated into several European languages, is considered Camões's masterwork. The first of many translations into English, Richard Fanshaw's The Lusiad, or Portugals Historicall Poem, appeared in 1655. The most truly national epic of the early modern era, Os Lusíadas has also been regarded as the first notable poetic apology for worldwide European mercantilism and empire. Born a generation after Vasco da Gama (c. 1460–1524) became the first Portuguese sailor to reach India by rounding the Cape of Good Hope (1497–1498), Camões constructed his poem celebrating the drama and glories of Portuguese history around the stages of Gama's voyage. Among Camões's most effective creations in this historical poem is Adamastor, the monstrous Spirit of the Cape who awaits the Portuguese mariners. The figure of Adamastor has suffered varied interpretations and adaptations. He has been transformed, particularly in southern Africa, into the sinister symbol of Europe's own perfidy, betrayal, and violence in Africa.

Posthumously Camões's position as a lyric poet has been characterized by numerous attempts to enlarge the canon. The 65 poems attributed to Camões in 1595 were joined by 287 others by 1860. The vogue for Camões's lyrics reached its apogee with the spread of literary Romanticism throughout Europe. In the English-speaking world, Lord Strangford's loose and permissive translations in 1803 set the tone and laid the lines for the appreciation of the Portuguese poet for the rest of the century. Among Camões's most famous lyrics are the sonnet "Alma minha gentil" (Oh gentle spirit), his most frequently translated poem, and "Sobolos rios que vão" (By the rivers of Babylon), a magnificent personal meditation. The latter, which Lope de Vega once called "the Pearl of all poetry," starts with a paraphrase of Psalm 137 of the Old Testament.

CAMÕES, LUÍS VAZ DE

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