Luis Vaz de Camoens was a Portugal’s great national poet, author of the epic poem Os Lusíadas (1572; The Lusiads), which describes Vasco da Gama’s discovery of the sea route to India.
Background
Many details concerning the life of Camoens remain unknown, but he is thought to have been born around 1524. Luís Vaz de Camões was the only child of Simão Vaz de Camões and wife Ana de Sá de Macedo. His birthplace is unknown. Lisbon, Coimbra or Alenquer are frequently presented as his birthplace, although the latter is based on a disputable interpretation of one of his poems. Constância is also considered a possibility as his place of birth: a statue of him can be found in the town.
Camoens belonged to a family originating from the northern Portuguese region of Chaves near Galicia. At an early age, his father Simão Vaz left his family to pursue personal riches in India, only to die in Goa in the following years. His mother later remarried.
Education
Camoens studied in Coimbra, first at the College of All Saints and then at the university until 1542 and soon thereafter made his way to Lisbon.
Career
He is supposed to have been, in his youth, in territories held by the Portuguese in Morocco, but it is uncertain whether he had been exiled or was there because it was simply the place for a young Portuguese aristocrat to start a military career and to qualify for royal favours. It is also assumed that his youth in Lisbon was less than subdued. King John III pardoned him in 1553, when he was under arrest for taking part in a street brawl in which a royal officer was assaulted. The pardon hints that Camoens would go to India in the king’s service, but none of his wanderings for nearly 17 years there has been documented. He was certainly there, judging from references in his works that reveal an intimate knowledge of the area’s social conditions. He surely did not make his fortune there, since he complains often in his poetry about his bad luck and the injustices he met with. While in the East, he took part in one or two military naval expeditions and, as he alludes to it in his epic, underwent shipwreck in the Mekong Delta. 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 Camoens 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.
Camoens 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. His mother, a widow, survived him and had the pension renewed in her name. Documents related to payments due and to the renewal are known, and through them the date of his death in 1580 has been accepted. It is not certain that he died of anything more than premature old age brought on by illnesses and hardships.
Camoens’ poetical works may conveniently be discussed under three headings: lyric, epic, and dramatic.
The first edition of Camoens’ Rimas was published in 1595, 15 years after his death. The editor, Fernão Rodrigues Lobo Soropita, had exercised scrupulous care in collecting the poems from manuscript songbooks, but even so he could not avoid the inclusion of some apocryphal poems. The increasing fame of Camoens’ epic during the early 17th century also swept the lyrics into fame, and in the 17th century many efforts, not all of them praise-worthy, were made to unearth more poems. Prominent in this enterprise, but in a manner condemned by modern criticism, was Manuel de Faria e Sousa. Even in the 19th century, the Visconde de Juromenha added to the already excessive collection of lyrics, introducing into his edition of 1860–69 many poems from the songbooks, which were still comparatively unstudied. As a result the sonnets increased from 65 in the first edition to 352 in the Juromenha edition; the total number of poems, including sonnets, sextets, odes, octets, eclogues, elegies, and the Portuguese forms known as canções, redondilhas, motos, esparsas, and glosas had risen from 170 in the first edition to 593 by 1860.