Luís de Camões

Luís de Camões (born c. 1524/25, Lisbon, Portugal—died June 10, 1580, Lisbon) was 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. Camões had a permanent and unparalleled impact on Portuguese and Brazilian literature alike, due to not only his epic but also his posthumously published lyric poetry.

Life

What little information there is about Camões in a strict biographical sense falls into three categories: statements by his first biographers in the 17th century, a few documents unearthed in the 19th century and scant subsequent research, and very abstract allusions (some chronologically uncertain) to his own life in his works. Successive biographers have woven the few concrete facts known about Camões’s life into a bewildering complexity of fantasy and theory that is unsupported by concrete documentary evidence.

It is supposed that Camões was born in Lisbon around 1524 or 1525, when Portuguese expansion in the East was at its peak. Research has shown him to be a member of the impoverished old aristocracy but well-related to the grandees of Portugal and Spain. A tradition that Camões studied at the University of Coimbra or that he followed any regular studies, for that matter, remains unproved, though few other European poets of that time achieved such a vast knowledge of both classical and contemporary culture and philosophy. 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 Camões 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 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.

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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. 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.