Selected Sonnets Read Online

Selected Sonnets: A Bilingual Edition

Selected Sonnets

With it Camöens soothed an exile’s grief . . .

“scorn not the sonnet” wordsworth

Illustrations

Introduction

Luís de Camões (1524–80), the greatest of Portuguese writers, has been described by Harold Bloom as the “transcendent genius of his nation.” Camões is the author of the last great Western epic, Os Lusíadas, and he was also one of the most sublime lyric poets of the Renaissance, often compared to Dante, Petrarch, and Shakespeare. The poet’s life, as commentator Henry H. Hart remarks, is “so fascinating and adventurous that it borders on the unbelievable.” The young Camões, a regular at the Lisbon court, lost an eye fighting the Moors in Morocco and was later arrested for stabbing a royal favorite in a Lisbon street brawl during the Corpus Christi celebrations of 1552. He was subsequently banished to the Eastern empire where he fought in several military engagements, served as a government official in Macao, China, and was charged with embezzlement.

Recalled to India, Camões, by his own account in Os Lusíadas, was shipwrecked off the Cambodian coast and survived by swimming to shore clutching the only manuscript of his epic-in progress. Subsequently, he was jailed in Goa, India, for his activities in Macao and his unpaid debts. After seventeen years in the East, Camões found himself stranded in abject poverty in Mozambique. When he was fortuitously rescued by several friends, he was finally able to return to Lisbon, where he published his national epic, Os Lusíadas, six years before the disastrous death of King Sebastião and his Portuguese army at Alcácer-Kebir in Morocco.

Camões died in Lisbon in 1580 during an outbreak of the plague, just before Spain seized his beloved Portugal. Luís de Camões led a truly amazing life, one that Henry H. Hart has aptly described as “more adventuresome by far than that of François Villon, as chivalrous as the Cyrano de Bergerac of Edmond Rostand, and as replete with excitement, love, and tragedy as The Three Musketeers of Alexandre Dumas.”

The Life

As is the case with his younger contemporary, Shakespeare, only a few indisputable facts concerning Camões’s life can be verified by the public record. He lived in an era before the archivally useful habit of keeping personal diaries, and once Camões became famous, the “facts” of his life became enmeshed in a fascinating but frustrating web of legend, speculation, and pure invention. But despite these mythologies, there’s much that we do know for certain.

Luís de Camões, according to an entry in the records of the Casa da India, was born in 1524, the son of Simão Vaz de Camões and Ana de Sá. He was from an impoverished but well-connected family that had originally come from Galicia in Spain when his ancestor, Vasco Pires de Camões (a minor poet), moved to Portugal in 1370 to serve under King Ferdinand I. On his mother’s side, Luís was a distant kinsman of the legendary Vasco da Gama, who would eventually serve as the central figure in Camões’s Os Lusíadas. It seems most probable that the young Luís de Camões grew up in Lisbon and, given his extraordinary erudition, it’s also reasonable to assume that he studied at the renowned University of Coimbra, founded in 1290. It’s clear from his writings, especially his lovely sonnet about the Mondego River, that Camões indeed spent time in Coimbra.

Sometime in the early 1540s, Camões returned to Lisbon. He was often at court and writing poetry, but he was also a bit of a young swashbuckler, keeping company with a group of rowdy friends. During this period, according to legend and numerous biographers, Camões reputedly fell in love with Caterina de Ataide, a young lady at court who would become the inspiration for much of his love poetry. There’s been a long debate as to whether Caterina de Ataide was really Camões’s “Beatrice,” and some commentators have suggested instead the Infanta Dona Maria and others. Nevertheless, the case for Caterina is the most compelling, especially given Camões’s lyrics that refer to a beloved “Natercia,” an anagram for “Caterina.”

Whether it’s true that his love for Caterina was disapproved of by the Crown and that he was subsequently shunted off to military exile is much more debatable. Nevertheless, it’s certain that in 1547 Camões, as a common soldier, joined the garrison in Ceuta, Morocco, where he would lose his left eye fighting against the Moors. By June 1552, Camões was back in Lisbon, where he was arrested after a street brawl during the celebrations on the feast of Corpus Christi. During the altercation, he inflicted a sword wound on a minor court official named Gonçalo Borges, who survived his injury. As a result, Camões was incarcerated in Tronco prison, paid a fine, and was eventually shipped out as a common soldier to India. He sailed on the São Bento, the only ship of four to arrive safely in Goa, India, that year. Over the next three years, Camões was involved in a number of military engagements, including action on the shores of Malabar, as well as the Straits of Mecca and the East African coast.

In 1556, with his military obligation completed, Camões was appointed the Trustee for the Dead and Absent in Macao, China. In this not insignificant position, Camões was responsible for the maintenance of all the properties of those abroad and deceased. It was an opportunity for Camões to finally make his fortune, and he seems to have done quite well until the charges of malfeasance, which he claims in Os Lusíadas (canto X, stanza 128 ) were totally “unjust.” Summarily dismissed from his position and recalled to Goa to answer for his actions, Camões, as he vividly describes in the epic’s same passage, lost all his material possessions in a devastating shipwreck near the mouth of the Mekong River off Cambodia. Only his strong swimming skills allowed him to survive, and to bring with him through the waves and currents of the ocean his sole copy of Os Lusíadas and, presumably, his lyrics as well.

When Camões finally arrived in Goa, he was jailed for his alleged embezzlements.