The Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute from Fresno State continues commemorating the 500th birthday of the most renowned poet of the Portuguese-speaking world, Luiz Vaz de Camões. Today, we have a magnificent essay from Professor Maria do Céu Fraga, one of the Portuguese specialists on Camões, a full professor at the University of the Azores.

Luís de Camões: poetry and truth
By Maria do Céu Fraga

The attempt to design or anticipate the future has undeniably taken hold in our daily lives and, along with the cult of the contemporary, produces a restlessness that leads to a more or less passive or voluntary devaluation of the past. Nevertheless, at the center of our literature – when we talk about creation, criticism, and literary history – we naturally continue to find Luís de Camões and dialogue with his work. And in this year that marks the 500th anniversary of the poet’s birth, we need to reflect: where does this imperative for Camões to be present in our society come from? What does his work represent in today’s culture? What is it worth, and what purpose does it serve?
Few books and rare writers resist the usury of time. Many achieve notoriety in their time and are read, praised, and discussed because they correspond circumstantially to the demands of their time and society. However, after a few years or decades, they age on the shelves, and only those who read them remember them. Others, not even that. Both Os Lusíadas, published in 1572, and the Rimas, posthumously collected and published in 1595, have endured, imposed their author’s name, and retained the power to interest and move us with each reading. They are works of a very different nature. Still, in both, we recognize ourselves, individually and collectively, in the pride of sharing a language made noble by poetic work, in the epic spirit that runs through national history, in the constant questioning of man’s place in the universe, in the multiplicity of sentimental shifts that coexist in each of us, despite contradicting each other, and make us recognize human glory and misery.
Interest in the work also naturally leads to curiosity about the poet, his life, and his place in the historical and social world. Hence, in part, the interest that has been reborn today in the testimonial value of the prose letters attributed to him, as well as in the details of a biography in which, since the 16th century itself, it was felt that there were aspects to be forgotten.
Camões lived at a time when poets “went all out,” as Sá de Miranda used to say, who, around 1526, introduced us to the forms of Renaissance poetry and, with them, the possibility of literarily adopting the humanly representative ideals of his time. Sá de Miranda is from the generation before Camões, and it was he who first composed sonnets and songs in Portuguese, for example, moving from a short verse of 7 syllables, typical of peninsular poetry (it still persists today in popular poetry) to a long verse, in which 10 syllables allow for greater discursiveness.
At the end of the 15th century and throughout the 16th century, in Portugal, as in the rest of Europe, letters were entrusted with reordering the world and rationally constructing society and man. To the writer, the humanists pointed out the power of the word, demanding that culture be made responsible for personal and civic improvement. By the first half of the 16th century, letters had gained a vigor primarily fueled by the Crown’s policy, namely by the actions of King Manuel and then King João III. They accompanied changes in political and social life. The formation of new ideal standards for the courtier did not forget the role of arms but included love, human dignity, and letters.
Until the beginning of the 16th century, the Portuguese had seen poetry above all as a form of entertainment and conviviality – the brilliance of the evenings at the Portuguese royal court at the end of the 15th century and beginning of the 16th is reflected in the troves of the Cancioneiro Geral, published in 1516. In his characteristic plain and expressive language, Sá de Miranda guaranteed that there were no subjects off-limits to poets; what’s more, it was up to them to enlighten political leaders.
Without losing its function of sublimated communication and social, courtly play, literature would also become responsible for revealing a new world, artistically imagined and perfected; alongside scientific discovery, society would make room for knowledge and reflection on man himself, his place in the universe, the individuality of each person.
“Poets go all out” – and Camões went all out. Total and passionate at every turn, there are no themes or attitudes that he considers to be outside his sphere of reflection, even if they might seem inconvenient to some critics.
Basically, when we read Camões and try to create an image of him, we become well aware that it is part of the human condition that the unity of the personality, individual or collective, is not achieved by sacrificing what “jumps out” of the rationality required of those who literarily construct a fictional character. Epic and elegiac sentiment, dramatic tone, and tragic despair do not exclude the delicate love or lyrical bucolicism with which they often coexist. Whether happy or sad, angry or accepting the uncertainties and contradictions he feels and knows is part of himself and our condition, Camões affirms his dignity in each poem.
And with that, by reading Camões, we rediscover the world and are free to imagine it.