Luis de Camoes - Selected Sonnets: A Bilingual Edition

Selected Sonnets

With it Camens soothed an exiles grief...

scorn not the sonnet wordsworth

Illustrations

The Life

As is the case with his younger contemporary, Shakespeare, only a few indisputable facts concerning Camess life can be verified by the public record. He lived in an era before the archivally useful habit of keeping personal diaries, and once Cames 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, theres much that we do know for certain.

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

Sometime in the early 1540s, Cames 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, Cames reputedly fell in love with Caterina de Ataide, a young lady at court who would become the inspiration for much of his love poetry. Theres been a long debate as to whether Caterina de Ataide was really Camess Beatrice, and some commentators have suggested instead the Infanta Dona Maria and others. Nevertheless, the case for Caterina is the most compelling, especially given Camess lyrics that refer to a beloved Natercia, an anagram for Caterina.

Whether its 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, its certain that in 1547 Cames, as a common soldier, joined the garrison in Ceuta, Morocco, where he would lose his left eye fighting against the Moors. By June 1552, Cames 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 Gonalo Borges, who survived his injury. As a result, Cames was incarcerated in Tronco prison, paid a fine, and was eventually shipped out as a common soldier to India. He sailed on the So Bento, the only ship of four to arrive safely in Goa, India, that year. Over the next three years, Cames 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, Cames was appointed the Trustee for the Dead and Absent in Macao, China. In this not insignificant position, Cames was responsible for the maintenance of all the properties of those abroad and deceased. It was an opportunity for Cames to finally make his fortune, and he seems to have done quite well until the charges of malfeasance, which he claims in Os Lusadas (canto X, stanza 128 ) were totally unjust. Summarily dismissed from his position and recalled to Goa to answer for his actions, Cames, as he vividly describes in the epics 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 Lusadas and, presumably, his lyrics as well.

When Cames finally arrived in Goa, he was jailed for his alleged embezzlements. Eventually the charges against him were dismissed, but his impoverished situation landed him back in jail when he couldnt pay his debts. From his writings, its very clear that Cames never liked the important trading city of Goa, which was the hub of the great Portuguese empire in the East, and which Cames, in one of his few surviving letters, called the mother of knaves and the stepmother of honest men. His continual despair in Goa (Babylon) and his longing for Lisbon (Zion) is a constant and powerful theme in his lyric poetry.

Eventually, Cames managed to arrange passage to Mozambique in 1567, but he ended up stranded and penniless on the African coast. When he was finally discovered by the Portuguese historian Diogo do Couto and another friend, they were appalled by his condition, and they gave him the necessary money to complete his passage back to Lisbon on the Santa Clara.When, at long last, Cames arrived back in his beloved country, Lisbon was engulfed in the plague, and the country itself was absorbed with the grandiose ambitions of its young king, Sebastio. As for Cames, after seventeen years abroad, hed returned to his native land even poorer than when hed left. At the age of fifty-one, his only publication thus far had been a dedicatory poem for Garcia da Ortas Colquios dos simples e drogas e cousas medicinais da India, etc. (Goa, 1563), a scientific book about medicinal plants. His beloved Caterina de Ataide had long been dead (1556), and hed returned to Portugal an obvious failure. The world had seemingly passed him by. All he had were his manuscripts.