Poetry
Camões
Almeida Garrett · 1825
Synopsis
One evening, a Portuguese ship docks at Lisbon. Among the passengers, a melancholy soldier, Camões, brings back his poem and keeps with him the Javanese servant whom they wanted to leave on the quay. Received by the young King Sebastian, who at first barely listens to him, he remembers Natércia, who had urged him to leave, then finds his rival at her side, and she gives him her portrait. The king leaves for Africa, and the poet remains poor, while his servant begs for him at night in the streets.
Context
The poem appeared in Paris in 1825, without an author's name, written by an exile of twenty-six; it was signed only in its second edition, in Lisbon, in 1839. It is held to be the first Romantic work of Portuguese literature, because it takes as its subject, in place of a Greek or Latin theme, the adventurous and unhappy life of the national poet; its language and versification nevertheless remain neoclassical, and critics reserve the title of first fully Romantic text for another poem by Garrett, in 1828. The painter Domingos Sequeira had just exhibited a Death of Camões at the Paris Salon. Henri Faure translated it into French in 1880.
Who it is for
A long narrative poem in ten cantos; it assumes knowledge of the life of Camões and of the defeat at Alcácer Quibir.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the work that opens Portuguese Romanticism; reissued in 2018 by the Imprensa Nacional, with an introduction by Helena Carvalhão Buescu.
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