Os Lusíadas

Os Lusíadas (“The Lusiads”), by Luís Vaz de Camões (c. 1524–1580), is the national epic of Portugal and one of the great works of European Renaissance literature. Printed in Lisbon in 1572, it tells of Vasco da Gama’s sea voyage to India (1497–1499), using it as the pretext to sing the whole history and destiny of the Portuguese people. The very title — os Lusíadas, “the sons of Lusus”, the mythical founder of Lusitania — announces the design: not a single hero, but an entire nation raised to the matter of epic.

A classical epic

Camões writes in the manner of the ancients. His model is Virgil’s Aeneid — and, behind it, Homer — but reinvented to celebrate a modern and factual exploit: the opening of the sea route to the East. The work observes the conventions of epic, which it arranges in four inherited parts:

Part	Function	Location
Proposition	the theme and the heroes announced	Canto I, st. 1–3
Invocation	appeal to the Tágides, nymphs of the Tagus	Canto I, st. 4–5
Dedication	offering to King Sebastião	Canto I, st. 6–18
Narration	the voyage and the history of Portugal	through Canto X

There are ten cantos, totalling 1,102 stanzas. Each stanza is an ottava rima (eight lines rhyming ABABABCC), and each line a heroic decasyllable — ten metrical syllables with obligatory stress on the sixth and the tenth. Elision between vowels is constant, and the syllable count depends on it:

The voyage and the gods

Onto the historical plot — Gama’s fleet rounding Africa, the calls at Mozambique and Malindi, the arrival at Calicut — Camões superimposes a mythological machinery of Graeco-Roman gods. Venus and Mars protect the Portuguese; Bacchus, lord of the East, conspires against them. This pagan marvellous coexists, untroubled for its age, with the Christian faith of the navigators: the gods are allegories, forces that dramatise the enterprise.

The narrative advances on several interwoven planes: the voyage itself; the history of Portugal, told by Gama to the king of Malindi; the mythological plane of the gods’ council; and the poet’s reflections, which interrupt the action to meditate on glory, greed and the human condition. At the very outset, Camões declares that the real deed surpasses all ancient fiction:

The great episodes

Four episodes stand out for their poetic force and have lodged themselves in Portuguese cultural memory:

• Inês de Castro (Canto III) — the tragic love and death of the mistress of Prince Pedro, murdered for reasons of state; the famous cry “Estavas, linda Inês, posta em sossego…” (“You lay, fair Inês, at peace…”) opens one of the most moving passages in the language.
• The Old Man of Restelo (Canto IV) — as the fleet departs, an elder utters a grave warning against ambition and the perils of expansion: a critical voice within the heroic poem itself.
• The Giant Adamastor (Canto V) — the personification of the Cape of Storms, who rises out of the dark to threaten the navigators; one of the great inventions of European poetry.
• The Isle of Love (Canto IX) — the allegorical reward offered by Venus to the heroes, in which pleasure stands for the immortality of fame.

The poem even stages its own farewell. At the close of Canto X the exhausted poet breaks off the song: “No mais, Musa, no mais…” (“No more, Muse, no more, for my Lyre is out of tune and my voice grown hoarse”) — weary not of glory, but of singing to a country he feels deaf to its own worth.

The language of Camões

For the history of Portuguese, Os Lusíadas is more than a poem: it is a monument of the language. So much so that “the language of Camões” became, by metonymy, the very name of the tongue. The work helped to fix the literary norm of sixteenth-century Portuguese, at the moment when the language was asserting itself as a vehicle of high culture, able to rival Latin and Castilian.

The style is deliberately Latinate. Camões cultivates hyperbaton — the inversion of the natural word order, in the image of Latin syntax — multiplies learnèd words and classical epithets, and builds long, architectural periods. From him literary Portuguese inherited much of its elevated register.

It is worth hearing how some of the poem’s emblematic words sound in European Portuguese:

• barões [bɐˈɾõjʃ] — here in the old sense of “noble men, illustrious males”, not the noble title;
• Lusíadas [luˈzi.ɐðɐʃ] — the descendants of Lusus;
• Taprobana [tɐpɾuˈβɐnɐ] — the ancient name of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), here the far limit of the known East.

Afterlife

The influence of Os Lusíadas runs through the whole of Portuguese-language literature, from Fernando Pessoa’s Mensagem — an explicit dialogue with the epic — to the twentieth century’s critical reckoning with empire. Camões was translated early and widely, and his figure became a national symbol.

The date of his death, 10 June, is today Portugal Day, Camões Day and the Day of the Portuguese Communities: few languages choose a poet’s death-day for their national holiday. The gesture sums up the singular place of Os Lusíadas — a work that is at once a literary summit and the symbolic founding of a linguistic identity.