The Literature of Portugal
Luis Vaz de Camões, José Maria de Eça de Queiroz, Fernando Pessoa, José Saramago
Luis Vaz de Camões
Poet of the Voyages
Very little is known for definite about Luis Vaz de Camões early life. He is believed to have been born in 1524/5, probably in Lisbon, and was probably educated at Portugal's national university at Coimbra. Twenty years later it is known that he was back in Lisbon writing love ballads. In 1547 he enlisted as a soldier in the garrison at Ceuta in Morocco and lost his left eye in battle.
During the Corpus Christi procession through Lisbon in 1552, Camões fought a duel with an aid to the King. He was jailed for brawling and was released after paying a fine and being conscripted into the army. It was during this journey through India that Camões became a great poet.
Camões was the first major European artist to visit the tropics and the orient and his "The Lusiads" is now regarded as a major piece of European thought in the sixteenth century. In it, Camões describes the first European voyage to India as an event that he knows will change history and transform the course of human affairs in the future. The classical pagan gods Jupiter, Venus, Mars, Bacchus and Neptune all make appearances and play their roles in affecting the outcome of the voyage, but they are interwoven with descriptions of Vasco de Gama charting the journey using his astolabe. Camões illustrates the Renaissance move from a world of religion to a world of science.
Camões spent seventeen years in Goa, Macau and Mozambique. He returned to Lisbon in 1570 and two years later The Lusiads was published. Camões died in poverty in 1580.
José Maria de Eça de Queiroz
Eviscerating the hypocricies of his time
Eça de Queiroz was born on 25 November 1845, his father was a magistrate, and his mother was the daughter of a senior army officer. His parents were not married at the time of his birth and his mother refused to acknowledge Eça's existence, even after marrying his father (a marriage which took place four years after Eça's birth and produced another four children). Eca was brought up by a nurse who died when he was five years old and then sent to live with his paternal grandmother. She died when Eça was ten years old and he was then sent to a boarding school in Oporto. At sixteen Eça enrolled as a law student at the University of Coimbra and it was here that he began publishing his poems in the Gazeta de Portugal.
Portugal at this time was lagging far behind in the industrial revolution that was sweeping across the rest of Western Europe. The Portuguese took immense pride in their history and culture and fondly remembered the days when the nation had been the pioneering force of Western imperialism. The intellectual elite concerned themselves with explaining why this fall from grace had occured, and what measures could be taken to resolve this situation.
Eça's writing illustrate the concerns of his generation, a desire to expose the narcissism and decadence of the ruling classes, and a fervent hope that this could be overcome and that Portugal could be reborn as a leading European nation once more.
Eça produced three great novels on these themes, The Sin of Father Amaro, Cousin Basilo and The Maias. The Sin of Father Amaro describes the love affair between a young priest, Amaro Viera, and Amelia Joanneira, a young woman in the small town of Leiria. Here Eça focuses his anger at a smug and decadent Catholic church who held immense power in Portuguese society at the time. Cousin Basilo and The Maias both dealt with the incestous relationships and sexual hypocrisy that prevailed within the society of the times. Although less known than Dickens, Balzac and Tolstoy many regard Eça as their equal, Zola was a particular fan of the writer saying "he is far greater than my own dear master, Flaubert".
Later in his writing career Eça changed the setting for his books from the city to the countryside, turning from satirising the corruption and greed of the aristocracy to looking with new skepticism at social reformers and what progress entailed. Eça was well travelled, serving as Portuguese consul in Havana, Newcastle, Bristol and Paris where he died in 1900.
Fernando Pessoa
"Be plural like the universe!"
Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was born in Lisbon on the 13th June 1888. "Pessoa" means person in Portuguese and over the course of his writing career Fernando Pessoa gave birth to seventy-two seperate literary pseudonyms, three of which gained the most recognition - Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis. Pessoa disliked the word pseudonym and called his alter-ego's "heteronyms". Each of Pessoa's heteronyms had their own unique personalities and temperaments, even their own biographies and horoscopes.
Pessoa made his living translating and drafting business letters in English and French. He appears to have led a very uneventful life and seems to have lived through the characters of his imagination. Alvaro de Campos was the well travelled futurist who led a bisexual lifestyle and indulged in an adventurous lifestyle completely alien to Pessoa's. Alberto Caeiro was an unemployed country man and an "unwitting master". Ricardo Reis was a doctor who wrote odes in the classical style. In his writing Pessoa had Ricardo Reis emigrate to Brazil in 1919.
This creation of a multiplicity of persons through which the artist could express himself has fascinated writers and poets who have read Pessoa's literature. In 1992 José Saramago wrote "The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis". In this novel Ricardo Reis returns to Portugal in 1935, having heard that Fernando Pessoa has died. Saramago constructs a number of encounters between Pessoa and his heteronym Ricardo Reis.
I don't know how many souls I have.
I've changed at every moment.
I always feel like a stranger.
I've never seen or found myself.
From being so much, I have only soul.
A man who has soul has no calm.
A man who sees is just what he sees.
A man who feels is not who he is.
Attentive to what I am and see,
I become them and stop being I.
Each of my dreams and each desire
Belongs to whoever had it, not me.
I am my own landscape,
I watch myself journey -
Various, mobile, and alone.
Here where I am I can't feel myself.
That's why I read, as a stranger,
My being as if it were pages.
Not knowing what will come
And forgetting what has passed,
I note in the margin of my reading
What I thought I felt.
Rereading, I wonder: "Was that me?"
God knows, because he wrote it.
"I Dont Know How Many Souls I Have"
Fernando Pessoa & Co: Selected Poems
Edited and translated by Richard Zenith
Grove Press 1998
José Saramago
Exploring identity
Saramago was born in 1922 into a poor, rural Ribatejo family that moved to Lisbon two years later. When he was eighteen Saramago began working as a car mechanic. At the same time he began to spend his evenings in a public library where he developed a love of literature. Saramago's first novel was published in 1947 entitled Terra do Pecado (Land of Sin) but it was another thirty years before Saramago would write another book.
Saramago achieved literary acclaim for the novel he wrote when he was in his sixtieth year. "Baltasar and Blimunda" describes a romance between an ex-soldier Baltasar who can only see in the light, and the clairvoyant Blimunda who can only see in the dark. Together they fly in a flying machine created by Padre Bartolomeu that is powered by will power alone. "Baltasar and Blimunda" mixes fantasy with historical figures in an ironic style and brought Saramago international applause.
In 1984 "The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis" was published. Dr Ricardo Reis was one of the poetic pseudonyms created by Fernando Pessoa. In Pessoa's zodiac of heteronyms Dr Ricardo Reis wrote classical odes and supposedly fled to Brazil because of his monarchist sympathies in 1919. Saramago continued this fiction and has Reis returning to Lisbon after hearing about the death of his creator from another of Pessoa's heteronyms.
"The Stone Raft" was Saramago's next work inwhich a rift opens along the border between Spain and France and the Iberian peninsula floats off westwards across the Atlantic. The Spaniards and Portuguese that are stranded upon the raft go wandering through the land having to abandon their familiar routines and points of reference.
This was followed in 1991 by "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ", a narrative on the life of Christ from conception to crucifiction. In this gospel Jesus is described as a man suscetible to normal human desires and naiviety, and his relationship to a blood thirsty despotic God. This, as can be expected, recieved much overt hostility from the Church, although a debate between Saramago and a Dominican theologian on the book at a Catholic chapel did take place before a huge congregation. The under secretary of state responsible for cultural affairs in the conservative government of the time, had Saramago's book taken out of the competition for the European Literary Prize in 1992. Enraged, Saramago left Portugal and moved to Lanzarote in the Canary Islands.
In interviews, Saramago has refered to his most recent books as a "trilogy of identity". In the first of the trilogy "All the Names" (1997) a clerk working in a public records office searches for data concerning an anonymous woman and through this Saramago explores the effects of bureacracy on identity. This was followed by "The Cave" (2000) inwhich a group of rural artisans find their community uprooted by global market forces. Saramago's most recent novel was published in 2002 when the author turned eighty. This story concerns an author who discovers another incarnation of himself.