Camões: Made in Goa. Selected Lyric Poems Written in India by Landeg White

Abstract

Reviews 99 this perfectly, keeping the simplicity of the original fresh, while the dramatic ecstasy of ‘Em Deus, meu criador’ is captured elegantly. The scope of this anthology of poetry is ambitious, but there are gaps here. As the authors acknowledge, no dramatic verse is included with the exception of Ferreira’s Castro, which is explained by the fact that, despite its undeniable originality, quality and productivity, the poetry of theatre of the second half of the sixteenth century in Portugal has not been the object of consistent studies, despite recent attempts to address this. Like Camões in the epic and the lyric, Gil Vicente’s dramatic masterpieces have obscured the work of others who composed the traditional autos and other classical genres. All this makes White and Alves’s work more important than ever. Rescuing these poets from obscurity, making them available to both the Portuguese- and English-speaking public, is imperative if the cultural contribution of generations of intellectuals who worked in the vast territory that constituted the so-called Portuguese Empire is to be taken into consideration by non-Portuguese-speaking scholars. As an academic and a writer, that this was one of the projects White was working on before a short illness led to his death shows his dedication to a rich poetic tradition that has much more to offer. Alves completed the work alone and we are all richer for this anthology a quatro mãos. Camões: Made in Goa. Selected Lyric Poems Written in India, trans. by Landeg White (Margao, Goa: Under the Peepal Tree, 2017). 192 pages. Print. Reviewed by Jason Keith Fernandes (Centre for Research in Anthropology (CRIA) — University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE-IUL)) Central to a recent discussion among scholars of Goan literature in Portuguese was the question of defining a canon of Goan literature in Portuguese. Where would the history of such a literature begin? Who could be considered Goan for the purposes of constructing such a history? During these discussions, a question was half-jocularly posed: could Camões be considered Goan? Despite the fact that Camões’s name was proposed half in jest, the suggestion was seized upon with enthusiasm. Indeed, Camões should be considered Goan! This is not dissimilar to the argument made by the late Landeg White, the celebrated translator of Camões’s verse into English, in the introduction to this selection of lyric poems. What binds these poems together is White’s assertion that they were all written in Goa, then capital of the recently established Estado da Índia, wrested from the Sultan of Bijapur in 1510. Camões, as is famously known, spent close to fifteen years based in Goa, having arrived there in 1553 as a convict or degredado, offering military service instead of prison time. He left Goa in 1567, but due to the vagaries of intercontinental travel and the state of his purse, he arrived in Lisbon only in 1570. White suggests that the shift to Goa ensured a move in style, away from ‘the sophisticated wit of the Petrarchan mode’ to write love poems that are Reviews 100 ‘intense, personal, utterly direct and, for the translator, dismayingly simple’ (Introduction, p. 18). Further, his presence in Goa also ensured that Camões overturned the conventions regarding ‘the marks of a desirable mistress’. White argues that whiteness alone was no longer valued as the epitome of beauty, and that the dark features of Barbara, the possibly black concubine immortalized in the poem Aquela cativa (pp. 146–47), were no obstacle to her praise. White also indicates that the Goan location is fundamental to Camões’s poetry because, as in stanzas 6–21 of canto iii of his epic Os Lusíadas (not contained in this selection because White believes that it needs to be read as a whole), it is from this Asian location that Europe can be first viewed and presented as a cogent whole stretching from Russia to Portugal. White is somewhat apologetic when he suggests that ‘it has to be conceded there is little directly about India in his poems’ (Introduction, p. 16). There is, however, no need for this apology given that...