Opinion: Camoes Lives

01/29/2015 - 10h56

I attended the inaugural lecture by Professor Phillip Rothwell this week. He is the new "King John II Professor of Portuguese" at Oxford University, named after Dom Joao II of Portugal (1481-1495), better known to history as "The Perfect Prince."

Dom Joao II ruthlessly consolidated his authority and expanded Portugal's presence along the coast of West Africa and around the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean.

Professor Rothwell studied mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge University. But his love of the Portuguese language and literature began in Mozambique where he went at the age of 18 to teach arithmetic. Later he taught Portuguese literature for over decade in the United States at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

His inaugural lecture was entitled "Why Camoes still matters: Copies in Search of Originals."

It was a sparkling performance: Multifaceted, multinational, beautifully crafted, it looked both out from Portugal to the lost empire, and in from Portugal towards a Europe, which Portugal embraced as its empire was lost, but where today Portugal is very imperfectly and uncomfortably incorporated, a factor Rothwell did not fail to note.

Luis Vaz de Camoes (1524-1580) is Portugal's greatest poet, the author of "Os Lusiadas."

He fought in North Africa and in Asia. It is often claimed his great epic epitomized Portugal's imperial adventure. But Rothwell provided a remarkable (and subversive) interrogation of Camoes, examining his work from the perspective of four other Portuguese writers who followed him over the centuries, including Fernando Pessoa, as well as post-imperial novelist, Helder Macedo, one of Rothwell's mentors, who was in the audience.

The Head of St Peter's College, Mark Damazer, a former BBC bigwig, who hosted the dinner at the college after the lecture, was more interested in the success of the St Peter's College team competing in the BBC's "University Challenge," an academic quiz show. In his speech he did mention the fact that the Anglo-Portuguese alliance is the oldest in the world, dating from the Treaty of Windsor of 1386. Which is true up to a point.

The problem is that between the date of Camoes death in 1580 and until 1640, Portugal was ruled by the Spanish Hapsburgs. The "Spanish Armada" which Philip II dispatched to overthrow Queen Elizabeth in 1588 had set sail from Lisbon.

The independence of Portugal from Spain after 1640 was decisively supported by Oliver Cromwell's "Commonwealth," and its navy, when England (as well as Scotland and Ireland), was ruled as a Republic between 1649 and 1660.

The last royal court of King Charles 1st was held in Oxford no less: Before the trail and the beheading of the King in London on January 30, 1649.

The Dutch had between 1581 and 1654 seized much of North Eastern Brazil, as well as Angola. Brazilians had on their own initiative, and at their own expense, at the cost of their own lives, mobilizing their own multiracial forces, and with very little support from Portugal, fought a series of a long, and eventually successful battles, against the Dutch, retaking Brazil for the newly established independent Portuguese monarchy after 1640.

This is also part of the story of the complexities of the Portuguese empire, its legacy, and its lasting repercussions. After all the language of Camoes thrives today as a global language in very large part because over 203 million Brazilians speak it.