Luís Vaz de Camões and Fernão Mendes Pinto: A Comparative Overview of their Lives in Asia and After

Summary

My interest in a comparative study of the lives of Luís Vaz de Camões and Fernão Mendes Pinto dates back to l998 when I was invited by the Department of History of The Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore) to give a seminar on Portuguese Culture à propos the commemoration of the fifth centenary of Vasco da Gama's arrival in India. As a Professor of Literature, I chose to focus on the works of those two masters of the Portuguese Golden Age in which reflections of the Overseas Expansion of the sixteenth century can be seen: Camões’ The Lusiads, Mendes Pinto's The Peregrination.

During the time I taught courses on Renaissance and Baroque literature at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, my approach had always been based on the conviction that a close reading (the works, duly supported by an appropriate historical and theoretical background) would be more profitable than the old method of giving primary attention to biographical details. In spite of this conviction, in the case of Camões I could not but recognize the importance of the record of his life experiences during the time he spent in Asia, however scanty and controversial, considering the role they play in The Lusiads and in his poetry in general. As for Fernão Mendes Pinto, due to the autobiographical nature of The Peregrination, the available data on the subject became obviously essential. Therefore, unable to avoid the biographical approach in a preliminary stage, I decided to elaborate a program starting with a comparative reading of the available information on the lives of both authors, particularly concerning their Asian experience, intended to function as a backdrop to the subsequent analysis of their works.

Such comparative reading required a detailed chronology of the lives of those authors in the East, a challenging task due to the uncertainty of the available information. But with that approach, I was trying not only to find answers to questions I had been asking myself for quite a while, but also to stimulate the students to further study and investigation.