Luís De Camões: The Poet as Scriptural Exegete by John V. Fleming (review)

In recent days the study of Camões and his work has waned, in part due to a focus on more contemporary sociocultural expression through literature. As such, the need for a new perspective on older texts seems appropriate. John Fleming, through his meticulous, transliterary study of the poem "Sóbolos rios," brings back a philology of analysis whose time may deserve a swift return.

The study is divided into seven chapters, each with a series of digressions into the variety of symbols, intertextual references, and other influences on the poem. Chapter I, "Poetry as Exegesis," defines the parameters of the book's thematic foci, the poet as exegete, from the medieval tradition of Exegesis found in the writings of Saint Augustine and others, and the poet as embodiment of the intertextuality needed to reflect on social and religious thematics simultaneously. Chapter II, "The Psalm," focuses on Biblical intertextuality in the poem. Chapter III, "The Eclogue of Theodulus," observes extra biblical influences on Camões' poem and looks deeper into the poet's evident knowledge of biblical stories as a basis for the presentation of his thematic structure. Chapter IV turns away from the Bible and moves toward a more contemporary biblios, La conversión by Juan Boscán. Although the presentation given in Chapter IV reads as more of a symbol-by-symbol analysis, Chapter V, "Boscán and Some Predecessors" delves as deeply as a single scholar could into the contextual, diegetic, transhistorical, and intertextual convergences which make up the rest of the poem. The study ends with a transcription, and translation into English, of the poem, and a substantial bibliography.

We may make quite a few very positive comments on Fleming's study. If one were to describe this work in a single word, that word would be "meticulous." Preferring an approach akin to the "explication de text" model of critical inquiry, the author spares no effort in an analysis which explores, in every possible detail and from every possible angle, works directly, indirectly, and tangentially related to the poem at hand. As an example, when speaking of sociocultural contextual influences in Chapter V, the author invokes the well-known numerical studies composed on Camões' verses (130-31), Horace's presence in Boscán's intertextual relationship with "Sóbolos rios" (126), and the retracing of 20^th and 21^st Century Poet Vasco Graça Moura's loving parody on Renaissance searching for the "divine patterns" of artistic expression regarding the perfection of human existence (134–35). Fleming does not simply mention these; rather, he analyses them in their historical, socioliterary, and mythical-religious contexts. The appeal of the work resides, then, in the transhistorical, transliterary, and truly profound understanding of the poem in its—human—context that this study offers the reader.

If we were to make a more critical comment, it would exist secondary to the considerations above. In a more critical sense, because the study incorporates so many other works from such a variety of geographical, literary, exegetic, and sociocultural contexts, many times the author loses sight of "Sóbolos rios" itself, only to return in the midst of a detailed analysis of, for example, works listed above. These few but noticeable moments in which the reader participates in a losing of the forest for the trees may leave some more focused readers a bit perplexed, despite the richness of understanding that such an approach provides.

Exegesis as a topic of critical inquiry has found a new home in Fleming's book, a wide-ranging and heartfelt appreciation for one of Camões' titular poems. Although at times tangential, Luís de Camões: The Poet as Scriptural Exegete makes excellent use of existing scholarship, a multitude of perspectives, and a true appreciation for the intertextual, transnational, transhistorical, and contextual elements that make such works of literature relevant for our time.