In Camões’ ‘A partida para a Índia’ (‘Leaving Lisbon for India’), the poet holds in intimate proximity both the confidence of static, land-bound youth and the impending, aged and unknown voyage. As when observing Ericeira’s surfers, there is a feeling of youthful invulnerability, with the ship yet unused and the poem’s voice boasting that ‘e não refreia / Temor nenhum o juvenil despejo’ (‘not a fear / impedes /evicts my youthful career’). However, this confidence is tempered and ironised. The stanza-ending couplet of ‘marte / parte’ gives the rhyme a songlike quality which grates with the gravitas of the reference to the epic Ulysses, signifying the hardships of journeying, and the poem’s clarity of sound is betrayed by the half-rhyme on ‘desejo / despejo’. Rhyming the passion of ‘desejo’ (‘desire’) with ‘despejo’ (with connotations of forceful eviction) places the reality of being cast out (to sea) directly next to the burning, pre-voyage feelings of youth.

There was something in Louis de Camões’ verse that captured the spirit of the Portuguese coastline and my experience of Ericeira. While my attempts at riding waves were always exhilarating, I felt like Camões’ voice of youth, trying to ‘consume’ an ocean I was yet to understand. In the cobbled cafés and squares of Ericeira’s pale streets brawn-filled teenagers mix with the descendants of ‘navegadores’; Portuguese seafarers who travelled from their homeland on wooden ships. Standing and looking over Praia dos Pescadores to the horizon at Praia do Norte, Camões’ two states seem to exist physically, as the tumbling beginner is framed by the distant expert, whose arcing surfboard marks a mastery of the sea that mocks inexperience. Asking a local fisherman where to surf was fairly decisive: ‘speak to those who know the sea.’ It was a reminder that trying to squeeze the experience out of a place, as so many adrenaline-chasers do, doesn’t work without a connection to the place itself. The verses of Camões, who was instrumental in furthering Portugal’s identity as a seafaring nation and famously experienced a real shipwreck, allowed me beyond the sea’s foam and salt-spray to some of the past, present and mythical voyages that call from it.

Lisbon

Arriving in Portugal’s capital, and in the poetry of Cesário Verde and Fernando Pessoa, there continues a weaving between sensory experience and culture, and an abstraction of place. Staying in a small apartment in Barrio Alto and leaning out of the window, you can become consumed by senses- low throbbing music, the visual satisfaction of the undulating cobble-stones, colourful washing lines bridging the streets and smells rising from restaurants that hide behind graffiti-covered walls. There seems to be a general willingness to give in to sensations: if you walk down Rua do Alecrim to the station Cais do Sodre, people line the street drinking, smoking, speaking and dancing, connected by the tram-line and falling gradient.

‘In Lisbon there are a few restaurants or eating houses […which] frequently contain curious types whose faces are not interesting but who constitute a series of digressions from life.’ –

Fernando Pessoa, from The Book of Disquiet, trans. Alfred MacAdam: