SeeMacau
November 4th, 2004, 01:00 AM
Camoes Garden in Macao
English poet Rudyard Kipling famously mused, ``East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.’’ Yet my recent effort to retrace the footsteps of another European poet, Luis Vaz de Camoes (1524-1580), reinforced my belief that Kipling erred in his cultural essentialism. The decisive step in this journey was my June visit to the Camoes Garden in Macao, a former Portuguese colony in Southeastern China where Camoes composed parts of his greatest work, the ``Lusiads.’’
Camoes is widely regarded as the greatest poet in Portuguese history, but like many great artists, he was unappreciated in his native land during his lifetime. In fact, Camoes found himself in the Orient because he was banished from Portugal for wounding an officer of the royal court _ the proverbial final straw that broke the camel’s back _ and forced to serve as a soldier in India. Before that he had also been banished from the royal court after those in power opposed his courtship of a lady of the queen’s suite. In the period between his banishment from the royal court and later from Portugal, Camoes led a roguish, disorderly life punctuated with a lot of violence, including participation in African wars where he lost one of his eyes.
Camoes’ life in the Orient was also full of vicissitudes. He fought for a time as a soldier of fortune, and another time was jailed for maladministration after he held an official post. His life lacked any stability or permanence as he was always on the move. On one occasion he even narrowly escaped death after a shipwreck by swimming ashore, whereby he saved not only his life but also the unpublished ``Lusiads’’ manuscript.
Portugal and the literary world have been fortunate that Camoes saved his manuscript from that shipwreck. ``Lusiads’’ literally means the ``sons of Lusus’’ or the Portuguese people, as Lusus is the mythical founder of Portugal. As a result, the ``Lusiads’’ is a national epic meant to celebrate the achievements of the Portuguese people and has drawn comparisons to another famous national epic, Virgil’s ``Aeneid,’’ that sings of the Roman virtues.
At the center of the Portuguese epic is the journey of Vasco da Gama, Camoes’ kinsman and the first person to sail from Europe to India _ a feat that many thought impossible at the time since many believed that the Indian and Atlantic Ocean were not connected. Due to da Gama’s epochal journey, Portugal emerged as the first major European colonial power in Asia. Camoes’ sublime poetry then recorded this momentous development in world history, the ``opening’’ of Asia to Western influence, and gave meaning to it.
Of course, the legacy of da Gama and the European colonialists who followed him remains complex and a subject of intense controversy in Asia. Many Asian people, for instance, claim that Europeans did nothing but exploit their Asian colonies and that the colonial experience was a wholly negative one for Asia. To his credit, Camoes also displayed misgivings about the colonialist enterprise (in the beginning of ``The Lusiads’’):
Already in this vainglorious business
Delusions are possessing you,
Already, ferocity and brute force
Are labeling strength and valour,
The heresy ``Long live Death!’’ is already
Current among you, when life should always
Be cherished, as Christ in times gone by
Who gave us death yet was afraid to die.
But I found the greatest rebuke to the claim that Europe only changed Asia through force, not in Camoes’ poetry, but in the physical space of the Camoes Garden. Within it is also a statute of Kim Tae-gon (Saint Andrew), who was educated in Macao and later martyred in the middle of the 19th century. It was in Macao that Kim Tae-gon and other early Korean Catholic priests such as Choe Yang-eop studied Christian theology and imbibed Western civilization. While Kim was executed shortly after his return to Korea, Choe played a significant role transmitting Catholicism to Korea, including translating important Catholic texts into Korean.
In addition to his own missionary work, Choe was also instrumental in bridging East and West in another important way. Choe Yang-eop was an acquaintance of Choe Su-un, the founder of Tonghak, an important indigenous religious and scholarly movement that literally meant ``Eastern learning’’ and later became Chondo-gyo. It is from Choe Yang-eop that the founder of Tonghak learned about Western civilization; and Choe Su-un incorporated many Western religious and philosophic concepts into his own syncretic philosophical system. In fact, though I cannot prove it, I assume that the ``Youngdamyu-sa’’ and some of the poetic sections of the Chondo-gyo scripture, written in verse by Choe Su-un, were influenced by Camoes’ poetry.
The Camoes Garden in Macao (and Kim Tae-gon’s statute in it) therefore stands as a symbol of the coming together of Korea and Portugal, and ultimately of East and West. Though I am neither a poet nor a Catholic, I am eager to visit the Camoes Garden again to better appreciate our dual Eastern and Western heritage.
Choe Chong-dae is president of Dae-kwang International Co., and the Korean representative of Compagnie Cotonniere of Paris, France. He is a founding member of the Korean-Swedish Association.
English poet Rudyard Kipling famously mused, ``East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.’’ Yet my recent effort to retrace the footsteps of another European poet, Luis Vaz de Camoes (1524-1580), reinforced my belief that Kipling erred in his cultural essentialism. The decisive step in this journey was my June visit to the Camoes Garden in Macao, a former Portuguese colony in Southeastern China where Camoes composed parts of his greatest work, the ``Lusiads.’’
Camoes is widely regarded as the greatest poet in Portuguese history, but like many great artists, he was unappreciated in his native land during his lifetime. In fact, Camoes found himself in the Orient because he was banished from Portugal for wounding an officer of the royal court _ the proverbial final straw that broke the camel’s back _ and forced to serve as a soldier in India. Before that he had also been banished from the royal court after those in power opposed his courtship of a lady of the queen’s suite. In the period between his banishment from the royal court and later from Portugal, Camoes led a roguish, disorderly life punctuated with a lot of violence, including participation in African wars where he lost one of his eyes.
Camoes’ life in the Orient was also full of vicissitudes. He fought for a time as a soldier of fortune, and another time was jailed for maladministration after he held an official post. His life lacked any stability or permanence as he was always on the move. On one occasion he even narrowly escaped death after a shipwreck by swimming ashore, whereby he saved not only his life but also the unpublished ``Lusiads’’ manuscript.
Portugal and the literary world have been fortunate that Camoes saved his manuscript from that shipwreck. ``Lusiads’’ literally means the ``sons of Lusus’’ or the Portuguese people, as Lusus is the mythical founder of Portugal. As a result, the ``Lusiads’’ is a national epic meant to celebrate the achievements of the Portuguese people and has drawn comparisons to another famous national epic, Virgil’s ``Aeneid,’’ that sings of the Roman virtues.
At the center of the Portuguese epic is the journey of Vasco da Gama, Camoes’ kinsman and the first person to sail from Europe to India _ a feat that many thought impossible at the time since many believed that the Indian and Atlantic Ocean were not connected. Due to da Gama’s epochal journey, Portugal emerged as the first major European colonial power in Asia. Camoes’ sublime poetry then recorded this momentous development in world history, the ``opening’’ of Asia to Western influence, and gave meaning to it.
Of course, the legacy of da Gama and the European colonialists who followed him remains complex and a subject of intense controversy in Asia. Many Asian people, for instance, claim that Europeans did nothing but exploit their Asian colonies and that the colonial experience was a wholly negative one for Asia. To his credit, Camoes also displayed misgivings about the colonialist enterprise (in the beginning of ``The Lusiads’’):
Already in this vainglorious business
Delusions are possessing you,
Already, ferocity and brute force
Are labeling strength and valour,
The heresy ``Long live Death!’’ is already
Current among you, when life should always
Be cherished, as Christ in times gone by
Who gave us death yet was afraid to die.
But I found the greatest rebuke to the claim that Europe only changed Asia through force, not in Camoes’ poetry, but in the physical space of the Camoes Garden. Within it is also a statute of Kim Tae-gon (Saint Andrew), who was educated in Macao and later martyred in the middle of the 19th century. It was in Macao that Kim Tae-gon and other early Korean Catholic priests such as Choe Yang-eop studied Christian theology and imbibed Western civilization. While Kim was executed shortly after his return to Korea, Choe played a significant role transmitting Catholicism to Korea, including translating important Catholic texts into Korean.
In addition to his own missionary work, Choe was also instrumental in bridging East and West in another important way. Choe Yang-eop was an acquaintance of Choe Su-un, the founder of Tonghak, an important indigenous religious and scholarly movement that literally meant ``Eastern learning’’ and later became Chondo-gyo. It is from Choe Yang-eop that the founder of Tonghak learned about Western civilization; and Choe Su-un incorporated many Western religious and philosophic concepts into his own syncretic philosophical system. In fact, though I cannot prove it, I assume that the ``Youngdamyu-sa’’ and some of the poetic sections of the Chondo-gyo scripture, written in verse by Choe Su-un, were influenced by Camoes’ poetry.
The Camoes Garden in Macao (and Kim Tae-gon’s statute in it) therefore stands as a symbol of the coming together of Korea and Portugal, and ultimately of East and West. Though I am neither a poet nor a Catholic, I am eager to visit the Camoes Garden again to better appreciate our dual Eastern and Western heritage.
Choe Chong-dae is president of Dae-kwang International Co., and the Korean representative of Compagnie Cotonniere of Paris, France. He is a founding member of the Korean-Swedish Association.