«Everything, as you see, is filled with sorrow: the field denies flowers to the bees, / and the dawn denies dew to the flowers»:

towards an ecocritical reading of Camões' eclogue camoniana Que grande variedade vão fazendo

Abstract

On the occasion of the fifth centenary of Luís Vaz de Camões, this article, drawing on the contributions of Ecocriticism and Camonian Studies, proposes to make a reading of Eclogue 1, entitled Que grande variedade vão fazendo. This analysis was carried out taking into consideration two purposes: on one hand, attention was paid to the stanzas in which the landscape is extensively textualized, observing the chaining of anthropophonic, biophonic, and geophonic elements (Krauss, 2008); on the other hand, focusing on the relationship between the shepherds and nature, the relevance of the ecosystem in the literary construction of the poem was sought to be witnessed, demonstrating how the landscape is not merely a scenic device or a backdrop. Finally, since the eclogue is an open genological code, shaped by other traditions, some examples of imitatio with regard to bucolicism have been pointed out.