About the metamorphosis of love in The Lusiads: armour-amour

Abstract

The attentive reading of the ten constitutive cantos of The Lusiads allows us to connect the nouns armour and amour (in Portuguese, the original title intends to relate the noun “weapon” and the verb “love” – which we translate, by meanings of maintaining the wordplay, armour-amour) to is- sues that exceed the textual coincidence or the ludic results of changing the position of letter r. Thematically, we know that the “arms and the heroes” sometimes give place to the lyricism, for instance, in the voice of a captain who seems to leave his military ranks, therefore his armour, to perform scenes in which love is the protagonist. This article intends to think about the way that refereed wordplay transforms not only vocabulary, but par- ticularly semantics along the poem: which effects it causes in the reading; which contempory readings can be done; what are the consequences of the relation between armour and amour. Reflecting about those points, from the ideas of António Saraiva, Eduardo Lourenço, Luiza Nóbrega, as well as contemporary Portuguese writer Mário Cláudio, among other important names in literary critics and theory scene, we do not aim to offer an innova- tive interpretation of the poem, but to reinforce the current reading of The Lusiads, in which Mannerist, ludic, and plastic demands rise as significant points in the exegesis of the work.