NHe’s not a truck driver, he’s a physicist, but Henrique Leitão is enthusiastic about exploring the verses of “Os Lusíadas” in search of clues to understand the poet’s world. Pessoa Prize in 2014 and pro-rector of the University of Lisbon, he is an enthusiast for promoting Portuguese culture and it was as such that he participated this week in the symposium he held in New York, in a joint initiative of the Gaudium Magnum Foundation and the Hispanic Society, some of the greatest Portuguese and North American scholars on Camões, as part of the celebrations of the 500th anniversary of the poet’s birth. The meeting highlights the participation of the director of the Department of Roman Languages and Literatures at Harvard, Josiah Blackmore, with a communication entitled “The Hidden Fire: Word and Lyrical Knowledge of a Changing World”, and of Kenneth David Jackson, from Yale, who pored over “The Questions of Camões”. The president of the Board of Trustees of the Gaudium Magnum Foundation — Maria and João Cortez de Lobão spoke to Expresso, before leaving for the United States, about the impact of Camões.
