Luis de Camoes Collected Poetical Works

by Luis de Camoes

  Affulget ratibus flamma ministra tuis.

  74 i.e. poetic. Aonia was the ancient name of Bœotia, in which country was a fountain sacred to the Muses, whence Juvenal sings of a poet —

  “Enamoured of the woods, and fitted for drinking

  At the fountains of the Aonides.”

  Juv. Sat. vii. 58. — Ed.

  75 To match the Twelve so long by bards renown’d. — The Twelve Peers of France, often mentioned in the old romances. For the episode of Magricio and his eleven companions, see the sixth Lusiad.

  76 Afonso in Portuguese. In the first edition Mickle had Alfonso, which he altered to Alonzo in the second edition.

  77 Thy grandsires. — John III. King of Portugal, celebrated for a long and peaceful reign; and the Emperor Charles V., who was engaged in almost continual wars.

  78 Some critics have condemned Virgil for stopping his narrative to introduce even a short observation of his own. Milton’s beautiful complaint of his blindness has been blamed for the same reason, as being no part of the subject of his poem. The address of Camoëns to Don Sebastian at the conclusion of the tenth Lusiad has not escaped the same censure; though in some measure undeservedly, as the poet has had the art to interweave therein some part of the general argument of his poem.

  79 This brave Lusitanian, who was first a shepherd and a famous hunter, and afterwards a captain of banditti, exasperated at the tyranny of the Romans, encouraged his countrymen to revolt and shake off the yoke. Being appointed general, he defeated Vetilius the prætor, who commanded in Lusitania, or farther Spain. After this he defeated, in three pitched battles, the prætors, C. Plautius Hypsæus and Claudius Unimanus, though they led against him very numerous armies. For six years he continued victorious, putting the Romans to flight wherever he met them, and laying waste the countries of their allies. Having obtained such advantages over the proconsul, Servilianus, that the only choice which was left to the Roman army was death or slavery, the brave Viriatus, instead of putting them all to the sword, as he could easily have done, sent a deputation to the general, offering to conclude a peace with him on this single condition, That he should continue master of the country now in his power, and that the Romans should remain possessed of the rest of Spain.

  The proconsul, who expected nothing but death or slavery, thought these very favourable and moderate terms, and without hesitation concluded a peace, which was soon after ratified by the Roman senate and people. Viriatus, by this treaty, completed the glorious design he had always in view, which was to erect a kingdom in the vast country he had conquered from the republic. And, had it not been for the treachery of the Romans, he would have become, as Florus calls him, the Romulus of Spain.

  The senate, desirous to revenge their late defeat, soon after this peace, ordered Q. Servilius Cæpio to exasperate Viriatus, and force him, by repeated affronts, to commit the first acts of hostility. But this mean artifice did not succeed: Viriatus would not be provoked to a breach of the peace. On this the Conscript Fathers, to the eternal disgrace of their republic, ordered Cæpio to declare war, and to proclaim Viriatus, who had given no provocation, an enemy to Rome. To this baseness Cæpio added one still greater; he corrupted the ambassadors whom Viriatus had sent to negotiate with him, who, at the instigation of the Roman, treacherously murdered their protector and general while he slept. — Univ. History.

  80 Sertorius, who was invited by the Lusitanians to defend them against the Romans. He had a tame white hind, which he had accustomed to follow him, and from which he pretended to receive the instructions of Diana. By this artifice he imposed upon the superstition of that people.

  81 No more in Nysa. — An ancient city in India sacred to Bacchus.

  82 Urania-Venus. — An Italian poet has given the following description of the celestial Venus —

  Questa è vaga di Dio Venere bella

  Vicina al Sole, e sopra ogni altra estella

  Questa è quella beata, a cui s’inchina,

  A cui si volge desiando amore,

  Chiamata cui del Ciel rara e divina

  Beltà che vien tra noi per nostro honore,

  Per far le menti desiando al Cielo

  Obliare l’altrui col proprio velo. — Martel.

  83 See the note in the Second Book on the following passage —

  As when in Ida’s bower she stood of yore, etc.

  84 The manly music of their tongue the same. — Camoëns says:

  E na lingoa, na qual quando imagina,

  Com pouca corrupçao cré que he Latina.

  Qualifications are never elegant in poetry. Fanshaw’s translation and the original both prove this:

  —— their tongue

  Which she thinks Latin, with small dross among.

  85 i.e. helmet.

  86 —— and the light turn’d pale. — The thought in the original has something in it wildly great, though it is not expressed in the happiest manner of Camoëns —

  O ceo tremeo, e Apollo detorvado

  Hum pauco a luz perdeo, como infiado.

  87 Mercury, the messenger of the gods. — Ed.

  88 And pastoral Madagascar. — Called by the ancient geographers, Menuthia and Cerna Ethiopica; by the natives, the Island of the Moon; and by the Portuguese, the Isle of St. Laurence, on whose festival they discovered it.

  89 Praso. — Name of a promontory near the Red Sea. — Ed.

  90 Lav’d by the gentle waves. — The original says, the sea showed them new islands, which it encircled and laved. Thus rendered by Fanshaw —

  Neptune disclos’d new isles which he did play

  About, and with his billows danc’t the hay.

  91 The historical foundation of the fable of Phaeton is this. Phaeton was a young enterprising prince of Libya. Crossing the Mediterranean in quest of adventures, he landed at Epirus, from whence he went to Italy to see his intimate friend Cygnus. Phaeton was skilled in astrology, from whence he arrogated to himself the title of the son of Apollo. One day in the heat of summer, as he was riding along the banks of the Po, his horses took fright at a clap of thunder, and plunged into the river, where, together with their master, they perished. Cygnus, who was a poet, celebrated the death of his friend in verse, from whence the fable. — Vid. Plutarch, in Vit. Pyrr.

  92 Acheron. — The river of Hades, or hell. — Ed.

  93 From Abram’s race our holy prophet sprung. — Mohammed, who was descended from Ishmael, the son of Abraham by Hagar.

  94 The Hydaspes was a tributary of the river Indus. — Ed.

  95 Calm twilight now. — Camoëns, in this passage, has imitated Homer in the manner of Virgil: by diversifying the scene he has made the description his own. The passage alluded to is in the eighth Iliad —

  Ως δ᾽ ὅτ᾽ ἐν οὐρανω ἄστρα φαεινὴν ἀμφὶ σελἡνην Φαἰνετ᾽ αριπρεπέα, etc.

  Thus elegantly translated by Pope: —

  As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night,

  O’er heaven’s clear azure spreads her sacred light,

  When not a breath disturbs the deep serene,

  And not a cloud o’ercasts the solemn scene;

  Around her throne the vivid planets roll,

  And stars unnumber’d gild the glowing pole,

  O’er the dark trees a yellower verdure shed,

  And tip with silver every mountain’s head;

  Then shine the vales, the rocks in prospect rise,

  A flood of glory bursts from all the skies:

  The conscious swains, rejoicing in the sight,

  Eye the blue vault, and bless the useful light.

  96 The Turks, or Osmanli Turcomans. — Ed.

  97 Constantinople.

  98 Straight as he spoke. — The description of the armoury, and account which Vasco de Gama gives of his religion, consists, in the original, of thirty-two lines, which M. Castera has reduced into the following sentence: Leur Governeur fait differentes questions au Capitaine, qui pour le satisfaire lui e
xplique en peu des mots la Religion que les Portugais suivent, l’usage des armes dont ils se servent dans la guerre, et le dessein qui les amène.

  99 i.e., helmets.

  100 Coats of mail.

  101 When Gama’s lips Messiah’s name confess’d. — This, and the reason of the Moor’s hate, is entirely omitted by Castera. The original is, the Moor conceived hatred, “knowing they were followers of the truth which the Son of David taught.” Thus rendered by Fanshaw: —

  Knowing they follow that unerring light,

  The Son of David holds out in his Book.

  Zacocia (governor of Mozambique) made no doubt but our people were of some Mohammedan country. The mutual exchange of good offices between our people and these islanders promised a long continuance of friendship, but it proved otherwise. No sooner did Zacocia understand they were Christians, than all his kindness was turned into the most bitter hatred; he began to meditate their ruin, and sought to destroy the fleet. — Osorio, Bp. of Sylves, Hist. of the Portug. Discov.

  102 Bacchus, god of wine.

  103 Whom nine long months his father’s thigh conceal’d. — Bacchus was nourished during his infancy in a cave of mount Meros, which in Greek signifies a thigh. Hence the fable.

  104 Alexander the Great, who on visiting the temple of Jupiter Ammon, was hailed as son of that deity by his priests. — Ed.

  105 Bacchus.

  106 His form divine he cloth’d in human shape —

  Alecto torvam faciem et furialia membra

  Exuit: in vultus sese transformat aniles,

  Et frontem obscænum rugis arat.

  Vir. Æn. vii.

  107 To be identified with the Sun, in the opinion of later mythologists; but not so in Homer, with whom Helios (the Sun) is himself a deity. — Ed.

  108

  Thus, when to gain his beauteous charmer’s smile,

  The youthful lover dares the bloody toil.

  This simile is taken from a favourite exercise in Spain, where it is usual to see young gentlemen of the best families entering the lists to fight with a bull, adorned with ribbons, and armed with a javelin or kind of cutlass, which the Spaniards call Machete.

  109

  —— —— —— e maldizia

  O velho inerte, e a māy, que o filho cria.

  Thus translated by Fanshaw —

  —— —— —— curst their ill luck,

  Th’ old Devil and the Dam that gave them suck.

  110

  Flints, clods, and javelins hurling as they fly,

  As rage, &c. —

  Jamque faces et saxa volant, furor arma ministrat.

  Virg. Æn. i.

  The Spanish commentator on this place relates a very extraordinary instance of the furor arma ministrans. A Portuguese soldier at the siege of Diu in the Indies, being surrounded by the enemy, and having no ball to charge his musket, pulled out one of his teeth, and with it supplied the place of a bullet.

  111 The italics indicate that there is nothing in the original corresponding to these lines. — Ed.

  112 See Virgil’s Æneid, bk. ii. — Ed.

  113 Quiloa is an island, with a town of the same name, on the east coast of Africa. — Ed.

  114 But heavenly Love’s fair queen. — When Gama arrived in the East, the Moors were the only people who engrossed the trade of those parts. Jealous of such formidable rivals as the Portuguese, they employed every artifice to accomplish the destruction of Gama’s fleet. As the Moors were acquainted with these seas and spoke the Arabic language, Gama was obliged to employ them both as pilots and interpreters. The circumstance now mentioned by Camoëns is an historical fact. “The Moorish pilot,” says De Barros, “intended to conduct the Portuguese into Quiloa, telling them that place was inhabited by Christians; but a sudden storm arising, drove the fleet from that shore, where death or slavery would have been the certain fate of Gama and his companions. The villainy of the pilot was afterwards discovered. As Gama was endeavouring to enter the port of Mombaz his ship struck on a sand-bank, and finding their purpose of bringing him into the harbour defeated, two of the Moorish pilots leaped into the sea and swam ashore. Alarmed at this tacit acknowledgment of guilt, Gama ordered two other Moorish pilots who remained on board to be examined by whipping, who, after some time, made a full confession of their intended villainy. This discovery greatly encouraged Gama and his men, who now interpreted the sudden storm which had driven them from Quiloa as a miraculous interposition of Divine Providence in their favour.

  115 i.e. Mohammed. — Ed.

  116 After Gama had been driven from Quiloa by a sudden storm, the assurances of the Mozambique pilot, that the city was chiefly inhabited by Christians, strongly inclined him to enter the harbour of Mombas.

  117 “There were,” says Osorius, “ten men in the fleet under sentence of death, whose lives had been spared on condition that, wherever they might be landed, they should explore the country and make themselves acquainted with the manners and laws of the people.”

  During the reign of Emmanuel, and his predecessor John II., few criminals were executed in Portugal. These great and political princes employed the lives which were forfeited to the public in the most dangerous undertakings of public utility. In their foreign expeditions the condemned criminals were sent upon the most hazardous undertakings. If death was their fate, it was the punishment they had merited: if successful in what was required, their crimes were expiated; and often they rendered their country the greatest atonement for their guilt which men in their circumstances could possibly make. What multitudes every year, in the prime of their life, end their days in Great Britain by the hands of the executioner! That the legislature might devise means to make the greatest part of these lives useful to society is a fact, which surely cannot be disputed; though, perhaps, the remedy of an evil so shocking to humanity may be at some distance.

  118 Semele was the mother of Bacchus, but, as he was prematurely born, Jupiter, his father, sewed him up in his thigh until he came to maturity. — Ed.

  119

  On it, the picture of that shape he placed,

  In which the Holy Spirit did alight,

  The picture of the dove, so white, so chaste,

  On the blest Virgin’s head, so chaste, so white.

  In these lines, the best of all Fanshaw’s, the happy repetition “so chaste, so white,” is a beauty which, though not contained in the original, the present translator was unwilling to lose.

  120 See the Preface.

  121 When Gama lay at anchor among the islands of St. George, near Mozambique, “there came three Ethiopians on board (says Faria y Sousa) who, seeing St. Gabriel painted on the poop, fell on their knees in token of their Christianity, which had been preached to them in the primitive times, though now corrupted.” Barros, c. 4, and Castaneda, l. i. c. 9, report, that the Portuguese found two or three Abyssinian Christians in the city of Mombas, who had an oratory in their house. The following short account of the Christians of the East may perhaps be acceptable. In the south parts of Malabar, about 200,000 of the inhabitants professed Christianity before the arrival of the Portuguese. They use the Syriac language in their services, and read the Scriptures in that tongue, and call themselves Christians of St. Thomas, by which apostle their ancestors had been converted. For 1300 years they had been under the Patriarch of Babylon, who appointed their Mutran, or archbishop. Dr. Geddes, in his History of the Church of Malabar, relates that Francisco Roz, a Jesuit missionary, complained to Menezes, the Portuguese archbishop of Goa, that when he showed these people an image of the Virgin Mary, they cried out, “Away with that filthiness, we are Christians, and do not adore idols.”

  Dom Frey Aleixo de Menezes, archbishop of Goa, “endeavoured to thrust upon the church of Malabar the whole mass of popery, which they were before unacquainted with.” — Millar’s History of the Propag. of Christianity.

  122 Venus.

  123 Proud of her kindred birth. — The French translator has the following no
te on this place:— “This is one of the places which discover our author’s intimate acquaintance with mythology, and at the same time how much attention his allegory requires. Many readers, on finding that the protectress of the Lusians sprung from the sea, would be apt to exclaim, Behold, the birth of the terrestrial Venus! How can a nativity so infamous be ascribed to the celestial Venus, who represents Religion? I answer, that Camoëns had not his eye on those fables, which derive the birth of Venus from the foam of the waves, mixed with the blood which flowed from the dishonest wound of Saturn: he carries his views higher; his Venus is from a fable more noble. Nigidius relates that two fishes one day conveyed an egg to the seashore. This egg was hatched by two pigeons whiter than snow, and gave birth to the Assyrian Venus, which, in the pagan theology, is the same with the celestial. She instructed mankind in religion, gave them the lessons of virtue and the laws of equity. Jupiter, in reward of her labours, promised to grant her whatever she desired. She prayed him to give immortality to the two fishes, who had been instrumental in her birth, and the fishes were accordingly placed in the Zodiac, the sign Pisces.... This fable agrees perfectly with Religion, as I could clearly show; but I think it more proper to leave to the ingenious reader the pleasure of tracing the allegory.”

  124 Doto, Nyse, and Nerine. — Cloto, or Clotho, as Castera observes, has by some error crept into almost all the Portuguese editions of the Lusiad. Clotho was one of the Fates, and neither Hesiod, Homer, nor Virgil has given such a name to any of the Nereids; but in the ninth Æneid Doto is mentioned —

  —— magnique jubebo

  Æquoris esse Deas, qualis Nereïa Doto

  Et Galatea secant spumantem pectore pontum.

  The Nereids, in the Lusiad, says Castera, are the virtues divine and human. In the first book they accompany the Portuguese fleet —

  —— before the bounding prows

  The lovely forms of sea-born nymphs arose.

  125 The ants are a people not strong, yet they prepare their meat in the summer. — Proverbs xxx. 25. — Ed.

  126 Imitated from Virgil —

  Cymothoë simul, et Triton adnixus acuto

  Detrudunt naves scopulo. — Virg. Æn. i.