Needless to add, it is not necessary to accept either of these propositions to enjoy this magnificent poem. Camões calls his heroes ‘sublime’. The sublime is not easy to render in modern English, but I hope I have done enough to give an inkling of the great sweep of Camões’s narrative, with its endless variety of incident and description, its openness to the wonders of the natural world, its relish of the differences between human societies, its tragedy, its eroticism, its humour, its episodes of pastoral, its nostalgia for that golden age before men first fitted sails to wood and took to the sea, and underlying all, its note of elegy for achievements already fading, already requiring the pageantry of poetry’s surprise.
1 Frank Pierce (ed.), Luís de Camões, Os Lusíadas (Oxford, 1973). p. x.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
Most English translators of The Lusíads, from Richard Fanshawe (1655) to Leonard Bacon (1950), have attempted to reproduce Camões’s octavos. I respect their efforts, and have a deep affection for Fanshawe who first taught me to love Camões and whose version still best captures the intellectual vitality of the original. J. J. Aubertin’s version of 1884 is both skilfully rhymed and extremely accurate. His exuberant claim that he has written as Camões would have written had he been writing English ottava rima is justified—so long as we add the rider that his imagined Camões spoke English as a second language. Many a time I have copied out a felicitous phrase only to realize, in the act of writing, that this is not English—rather, an uncanny approximation of English to Portuguese.
For it is an illusion to believe that the verse form of Camões’s epic can be replicated in English. Portuguese is an inflected language and its sentences are shaped differently. Nouns and verbs may be widely separated; adjectives follow (or may precede) nouns and adverbs their verbs. One among many consequences of this is to triple at a stroke the rhymes available, so that what is fluid and direct in Portuguese involves, in English, too many inversions of the natural word order to be a satisfactory rendering of the ease and lucidity of Camões’s diction. A further distinction is the prevalence in Portuguese of feminine rhymes. What looks on the page like a replication of Camões’s poetic forms sounds rather different when read aloud.
It is a question, too, of syntax. English is balder, more direct than Portuguese. Time and again, rendering stanzas of The Lusíads into rough and ready English, I have found myself with feet or whole lines to spare, needing padding to restore the shape of the original. This, too, violates both the precision of the Portuguese (for Camões is not prolix) and the natural vigour of any English verse which respects the sinews of the language.
At least two of my predecessors have responded to this problem by abandoning ottava rima. William Mickle’s best-selling version of 1776 is written in heroic, not to say triumphalist, couplets, piling antithesis on antithesis. William Atkinson’s Penguin Classic of 1952 is composed in an academic prose laced with Shakespearian echoes. Both obscure the architecture of The Lusíads, its shaping and pacing, substituting rhythms wholly alien to the original. Hence my compromise, for all translations involve painful choices. I have respected the eight-line units of the original text with its formal closes. But, in ambition at least, I have adopted a diction and prosody free to reflect the subtle modernity of Camões’s style.
The translation was undertaken with the assistance of a substantial grant over two years from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. I am also grateful to Helder Macedo, who first championed the notion of an untrammelled, un-rhymed Lusíads and who has been a consistent well-wisher. I am deeply in debt to a dear friend, Hélio Osvaldo Alves, who has translated my own poems and who, on Station B in Coimbra, encouraged me to proceed by declaring roundly: ‘I don’t feel I’m missing my octavos.’ Towards the opposite end of the process, Tom Earle intervened with an equally decisive phrase, correcting one of my couplets with the comment: ‘Not very poetic but it’s what it means.’ With this, and a hundred-and-one other suggestions, he led me to curb elaborations arising from my own fifteen years in the tropics, and to recognize that Camões’s virtues are better served by a translation erring on the side of plainness. The faults and failings that remain are, of course, my own.
I have used the text of Os Lusíadas edited by Hernani Cidade in his Luís de Camões: Obras Completas (Lisboa, 1947), vols, iv and v.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works
Luís de Camões. Obras Completas, com prefácio e notas do prof. Hernni Cidade. 5 vols. (Lisbon, 1947).
Frank Pierce (ed.), Luís de Camões, Os Lusíadas (Oxford, 1973).
Translations
Luís de Camões, The Lusíads in Sir Richard Fanshawe’s Translation, with an introduction by Geoffrey Bullough (London, 1963).
Os Lusíadas de Luis de Camões, translated by J. J. Aubertin (London, 2nd edn., 1884).
The Lusíads of Luís de Camões, translated by Leonard Bacon, with an Introduction and notes (New York, 1950).
Luís Vaz de Camões. The Lusíads, translated by William C. Atkinson, with an Introduction (London, 1952).
Luís Vaz de Camoens: The Lusíads canto 5, translated by Guy Butler, in M. van Wyk Smith (ed.), Shades of Adamastor: Africa and the Portuguese Connection: An Anthology of Poetry (Grahamstown, South Africa, 1988).
Luís de Camões: Epic and Lyric, translated by Keith Bosley, illustrated by Lima de Freitas (Manchester, 1990).
Background and General Studies
Note: among the best general essays on Camões and the world of the Portuguese voyages are William Atkinson’s, Leonard Bacon’s, Geoffrey Bullough’s, Frank Pierce’s, and M. van Wyk Smith’s introductions to the editions and translations listed above. Bacon’s annotations in particular are a constant delight.
A. F. G. Bell, Luís de Camões (Oxford, 1923).
C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire (London, 1969).
Richard Fletcher, Moorish Spain (London, 1992).
W. Freitas, Camões and his Epic. A Historic, Geographic and Cultural Background (Stanford, 1963).
W. Storck, Luis de Camoens Leben, trans, from the German as Vida e Obras de Luís de Camões, by C. M. de Vasconcelos (Lisboa, 1897).
On The Lusíads
Norwood H. Andrews Jr., ‘An Essay on Camões’ Concept of the Epic’, Revista de Letras, 3 (1962), 61–93.
C. M. Bowra, ‘Camões and the Epic of Portugal’, in From Virgil to Milton (London, 1945), 86–138.
Hernani Cidade, Luís de Camões: o Épico (new edn., Lisboa, 1986).
Fidelino de Figueiredo, ‘Ainda a epica Portuguesa’, Estudios Hispánicos: Homenaje a Archer A. Huntingdon (Wellesley College, 1952), 155–70.
A. Bartlett Giamatti, ‘Camões’, in The Earthly Paradise and the Christian Epic (Yale, 1969), 210–26.
Edward Glaser, ‘Manuel de Faria e Sousa and the Mythology of “Os Lusíadas”’ Miscelanea de Estudos a Joaquim de Carvalho, Figueira da Foz, 6 (1961), 614–27; and ‘“Se a tanto me ajudar o engenho e arte”: The Poetics of the Proem to Os Lusíadas’, Homenaje al Prof. Rodriguez-Monino (Madrid, 1966), i. 197–204.
Jorge Borges de Macedo, ‘Os Lusíadas’ e a Historia (Lisboa, 1979).
Helder Macedo, Camões e a Viagem Iniciática (Lisboa, 1980) and ‘The Lusíads: Epic Celebration and Pastoral Regret’, Portuguese Studies, 6 (1990), 32–7.
Frank Pierce, ‘The Place of Mythology in The Lusíads’, Comparative Literature, 6 (1954), 97–122.
António Salgado Junior, Os Lusíadas e a Viagem do Gama (Porto, 1939).
António José Saraiva, Estudos Sobre a Arte d’Os Lusíadas (Lisboa, 2nd edn., 1995).
R. M. Torrance, ‘“Se Fantásticas São / Se Verdadeiras”: The Gods of the Lusíads on the Isle of Love’, Modern Language Notes, 80 (1965), 210–34.
R. M. Walker, ‘An Interpretation of the Role of the Supernatural in Os Lusíadas’, Revista Camoniana, 1 (1964), 83–93.
CHRONOLOGY OF LUÍS VAZ DE CAMÕES
1524/5
Born, probably in Lisbon, possibly in the Mourar
ia district, son of Simão Vaz de Camões, a ship’s captain who drowned off Goa, and Ana de Sá. A direct ancestor, Vasco Lopes de Camões, was from Galicia in Spain, but moved to Portugal in 1370, serving under King João I and becoming known as a minor poet. A grandfather married a distant relative of Vasco da Gama, who died 1524.
c.1539
Develops deep knowledge and love of Italian, Spanish, and Latin (but not Greek) literature, probably at Portugal’s national university, based from 1537 at Coimbra.
c.1543
In Lisbon, mixing on the fringe of the court with others of the minor aristocracy, writing poetry and comedies and, according to legend, involved in a hopeless love affair with Caterine de Ataide, following a glimpse of her in church on Good Friday, 1544.
1546
Exiled from Lisbon, perhaps by choice, perhaps by royal decree for amorous causes.
1547
Joins the garrison in Ceuta, Morocco, as a common soldier. Sees action, losing his left eye, and gaining a lasting respect for and hostility towards Islam (the ‘Moors’).
1549
Back in Lisbon, possibly in the train of Afonso da Noronha, newly appointed Viceroy of India.
1550
Enlists for India on his father’s guarantee but does not sail. Described in the document as ‘squire’ with a red beard.
1552
(June) Arrested for brawling during the Corpus Christi procession. Jailed, then released on payment of fine and undertaking to proceed to India as a soldier.
1553
(March) Sails for India on board the São Bento, the only ship of four to arrive safely that year.
1553–6
Engaged in expeditions on the Malabar coast of India and in the Red Sea and along the Arabian and East African coasts.
1556
His satiric comedy Disparates na India (‘The Follies of India’) performed in Goa. Appointed Trustee for the Dead and Absent in Macau, and spends up to a year visiting Malacca and the Moluccas en route.
1559
Dismissed following ‘an unjust mandate’ and recalled to Goa. Shipwrecked in the mouth of the Mekong River in Cambodia and swims ashore, clutching ‘these cantos’ (evidently The Lusíads), but losing all other possessions.
1561–7
In Goa. Jailed on charges, eventually quashed, arising from his post in Macau. Jailed again for debt.
1563
First publication, the dedicatory poem to Garcia da Orta’s Colóquio dos simplese drogas e cousas medicinais, a study of medicinal plants, published in Goa.
1567
(Sept.) Borrows money for a return passage as far as Mozambique. Stranded there, he compiles his Parnasso de Luís de Camões, ‘rich in learning, doctrine and philosophy’ (stolen and now lost).
1569
(Nov.?) Two friends, Heitor de Silveira and the historian Diogo de Couto, offer a passage to Lisbon on the Santa Clara.
1570
(April) Disembarks in a plague-bound Lisbon, after an absence of seventeen years.
1572
The Lusíads published, with the approval of the censor of the Holy Office as containing ‘nothing scandalous nor contrary to faith and morals’, Camões granted tiny royal pension for ‘the adequacy of the book he wrote on Indian matters’.
1578
(August) King Sebastião killed and the flower of Portugal’s nobility destroyed at Alcácer-Kebir following Portugal’s disastrous invasion of Morocco.
1580
(10 June) Dies. The Portuguese throne passes to Spain for sixty years.
Map 1A: Places mentioned in Canto 5
Map 1B: Places mentioned in Canto 1,2, and 5
Places mentioned in Canto 10
THE LUSÍADS
Canto One
1 Arms are my theme,* and those matchless heroes
Who from Portugal’s far western shores
By oceans where none had ventured
Voyaged to Taprobana* and beyond,
Enduring hazards and assaults
Such as drew on more than human prowess
Among far distant peoples, to proclaim
A New Age and win undying fame;
2 Kings likewise of glorious memory
Who magnified Christ and Empire,
Bringing ruin on the degenerate
Lands of Africa and Asia;
And others whose immortal deeds
Have conquered death’s oblivion
—These words will go wherever there are men
If art and invention steer my pen.
3 Boast no more about the subtle Greek
Or the long odyssey of Trojan Aeneas;
Enough of the oriental conquests
Of great Alexander and of Trajan;
I sing of the famous Portuguese
To whom both Mars and Neptune bowed.
Abandon all the ancient Muse revered,
A loftier code of honour has appeared.
4 And you, nymphs of the Tagus, who
First suckled my infant genius,
If ever in my rustic verses
I celebrated your companionable river,
Return me now a loftier tone,
A style both grand and contemporary;
Be to me Helicon. Let Apollo choose
Your waters as the fountain of my muse.
5 Fire me now with mighty cadences,
Not a goatherd’s querulous piping
But the shouts of a battle trumpet,
Stirring the heart, steeling the countenance;
Give me a poem worthy of the exploits
Of those heroes so inspired by Mars,
To propagate their deeds through space and time
If poetry can rise to the sublime.
6 And you, my boy King,* guarantor
Of Portugal’s ancient freedoms,
And equal surety for the expansion
Of Christendom’s small empire;
You, who have the Moors trembling,
The marvel prophesied for our times,
Given to the world, in God’s eternal reign,
To win for God much of the world again.
7 You, tender and green sapling
Of that tree more precious to Christ
Than any other Western lineage,
Whether in the French or Roman line
(Witness your scutcheon, visibly
Stamped with the victory at Ourique,*
When Christ bestowed, as emblems to emboss,
The five wounds he suffered on the cross);
8 You, mighty King, on whose India
The new-born sun directs his first beam,
Shines on your palace in mid-hemisphere,
And casts his last ray on the Brazils;
You, to whom we look to yoke and humble
Arabia’s wild horsemen, infidel
Turks, and India’s sons and daughters
Who yet drink the Ganges’ sacred waters:
9 Descend a little from such majesty,
For I see on your youthful countenance
Already inscribed that maturity
You will bear to eternity’s temple;
Bend those royal and benign eyes
Earthwards, and behold this loving tribute;
The most valiant deeds of modern times
Given to the world in sure, well-cadenced rhymes.
10 You will witness a love of country, not
Driven by greed but true and enduring,
For it is no unworthy reward to be famed
Writing in praise of my native land.
Observe: you will see names exalted
Of those of whom you are supreme lord,
And you can judge which is the better case,
King of the world or king of such a race.
11 Observe, it is not for counterfeit
Exploits,* fantasies such as muses
Elsewhere have dreamed or invented,
That you will hear your people acclaimed.
Historic
deeds such as theirs
Transcend fables, and would eclipse
Boiardo’s Orlando, and Ariosto’s too,
Even if all they wrote of him were true.
12 Instead, I give you* Nuno Álvares
Who showed country and king such service;
It would take Homer’s lyre to commend
Sufficiently Egas Moniz and Fuas Roupinho;
For France’s twelve peers, I give you
The twelve of England led by Magriço,
And likewise Vasco da Gama, whose genius
Snatched renown from wandering Aeneas.
13 If you are looking for stature equal
To Charlemagne or Julius Caesar,
Consider Afonso the first whose lance
Eclipsed all foreign reputations;
Or João the first whose reign bequeathed us
The security of his great victory;
Or the second João, honourably spurred,
Or the fourth or fifth Afonso, or the third.
14 Nor will my lines leave uncommemorated
Those who in the lands of the Dawn*
Bore their arms with such excellence
Your standard was always victorious:
Matchless Pacheco, and the fearsome
Almeidas, whom the Tagus still laments,
Albuquerque the fierce, Castro the brave,
And others whose exploits have survived the grave.
15 While I celebrate these I say nothing
Of you, great King, not presuming so far;
Take up the reins of your kingdom
To furnish matter for another epic.
Let the world tremble as it senses
All you are about to accomplish,
Africa’s land and Oriental seas
The Lusiads (Oxford World's Classics) Page 3