The Real Motivations Behind the First English Translation of Camões's

Daniela Gioia

Os Lusíadas in English: the real motivations behind the first English translation of Camões’s masterpiece [email protected]

1. INTRODUCTION

Although his literary production is quite broad and varied – including sonnets, songs, eclogues, odes, elegies and even three comedies – Luís Vaz de Camões rose to fame as a poet thanks to Os Lusíadas, the epic poem in ten cantos he published in 1572, which was bound to become the most representative book of Portuguese literature. The poem soon achieved great success at home as is witnessed by the several editions in its original language (eighteen in less than a hundred years). Even outside Portugal it spread very quickly: in no more than half a century there had already been three translations into Spanish culminating in the famous scholarly edition by Manuel de Faria y Souza made up of four large tomes collected in two volumes that came out in Madrid in 1639. Camões’s epic was also translated into Latin by bishop Fra Tomaso de Faria (1621) and into Italian by Carlo Antonio Paggi (1659). As far as Os Lusíadas’ reception in England is concerned, its first English translation was published in London in 1655 by Sir Richard Fanshawe. This was followed by at least nine more versions, which especially came out during the nineteenth century when the British influence in India was at its height. Among these versions, there was a remarkable one in couplets by W. J. Mickle (1776) and a faithful translation in blank verse by Thomas Moore Musgrave (1826). The purpose of this essay is to bring out, through a linguistic analysis of the translated text, the main reasons that may have led Fanshawe to undertake such a translation. The point to be proved is that the first English version of Camões’s epic is not a mere consequence of its fast and wide circulation in Europe, as there was no tradition of literary translations from Portuguese into

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English prior to Fanshawe’s rendering of Camões; consequently, there must have been some other specific motivation behind Fanshawe’s attraction to Camões’s work.

2. LUÍS VAZ DE CAMÕES

Since Camões spent his whole tormented life working on his masterpiece, it seems appropriate to start with a brief survey of the most noteworthy events that marked his biography 1. Luís Vaz de Camões was born about the year 1524, probably in Lisbon, of a noble yet poor family from Galicia. Little is known about his education. It is almost certain that the author of Os Lusíadas studied at the University of Coimbra where he achieved sound knowledge of the Latin, Italian and Span- ish literatures. Still young, he took part in several military expeditions and lost an eye at Ceuta in Morocco during a battle against the Moors (1547). Back in Lisbon, Camões was imprisoned for having wounded a court official in a street-brawl, but was pardoned on condition that he left the capital. A few days later, in exchange for freedom, Camões sailed for India (March, 1533) in the fleet of Fernão Álvares Cabral as a simple soldier. During the sixteen years Camões lived in the East, he suffered many vi- cissitudes. He was sent out on military expeditions and shipwrecked off the Mekong River in the Gulf of Siam in 1559. On that occasion, according to tradition, he swam to the shore carrying nothing but the manuscript of his epic on which he had been working for many years. Back in Goa, Camões ex- perienced alternating periods of imprisonment (for debt and supposed illegal actions) and freedom. In 1567, finally determined to return home, when Pedro Barreto was ap- pointed new governor of Mozambique, Camões accepted his lift to the Afri- can country but, unable to pay his debt, stopped there and suffered many hardships until some friends of his, especially the Portuguese historian Diogo do Couto, paid his journey home where he arrived in 1570. Camões is likely to have finished his epic before his arrival in Lisbon, since he published it two years later, in 1572. Even though the poet expected a much better reward for his loyalty to the Portuguese nation and to its young king, D. Sebastian only gave him a small award (15, 000 reis a year). Disap- pointed, Os Lusíadas’ author spent the rest of his days in obscurity, loneliness and extreme poverty. He died of plague on June 10th, 1580, two years after

———————— 1 Information about Camões’s biography has been collected from Bellotti (1862), Fonseca (1846), Lanciani (1999), La Valle (1965), Moisés (1997) and Pellegrini (1966).

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the disastrous campaign against the Moors at Alcacer-Kibir, which not only culminated in the death of the flower of the Portuguese nobility and of its young king 2, but quite surely in the impending Spanish invasion too. As a matter of fact, a few months after Camões’s death, Philip II of Spain claimed the Portuguese throne and for sixty years Portugal remained under Spanish rule. The decline of the Portuguese nation, so much feared by Camões, had begun.

3. THE RENAISSANCE EPIC

Os Lusíadas is an epic poem in praise of Portugal. Its primary topic is the story of Vasco da Gama’s first and successful voyage from Lisbon to Calicut 3. However, into the central plot, Camões interwove, through flashbacks and prophecies, the whole history of Portugal, from its very beginnings to the mid to late 1500s. As a matter of fact, by deciding to write his country’s first epic, Camões acted as a spokesman for all those who lamented the lack of a Portu- guese epic able to spread and hand down the most extraordinary achievements of the Portuguese people. Moreover, by calling his poem Os Lusíadas, i. e. «the sons of Lusus» (a mythical companion of Bacchus and first inhabitant of Por- tugal), Camões made clear what his poem was meant to be: the epic of the Portuguese nation. He was extremely qualified for such a task as he was not only a poet but a man who lived a very adventurous life: his epic of Portugal is mostly a mirror of his own personal life experience. Camões’s epic is made up of 8,816 lines arranged in 10 cantos. It is written in decasyllables rhyming according to the scheme of the ottava rima. The Portuguese poet was greatly influenced by the main ancient models such as the Odyssey and the Aeneid, but he consciously modelled his work on Virgil’s epic that supplied him with the inspiration, the structure, and the mythological background as well as with many stylistic devices. Like Virgil, he began his poem in medias res and divided it into three parts. It starts with an introduction consisting of the first eighteen stanzas. The introduction includes a prologue relating the poem’s subject (stanzas I-III), an invocation to the Tagus’s nymphs (stanzas IV-V) and a dedication to king Sebastian (stanzas VI-XVIII).

———————— 2 D. Sebastian had dreamt of spreading Catholicism in North Africa. 3 In 1497 an expedition guided by Vasco da Gama, a skilled captain of noble origin, left Lisbon. Sailing south-west, it passed the Cape Verde Islands, rounded the Cape of Good Hope and arrived at Melinde, a city on the African east coast, where Vasco da Gama got from the local king a pilot who knew the route for India. After almost eleven months on the way, the party reached Calicut, a western Indian port, on May 20th, 1498.

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This first part is then followed by the very narration of the story and the epi- logue (the last two stanzas). It was thus what was meant to be a traditional epic poem that Sir Rich- ard Fanshawe chose as his first translation from the Portuguese language into English. Over the centuries, however, it has been discussed whether Os Lusíadas can be considered an epic poem like the classical ones. Firstly, the classical type of epic poem tells the story of a single hero; Os Lusíadas, instead, is a tribute to a whole people rather than to just one man (as the plural title «The Lusiads» witnesses). Although Vasco da Gama is a pivotal figure in the story, he does not symbolize a single hero, but a collective one. The poem’s real hero is not the captain of the successful expedition, but the whole Portu- guese people he represents and whose exploits he embodies. Secondly, Camões’s epic lacks that kind of distance, between the events related in the story and the world the author and his audience live in, and defined by critics as «epic gap» 4. Apart from da Gama’s historical account to the king of Melinde, there is no absolute, perfect and self-contained epic past (with nothing before or after). Camões achieved a well-balanced combination of fable and history, reconciling the epic manner (full of fantastic and marvellous or- naments) with a historical subject he was well acquainted with, since he had sailed the same route as Vasco da Gama and knew at first hand the places mentioned in the poem. In short, it can be stated that Os Lusíadas is a peculiar work whose uniqueness defies definition, or a precise definition at least. It is an original mixture of heroic elements and moving lyrical passages that, as some critics point out, represent the poem’s best part. Consequently, it may be concluded that, instead of striving to make the strict rules of classical epic apply to Camões’s work, it is definitely more reasonable to take it for what it really ap- pears to be: a Renaissance epic dealing with the most typical issues of Portu- guese Humanism.

4. OS LUSÍADAS IN ENGLAND

As has already been said, Camões’s masterpiece was first translated into Eng- lish in 1655 when Sir Richard Fanshawe’s version was published. Bearing the purpose of this essay in mind, it seems necessary to hint at the most signifi- cant features of the English translator’s life and literary career 5.

———————— 4 As will be clarified later on, Fanshawe’s choice of a contemporary work lacking an epic gap is strongly linked to the reason for translating Camões’s poem. 5 The main sources for this brief survey of Fanshawe’s biography are Bullough

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Richard Fanshawe, son of Sir Henry Fanshawe, a court official, was born at Ware Park in Hertfordshire in 1608. After his father’s death (1616), Richard was brought up by his mother who wanted him to study law. When she died in 1632, her son finally felt free to choose his own professional career and set out on a long journey through France and Spain, returning home two years later, but only for a short stay before leaving again for Madrid in 1635 as secretary to the new Ambassador to Spain (Lord Aston). For the following three years, Fanshawe lived mainly in Spain, except for three brief visits to England on diplomatic business. After Aston’s retirement on medical grounds, Fan- shawe went on handling diplomatic affairs in Madrid until the arrival of Sir Arthur Hopton, the new Ambassador. Fanshawe supported faithfully both Charles I Stuart and his son Charles II. When the Civil War broke out, the Court had to take refuge in Oxford; here Fanshawe married Ann Harrison, a distant cousin of his, in 1644. While in Oxford, he is supposed to have translated Giambattista Guarini’s Pastor Fido into English: this book was published in 1647 along with some other short poems. Even after Charles I’s execution in 1649 and the abolition of the monar- chy, Fanshawe insisted on his vain attempts to defeat the king’s enemies. As a reward for his devotion to the Royalist cause, he was made Baronet (in Sep- tember 1650) during his stay in Scotland. He worked hard for Charles II’s return home since the elder son of the dead king, after taking refuge in the Low Countries, had taken the Royal title and had been acknowledged as such by both the Scots and the Irish. Nevertheless, the Royalists’ dream did not come true. Fanshawe was captured by Cromwell’s troops and held prisoner, even if for a short time, in London. Although the charge of high treason for adhering to the king’s cause was quite serious, Fanshawe was not put to death and the time he served in prison was not long, owing to his having contracted scurvy and having thus been released on bail. During his imprisonment, Fanshawe probably revised some translations from Horace he had begun in his youth. They were published anonymously in 1652 and reprinted in 1671. Since leaving London in order to avoid any po- tential involvement in political affairs was one of the conditions of his bail, Fanshawe won permission to move with his family to Yorkshire provided that he did not go more than five miles from his house without leave. In an estate at Tankersley, which belonged to Fanshawe’s friend Lord Strafford, immersed in a quiet rural atmosphere and away from political worries, he spent his time reading and translating literary texts. During his Yorkshire captivity, he translated three different works into English: Os Lusíadas by Camões, the Spanish

———————— (1963), Davidson (1997; 1999), Neri (1963), and Staton & Simeone (1964).

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play Querer por solo querer by Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza, and a description of the court festivities for Philip IV’s birthday written by the same author and entitled Fiestas de Aranjuez. The two translations from the Spanish language only saw the light in 1671 while The Lusiad, as he called his English version of Camões’s epic, went through the press in 1655. The translation included a dedicatory epistle to the Earl of Strafford dated May 1st, 1655 even though Fanshawe was no longer in Yorkshire by that date. As a matter of fact, in July 1654 his daughter Ann died of smallpox at the age of eight and, a week later or so, the whole family had to leave the place in order to flee the danger of in- fection. Later on, Fanshawe was ordered by the High Court of Justice to go back to London and not to go five miles out of the town. Therefore, there must be an error in the date given in the dedication, and the epistle is likely to have been written in May 1654. If this is true, the poem must have been translated between March 1653 and April 1654. The book was entered in the Sta- tioners’ Register on August 16th, 1655, but some copies must have been ready before that time, as Fanshawe gave his nephew, Sir Thomas Leventhorpe, a gift copy on July 23rd, 1655. After the Restoration, Fanshawe resumed his political career and in 1661 was sent as Ambassador to Portugal to arrange all the matters concerning Charles II’s marriage to the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza. Fan- shawe quickly won the sympathies of the Portuguese people who knew him as the translator of their national epic, as well as the Princess’s trust, with the hope of obtaining a high government position and a settled life on his return home. His aspirations were, however, thwarted. Fanshawe attended the pri- vate royal marriage ceremony, but failed to achieve the much sought after post in the new queen’s household. He had, instead, to go back to Lisbon (1662) where he was warmly welcomed, even if he liked neither the climate of the Portuguese capital nor the chaotic state of Afonso VI’s court. For that reason, he was transferred as Ambassador to Madrid (1664) with instructions to medi- ate a peace between Spain and Portugal and to sign a satisfactory commercial treaty with Spain. Having failed both tasks, Fanshawe was called back home but, before leaving Madrid, he died of a fever in 1666.

5. THE MAIN REASONS BEHIND FANSHAWE’S TRANSLATION OF OS LUSÍADAS

There is no evidence that Fanshawe had ever visited Portugal or learned Por- tuguese before translating Os Lusíadas. Although it was not then uncommon for a writer to tackle a translation in an unfamiliar language in order to learn it,

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it can hardly be presumed that Fanshawe meant The Lusiad to be a sort of linguistic exercise to learn Portuguese: it would certainly have been wiser and more helpful to use a simpler text instead of a highly ambitious composition in verse; anyway, it must be taken into account that Fanshawe’s knowledge of Portuguese had never gone and would never go much further than an elemen- tary level 6. Fanshawe’s lack of competence in Camões’s language proved however only a small obstacle, since there had appeared several translations of the Por- tuguese epic into Spanish, a language Fanshawe knew pretty well. Actually, on the basis of some extra-textual elements (such as engravings and com- mendatory poems), it is almost certain that the English translator availed himself of the scholarly edition of Camões’s epic published by Manuel de Faria y Souza in 1639 and made up of four large tomes collected in two volumes. As in this Spanish edition each Portuguese stanza is followed by a Spanish prose translation with plentiful notes and an extended explanatory commentary, the fact that Fanshawe possessed this bilingual edition of Camões’s epic must have been very useful to him, since the time he spent in Madrid as secretary to the English Ambassador to Spain provided him with quite a good knowledge of the Spanish language 7. Besides, even though the Spanish paraphrase must have helped him to get over his initial problems of understanding, the English poet did not rely entirely on it, but succeeded in producing a translation of his own without be- ing over-influenced by the Spanish rendering. Fanshawe’s is not a word-for- word translation, it shows many deviations from the source text that alter the Portuguese poem considerably. Sometimes, such changes seem to be justified from a linguistic or grammatical point of view, but they may also be due to structural and stylistic reasons. Indeed, since Camões’s is a poetic text charac- terized by a strict verse and rhyme form, written in decasyllables rhyming according to the scheme of the ottava rima, the translator had to make a funda- mental methodological choice and decide beforehand which aspects of the source text should be favoured. Instead of producing a mechanical, anony- mous translation based on the automatic insertion of discrete grammatical or lexical components from the target language for equivalent ones in the source language at the expense of poetic composition and harmony, Fanshawe de-

———————— 6 As Roger Walker writes: «although amongst his diplomatic papers there are nu- merous letters addressed to him in Portuguese, there does not appear to be a single one written or even corrected by him in that language. In his dealings with high officials of the Portuguese court in the 1660s he invariably used Spanish, even in answer to letters from them in Portuguese.» (Davidson 1999: 582). 7 Fanshawe’s edition of Pastor Fido included a number of poems relating to Spain that may have been written during the translator’s stay in that country in the thirties.

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cided to leave a personal, indelible mark on his translation, in more than one way. Firstly, he chose to pay very close attention to the formal aspects of each translated stanza in order to preserve the original metre and rhyme as far as was possible; and when necessary, he was even ready to sacrifice the content of the English translation by preferring to remain faithful to the original’s melody than to its text. Secondly, when the textual modifications carried out cannot be ascribed to the necessities of metre or rhyme, they appear to be the result of stylistic choices made by the translator to give his version of Camões’s text a recog- nizable personal touch so as to make it characteristic of his own translation style. As a matter of fact, Fanshawe did not follow the source text faithfully, but departed from it at will, especially whenever he wanted to achieve a par- ticular effect, such as the addition of figures of speech, the creation of new colourful, effective images or the insertion of sound effects 8. All these manipulations and rewordings (even of whole lines) are highly indicative of the type of translation performed by Fanshawe: his is much more than a mere mechanical and impersonal reproduction of the source text with the purpose of achieving an objective and sterile textual equivalence, but a vivid rewriting of the Portuguese original. If the above observations demonstrate how Fanshawe carried out his translation, a systematic comparison between source and target texts can explain why he did it – or, at least, can help critics to make some hypotheses on the main reasons that may have moved him to translate Os Lusíadas. Although it was not a major activity in his life, translating had always played an important part in Fanshawe’s intellectual career. In fact, his several early unpublished poems include translations from Boethius and Martial; after Pastor Fido’s first English version had successfully come out in 1647, Fan- shawe revised, and published anonymously in 1652, some translations from Horace, which he had begun in his youth; finally, as has already been pointed out, Fanshawe took advantage of the quiet country life in Yorkshire to devote himself to reading and translating literary texts. In a way, these translations may be seen as a personal pastime ensuing from an inner creative psychologi- cal need. If one bears in mind the light nature of the two works by Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza translated into English during Fanshawe’s time in York- shire, such an opinion may seem reasonable. However, if the search for a moment of relief from the pain, sad thoughts and worries of his days in captivity were the only motive behind Fanshawe’s Yorkshire translations, it would

———————— 8 A close examination of the most important features of Os Lusíadas’ first English translation was the object of my unpublished undergraduate dissertation Os Lusíadas di Luís de Camões nella prima traduzione inglese di Sir Richard Fanshawe.

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not be easy to explain why he decided to embark on such a difficult task as the rendering of an epic poem in an unfamiliar language. One might suppose that the episodes related in Os Lusíadas reminded Fanshawe of his own journeys and sea-faring life. That is why the reader gets the impression that the author wanted the poem to be read and appreciated more as a sailor’s yarn than as a great epic. However, as Roger Walker points out (in Davidson 1999: 581):

Although Os Lusíadas is concerned with a momentous voyage and contains much detailed and curious information about exotic lands and civilizations, this could hardly have been its major attraction for a poet of Fanshawe’s experience and sensitivity.

Some critics argue that the English poet might be searching for a new challenge, for his first real epic translation 9. Yet, if his only aim had been to tackle a new genre as a translator, he could have turned to such Italian famous heroic poems 10 as Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato, Ludovico Ario- sto’s Orlando furioso or Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, which were written in a language he knew very well (as his Englishing of Pastor Fido testifies) and from which he had already translated before, instead of choosing a poem written in an unfamiliar language and whose literature was not traditionally translated into English. Thus, the answer to the question of what may have attracted Fanshawe to a long, complex poem in Portuguese is likely to be found elsewhere, mainly in the major political and moral issues Camões’s epic is concerned with. To begin with, Os Lusíadas is openly dedicated to the young and inexperienced king Sebastian, whom the poet addresses in the final apostrophe (X.146-156) exhorting him to hold his skilled knights, who were willing to endure any sacrifice whatever to show their courage and loyalty, in great esteem and to revive the old achievements of the Portuguese past heroes. As a reason for Fan- shawe’s attraction to the Portuguese poem, it is therefore neither unreasonable nor unlikely to see his attempt to support the English king’s cause; by empha- sizing Camões’s words to king Sebastian, Fanshawe aims at inspiring the young, exiled prince Charles II, whom he considered as the legitimate sovereign of England and still hoped would come back home, to imitate the glori- ous feats of his ancestors. Two examples are given below in support of this assumption:

———————— 9 His only previous attempt at an epic translation had been an English version of Aeneid’s fourth book (1648) whose content is definitely more lyrical than heroic, as it deals with the love story between Dido and Aeneas. 10 Italy was the major vehicle of Renaissance epic.

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1 C 11: Se isto o ceo me cõcede, e o vosso peyto digna empresa tomar de ser cantada, (X.155, 5-6) 1 F: “If HEAV’N afford me, This; and you, some high “And brave EXPLOYT; worthy a Monument “Of Verse, […] (X.155, 5-7)

2 C: olhay que sois (e vede as outras gentes) Senhor sò de vassallos excelentes. (X.146, 7-8) 2 F: “Behold (mark else what other Nations doe) “The Best of Subjects doe belong to You! (X.146, 7-8)

In the first example the demonstrative pronoun «This», separated from the rest by a comma and a semicolon and placed with a capital letter right in the middle of the line (indeed, it is preceded and followed by the same number of words), is given a special emphasis that brings out the idea the pronoun refers to: how important it is for the poet that his work should be appreciated by the sovereign. In the following instance, the English translator replaces the original affirmative sentence with an exclamation. Since this is the initial oc- tave of the above-mentioned final apostrophe where Camões addresses the eighteen-year-old king Sebastian directly and calls his attention to the unparal- leled worth of his subjects, Fanshawe’s choice to make the speech more inci- sive, also by means of other stylistic devices such as the use of italics and the periphrastic form «doe», increases the effectiveness of the couplet. The examples 3 and 4 show Fanshawe’s agreement with Camões’s de- nunciation of the risks and dangers connected with overseas colonialism:

3 C: O gloria de mandar, ò vam cobiça (IV.95, 1) 3 F: “O Glory of commanding! O vain Thirst (IV.95, 1)

4 C: Dura inquietaçam da alma, e da vida; fonte de desamparos, e adulterios: sagaz consumidora conhecida, de fazendas, de Reynos, e de Imperios. Chamamte illustre, chamãte subida, sendo digna de infames vituperios; (IV.96, 1-6) 4 F: “Fell Tyrant of the soule! life’s swallowing Wave! “Mother of Plunders, and black Rapes unchast! “The secret miner, and the open Grave, “Of Patrimonies, Kingdoms, Empires vast! “They call thee noble, and they call thee Brave: “(Worthy t’have other names upon thee cast!) (IV.96, 1-6)

———————— 11 In all the examples quoted in this paper «C» stands for Camões’s original lines and «F» for Fanshawe’s translated text.

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The Portuguese poet certainly meant the tone of the above lines to be quite exclamatory, but in the source text the emphatic expressions suggesting anger or strong emotion are not stressed by proper punctuation. Suffice it to notice that, while exclamation marks are absent from the original version, in the English one there are five of them in no more than six lines. In reality, the translator does not follow the original punctuation strictly, but varies both the choice and the position of punctuation marks. Such a large quantity of excla- mations placed almost one after the other seems to suggest a sort of emo- tional involvement on the part of the English author in the message conveyed by Camões’s stanza. Such a hypothesis may well be supported by the fact that in 1655 the dispute over the advantages and disadvantages of the overseas ex- pansion was apparently of current interest in England, since Cromwell’s for- eign policy was aimed at increasing English prestige and sea power abroad by establishing an empire in South America. With this purpose, he had reorgan- ized and strengthened the English Navy, so long neglected during the Stuarts’ administration, and was shrewd enough to convince public opinion of the moral and economic importance of such an enterprise, employing for the first time the military force of the English State in the colonization of an overseas land. Therefore, it can be assumed that Fanshawe should feel the same way as the poetic I about such ship expeditions which, under the cover of a religious mission, hid an unrestrained desire for wealth and fame. In the example given below, the original lines («They pass the loathsome tyranny, and cruelty / off as justice, and vain severity») are not just translated into English, but freely reworded so that the final version sounds much more forceful and eloquent than the Portuguese one. Camões speaks against those who disguise a tyrannical regime by passing it off as a stern and effective way of applying the law. Fanshawe enforces the original message so as to turn it into a fierce criticism of any form of censorship (of action, speech or press):

5 C: Da fea tirania, e de aspereza fazem dereyto, e vam severidade: (IX.28, 5-6) 5 F: They tell the People, what doth Them behove; obedience, in the deed, the Tongue, the Pen. (IX.28, 5-6)

Yet, a correct reading of these lines requires a brief consideration of the Eng- lish political and cultural situation at the time of Fanshawe’s translation. Ac- cording to the Star Chamber Decree of July 1637, books could not be published without prior censorship. Puritans detested the Star Chamber because it had been used extensively by Charles I to maintain his royal authority during the years of his personal rule and, in July 1641, it had been dissolved by the Parliament. On the other hand, since complete press freedom turned out to be dangerous as it offered the Government’s opponents an excellent vehicle

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to express their political ideas, in June 1643 a Licensing Order was issued, according to which all books had to be examined by a censor before publication. Bearing such a turbulent context in mind, the real meaning of Fanshawe’s lines becomes clearer: the English author takes Camões’s words as a starting- point to speak against all oppressive instruments of personal freedom. Actual- ly, by placing the key-word (» obedience») at the very beginning of the line, a word that would be enough in itself to express the translator’s viewpoint, and by using small capital letters almost as if he wanted to reproduce in writing the authoritative tone of the command, Fanshawe makes the translated text far more vigorous and powerful than the Portuguese original. This brief study of a few meaningful examples may suffice to make a final and substantiated assumption on what may have attracted Fanshawe to Camões’s poem. By translating such a text as Os Lusíadas which, under the pretext of celebrating Vasco da Gama’s discovery of the maritime way to the East Indies, tackled some of the most current issues of the time, Fanshawe certainly gave himself an excellent vehicle to express his own personal opin- ions: through the rendering of somebody else’s text, he could dare to make some critical remarks he would never have been allowed to if he had spoken for himself (after all, he was a war prisoner). So, in sum, although at first sight Fanshawe’s version of Camões’s epic might be seen just as one of his many translations, it was actually much more than that: it was a way to keep fighting his political battles, even from the lodgings in Chancery Lane to which he was largely confined.

6. CONCLUSION

For whatever reasons it was undertaken, Fanshawe’s translation of Camões’s masterpiece is undoubtedly the most demanding work achieved during his time in Yorkshire. Nevertheless, Fanshawe’s most ambitious translation seems to have done little to enhance his literary reputation among his English con- temporaries. As a matter of fact, it did not have much success on publication, and there was no second edition until J. D. M. Ford’s of 1940, even though an almost certainly unauthorized reprint was issued in 1664 by the widow of the original printer 12. Furthermore, copies of this reissue were even rarer than those of the 1655 printing. Contemporary disinterest in The Lusiad does not mirror Fanshawe’s general standing as a translator; suffice it to say that his rendering of Guarini’s

———————— 12 At the time of this publication Fanshawe was Ambassador in Madrid.

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Pastor Fido was reissued at least four times before the end of the seventeenth century. The apparent lack of immediate success of The Lusiad may have been due to the fact that there was no tradition whatsoever of literary translations from Portuguese into English previous to Fanshawe’s version of Camões’s epic as well as to the many misprints and misreadings in the first edition of Fanshawe’s translation (which, it should be noted, the English translator did not have the opportunity to revise as it went through the press). In conclusion, if Fanshawe had meant this translation to be – among other things – a way of expressing his own ideas, he definitely missed his mark. Anyway, he cannot be denied one great merit: by means of his translation he introduced the English reading public not only to one of the master- pieces of world epic, but also to Portuguese literature itself. That is why he must be acknowledged a deserved place among the most praiseworthy transla- tors of early modern England.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bellotti, F. (1862) I Lusiadi: poema di Luigi di Camoens, Milano, Carlo Branca. Bullough, G. (ed.) (1963) The Lusiads in Sir Richard Fanshawe’s translation, London, Cen- taur Press. Camões, Luís de (1972) Lusíadas de Luís de Camões…Comentadas por Manuel de Faria e Sousa (Reprodução fac-similada pela edição de 1639), Lisboa, Imprensa Nacional – Casa da Moeda, 2 voll. Davidson, P. (ed.) (1997) The poems and translations of Sir Richard Fanshawe, Oxford, Clarendon Press, vol. I. Davidson P. (ed.) (1999) The poems and translations of Sir Richard Fanshawe, Oxford, Clar- endon Press, vol.2. Fanshawe, Sir Richard (1655) The Lusiad, or, Portugals Historicall Poem: written in the Port- ingall Language by Luis de Camoens; and now newly put into English by Richard Fan- shaw, London. Fonseca, José da (1846) Os Lusíadas, poema épico de Luís de Camões, restituído à sua primitiva linguagem, Paris. Lanciani, G. (1999) Profilo di storia linguistica e letteraria del Portogallo. Dalle origini al Seicen- to, Roma, Bulzoni Editore. La Valle, M. (1965) Lusiadi / Camões, Parma, Guanda. Moisés, M. (1997) A literature portuguesa, São Paulo, Editora Cultrix. Neri, N. (1963) Il «Pastor fido» in Inghilterra con il testo della traduzione secentesca di Sir Rich- ard Fanshawe, Torino, G. Giappichelli. Pellegrini, S. (1966) Lusiadi / Luís de Camões, Torino, UTET. Staton Jr., W. F. & Simeone, W. E. (1964) A critical edition of Sir Richard Fanshawe’s 1647 translation of Giovanni Battista Guarini’s «Il pastor fido», Oxford, at the Clarendon Press.

Mots Palabras Words – 5/2004 http://www.ledonline.it/mpw/