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

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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 fa- mous 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 Mots Palabras Words – 5/2004 http://www.ledonline.it/mpw/ 53 Daniela Gioia 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). Mots Palabras Words – 5/2004 http://www.ledonline.it/mpw/ 5 4 Os Lusíadas in English 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 writ- ten 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. Mots Palabras Words – 5/2004 http://www.ledonline.it/mpw/ 55 Daniela Gioia 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 noth- ing 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.
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