127 122 869 I This Volume is for REFERENCE USE ONLY 3-36 6m P o s LUS^AD AS (THE LUSIADS) : ENGLISHED TJY RICHARD FRANCIS BURTON (EDITED BY HIS WIFE, ISABEL BURTON). LONDON : TINSLEY BROTHERS, CATHERINE STREET, STRAND, W. C, 1880. ALL K1GHTS RESERVED. VIYMAN AND SONS, PRINTERS, Ql'JLEN STREET, LINCOLN'S-INN FIKI DS, LONDON, \V C OS L U S J :iVD A S (THE LUSIADS) : ENGLISHED BV RICHARD FRANCIS BURTON (EDITED BY HIS WIFE, ISABEL BURTON). IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. I. LONDON : BERNARD QUARITCH, 15 PICCADILLY, W. 1880. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED WYMAN AND SONS, PRINTERS, 1 GUI' \ I QUEE\ STREET, LINCOLN*W-TNN-FICt DS, LONDON, W C H. I. M. DOM PEDRO DE ALCANTARA, (D. PEDRO II.) (Constitutional (Emperor, ant* ^ctprttiial JBrfcnfccr of THE BR AZ I L ; to tfjc JBltitt tatFjfcr tfjatt tfyc tfjiis Ucrstoit of n so focnt to t^ fjcatt of fftis Imperial tttost {jumble THE TRANSLATOR, 21 far tm libro & meno che niente, Sf il libj-0 fatto non ri/& la gente. GlUSTI. Place, riches, favottr, Prizes of acczdent as oft as merit. SHAKSPEARE. Qra toma a espadat agora a peima (Now ?vitft tJie sword-kilt, then with pen in CAM., Sonn. 192. JBramo assai, poco spero, nulla cJiicdo. TASSO. Tbitt ceta prouve enfin que fozwrage est plain dc grandes foautt's, puisque depuis deux cents ans ilfait Ics dtfices d?twc nation spirituals, qui doit en connditre Ics fautes. VOLTAIRE, Essai, etc. TO MY MASTER CAMOENS : se* lo mio maestro, e* I mio autore}. GREAT Pilgrim-poet of the Sea and Land ; Thou life-long sport of Fortune's ficklest will ; Doomed to all human and inhuman ill, Despite thy lover-heart, thy hero-hand : Enrolled by thy pen what maiv'ellous band Of god-like Forms thy golden pages fill ; Love, Honour, Justice, Valour, Glory thrill The Soul, obedient to thy strong command : Amid the Prophets highest sits the Bard, At once Revealer of the Heav'en and Earth, To Heav'en the guide, of Earth the noblest guard ; And, 'mid the Poets thine the peerless worth, 'Whose glorious song, thy Genius' sole reward, Bids all the Ages, Camoens ! bless thy birth. R. F. B. EDITOR'S PREFACE, I FELT that I had no light task before me when I under- took to edit my Husband's Translation of Camoens' ' Lusiads." The nearer I come to that work the more mountainous does it appear, instead of dispersing as most work does when one sets one's shoulder to the wheel. Yet, I feel that no other than myself should do this office for I his travels in his for him ; shared Portugal, four years up country in Brazil, learnt the language with him, and I have seen for nineteen and a-half years the Camoens table duly set apart the bonne boitche of the day. I have been daily and hourly consulted as to this expression, or this or that change of word, this or that peculiarity of Camoens. What, then, are those difficulties, you, the reader, will ask me ? Let me try to explain. So many enterprising poet-authors have translated Camoens, and received their meed of praise and popularity. In old times, Fanshawe, the best because so quaint; then, Messrs. Mickle, Musgrave, and Mitchell; latterly, Mr. J. J. Aubeitin, Mr. Duff, and Mr. Hewitt But this translation stands apart from all the rest as far apart as the Passionspiel of Ober-Ammergau stands from all apart as a grand dramatic act of devotion the other Miracle-plays, now suppressed. This translation is not a literary tour de force done against time or to earn a reputation; it is the result of a daily act of devotion of twenty years from a man of this age who has taken the hero of a former age for his model, his master, as Dante did Virgil; and between whose two fates Master and Disciple exists a strange and fatal similarity. I What tremble for in its publication is, thai it is too esthetic for the British Public, and will not meet with its due meed of appreciation as the commoner trans- lations have done. If a thousand buy it, will a hundred read it, and will ten understand it ? I say to myself; but then I brighten at the thought that to those ten it will be the gem of their library. " " It stands in poetry where Boito's Mcfistofclc stands in music. He was not appalled by Gounod, nor Spohr, nor Wagner, nor Meyerbeer, and in the opinion of many musicians has distanced them all, The first of his takes hearing opera away your breath that is, if you are a musician if not, it was a sin to occupy the place which would have been a seventh heaven to a musician. You don't understand it, nor pretend to do so, but you long to go again, and you do go night after night, each time unfolding new beauties in each separate passage, until you know by heart and have dissected the whole, nor even then do you tire, but enjoy it all the more. In this translation, whenever my Husband has appeared to coin words, or to use impossible words, they are the exact in or rendering of Carnoens ; every singularity seeming eccentricity, the Disciple has faithfully followed his Master, his object having been not simply to write good verse, but to give a literal word-for-word rendering of his favourite hero. And he has done it to the letter, not only in the WORDS, but in the meaning and intention of Camoens. To the uneesthetic, to non-poets, non-linguists, non- musicians, non-artists, Burton's Lusiads will be an unknown land, an unknown tongue. One might as well or an enhar- expect them to enjoy a dominant seventh monic change in harmony. To be a poet one must be a musician; to be a musician or a painter one must have the will a poetic temperament, or the poetry or music The Lusiatfs. have a hard metallic sound, and become a doggerel, a the ! scherzo ; painting a sign-post With this little explanation, I commend this grand work to the study of the public. The Commentaries will interest all alike. ISABEL BURTON. TRIESTE, July igtti, 1880. PREFACE, THE most pleasing literary labour of my life has been to translate "The Lusiads." One of my highest aims has been to produce a translation which shall associate " my name, not unpleasantly, with that of my master, Camoens." Those who favour me by reading this version are spared the long recital of why, how, and when Portu- gal's Maro became to me the perfection of a traveller's study. The first and chiefest charm was, doubtless, that of the Man. A wayfaier and voyager from his a turbulent youth ; soldier, somewhat withal, wounded for a and blamed his wounds ; a moralist, humourist, a satirist, and, consequently, no favourite with King Demos; a reverent and religious spirit after his own " fashion (somewhat Renaissance," poetic, and Pagan), after the fashion others an by no means of ; outspoken, writer a truth-telling, lucre-despising ; public servant whose motto was, strange to say, Honour, not Hon- ours; a doughty Sword and yet doughtier Pen,, a type xii The Lusiads. a of the so of the chivalrous age \ patriot purest water, jealous of his Country's good fame that nothing would her satisfy him but to see the world bow before perfec- tions; a genius, the first and foremost of his day, who died in the direst poverty and distress : such in merest outline was the Man, and such was the Life which won the fondest and liveliest sympathies of the translator, Poetas por poetas scjam lidos , Sejain s6por pottas explicadas Suas obras dwinas > (Still by the Poets be the Poets read Only be lender'd by the Poet's tongue Their works divine) ; writes Manuel Corra. Mickle expresses the sentiment with more brevity and equal point. None but a poet can translate a poet; and Coleridge assigns to a poet the property of explaining a poet Let mo add that none but a traveller can do justice to a traveller. And it so happens that most of my wanderings have unconsciously formed a miming and realistic: com- mentary upon "The Lusiads," I have not only visited almost every place named in the Epos of Commerce, in I many have spent months and even years. The of Arch-poet Portugal paints from the life, he has also the insight which we call introvision; he sees with *xact eyes where others are purblind or blind. Only hey who have personally studied the originals of his pictures can appreciate their perfect combination of idelity and realism with Fancy and Idealism. Here t is that the traveller-translator may do good service ,vith his specialty. Again, like Boccaccio, Camoens reflects the Lux ex Oriente. There is a perfume of the East in everything le writes of the East : we find in his song much of ts havock and all its splendour. Oriental-like, he in the to lavish inani- lelights Pathetic Fallacy ; upon nates the attributes of animate sensation. Here again, " he student of things Eastern, the practical Oriental- st," may be useful by drawing attention to points which k scape the European, however learned. There are many translators of Camoens yet to come. Ve are an ephemeral race, each one struggling to rample down his elder brother, like the Simoniacal D opes in the Malebolge-pit. My first excuse for adding o the half-dozen translations in the field, must be my ong studies, geographical and anthropological: I can it least spare future writers the pains and penalties of addling the exactest of poets with bad ethnology and /orse topography.