Os Lusiadas

Originally published in 1880. EDITORS PREFACE: I FELT that I had no light task before me when I under took to edit my Husbands 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 ones shoulder to the wheel. Yet, I feel that no other than myself should do this office for him for I shared his travels in Portugal, his 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 apart as a grand dramatic act of devotion from all 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. What I 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 Boitos 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 hearing of his opera takes 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...