The Lusiads

Today it is not about Medicine. It is about Literature.


“The Lusiads” is an epic poem written by Luís Vaz de Camões, the most famous of  Portuguese poets. He is considered the best epic poet of all Portuguese literature and also the best lyric poet of his time.


I remember reading a book by William Somerset Maugham in which he tells us of a man that he met somewhere in the South Seas who was writing a new translation of “The Lusiads.”


“It is the best epic poem ever written,” said the man to Maugham. “It tells much more than all others. The Iliad is all about the Trojan War. The Odyssey is merely Ulysses’ return travel to Greece. The Aeneid is just Aeneas trip from the destroyed city of Troy to Italy.


“But ‘The Lusiads’, although focused on Vasco da Gama’s discovery of the route to India, tell us all of the history of Portugal. Unfortunately it is written in a language that few people read and the existing translations are not good.”


The poem was first published in 1572 and has ten cantos, with a varying number of stanzas (a total of 1102), written in decasyllabic ottava rima. Brazilians can read the ten syllables very naturally; the Portuguese have to learn how to read them. It seems that the Portuguese language of the “colonies” evolved less rapidly than that of Portugal and it is quite probable that the present Brazilian pronunciation of the Portuguese was the one used in Portugal in the 1500's. 

Title page of the first edition of "Os Lusíadas" - Wikimedia Commons

When I was studying Medicine, my room mates and I decided to read “The Lusiads” and every night we would read several stanzas, until one of us was half asleep and proposed a stop. It was something that we really enjoyed; it was definitely a very good project. It was a reading that enriched all of us.


One of the interesting things about epic poems is that Roman (or Greek) mythology is an important part of it. Camões, however, wrote his poem at a time when the Roman Catholic church would probably persecute him if he tried to revive the old gods. He solved the problem very ingeniously, putting Roman mythology and Christianity side by side. Of course the Olympic gods were divided: some were in favor of the attempt of the Portuguese to arrive in India, some were against it. They plotted and made schemes. There is an interesting scene in which Bacchus, who was in favor of the Portuguese, becomes desperate and kneels to pray – and Camões adds: “the false god adoring the True One.” 


Virgil starts the Aeneid with a famous sentence: Arma virumque cano – I sing of arms and of a man. Camões expands this sentence into two stanzas, adding the objectives of the poem between “as armas e os barões” – the arms and the men – and “cantando espalharei por toda a parte” – singing I will tell it everywhere. He even created a Latin word – Tágides – to name the nymphs of the River Tagus, whose inspiration he invokes.


A beautiful lyric part of the poem tells the story of Inês, who was killed by courtesans that wanted to prevent her marriage to the King. And the King crowned her as Queen  after her death. Another one is the Island of Love, where the Portuguese sailors stopped on their return trip from India and were rewarded for their feats.


“The Lusiads” are, obviously, Camões masterpiece. It has a special place in Portuguese literature that will stay forever. 


But he also wrote beautiful sonnets, some of which inspired Elizabeth Barrett Browning to write her “Sonnets from the Portuguese.” And he also wrote theater plays. Some were lost, but there are still three of them that we can read. They are all comedies, all written in beautiful verse. I do not know whether they have ever been translated to English.


But an excellent translation of “The Lusiads” was published by Sir Richard Francis Burton in 1880. I do not think the one mentioned by Somerset Maugham (if its author ever finished it) would be better.