CAMOENS, Luis de.

£11,250 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Lusiad, or Portugals Historicall Poem: First edition in English of the Lusíadas (1572), the epic poem describing Portugal's rise from obscurity to greatness and the first translation of any Portuguese literary work into English. This is a pleasing copy, with the folding engraved portraits, which are often found trimmed and sometimes mounted, in fresh state.Camoens based his Virgilian epic around Vasco da Gama's discovery of the sea route from Europe to India via the Cape of Good Hope in 1497-98, coloured by his own experiences during the 14 years he spent in the East (1553-67), including wintering on Hormuz Island, where, Burton argues in Camoens: His Life and his Lusiads, he was exposed to Persian literature. Boies Penrose calls the Lusíadas "one of the noblest epics" and "the national poem par excellence and the supreme epic of Portugal's conquests in the East". The English translator, Sir Richard Fanshawe, part of the grouping often called the Cavalier poets, was an accomplished linguist, who spent a good deal of time on the Iberian peninsula. As Walker demonstrates, Sir Richard made his translation in England, relying on an intermediary version in Castilian, the massive scholarly edition of Manuel de Faria e Sousa of 1639. From 1662 to 1666 Fanshawe was ambassador to Portugal, probably because his translation had already earned him a good reputation there, and from 1664 to 1666 he was also ambassador to Spain.

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