The Lusiads (Oxford World's Classics) Read online

  There are problems in this for the modern reader. Few of us share the extent and depth of Camões’s knowledge of the classics, and the pleasures of recognition, that agreeable Renaissance game of spotting how the poet has adapted a favourite passage from a classical author and refurbished it to serve a contemporary purpose, plays little part in our reading. Some of Camões’s references are so erudite, not to say arcane, as to function effectively as riddles. How many of us know that ‘the bright lover of the adulterous Larisseian’ refers to Apollo and his affair with Coronis of Larissa, and that Camões is describing, with appropriate wit, dawn breaking over the Isle of Love? It is difficult to render this without clogging the verse itself (or the foot of the page) with laborious explanations.

  Riddling, however, and the sophisticated pleasures of recognition, point to something more interesting than dogged imitation of a classical model. The point is made baldly and literally by da Gama, who insists to the Sultan of Malindi (canto 5, stanzas 86–9) that his voyage is greater than those of Ulysses and Aeneas. His professional scorn for Ulysses for forgetting his crew-mates on the island of the Lotus Eaters, and for Aeneas, for losing even his helmsman on a calm night, is reinforced by the contrast he draws between those shore-hugging Mediterranean voyages and the vast uncharted oceans on which the Portuguese have ventured. Moreover, he says, his story is true: theirs is myth, and ‘My own tale in its naked purity | Outdoes all boasting and hyperbole’. For this, if for no other reasons, Camões is not bound by his Virgil, whose language and devices are constantly being subverted and transcended.

  Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in what has long been the most controversial feature of The Lusíads, namely, Camões’s use of the classical gods and goddesses. Within a stanza of the first mention of the Portuguese navigators in canto 1, stanza 19, a debate is raging on Mount Olympus about the wisdom of letting them proceed. Jupiter has resolved that they shall be granted a safe harbour on the coast of Africa to refit their ships. Bacchus opposes this, Venus supports it and is backed by Mars. The decision stands and the fleet finds its way, via Mozambique Island and Mombasa, to Malindi. Halfway through the poem, in canto 6, there is a parallel scene, this time in Neptune’s underwater palace, when the Portuguese have left Malindi and are on the last stage of their voyage to India. Bacchus is the sole speaker in persuading the gods of the sea to conjure a hurricane and destroy the fleet once and for all. All through the poem Bacchus and Venus intervene. Bacchus, jealous for his shrines in India, stirs up Muslim hatred in Mombasa, deceives da Gama by impersonating the so-called Christians of Prester John, and incites the Muslims of Calicut to prejudice the Samorin. Meanwhile Venus, admiring the Portuguese for their supposed Roman qualities, seduces Jupiter into maintaining his support for them, summons the sea-nymphs to rescue the fleet in Mombasa, summons them again to subdue the hurricane, and rewards the mariners with the delights of the Isle of Love. Yet at no point in the poem does da Gama fail to attribute what is befalling him to the cosmic struggle between good and evil, or neglect to thank Providence for guidance and protection.

  What are we to make of this fusing of Christian and pagan myths? One long tradition of commentary on The Lusíads, dating from the terms of the official censor’s approval of the poem on behalf of the Office of the Inquisition, has been to read all the pagan episodes allegorically, the gods and goddesses featuring as rhetorical vehicles within a Christian scheme of things. Thus, Jupiter doubles up as God, Venus as a guardian angel (or the Blessed Virgin), and Bacchus as Satan. This was the interpretation elaborated with extraordinary ingenuity and learning by the first great commentator on Camões, the Spanish Manoel Faria e Sousa in 1639, in a manner reflecting the inclusiveness of Renaissance scholarship, and in particular its passion for reconciling classical learning with Christian revelation. It is a reading which, suitably modified, continues to find supporters.

  Camões, at a key point in the poem (canto 9, stanzas 90–1), dismisses his pagan gods as simply poetic creations, (‘Jupiter, Mercury, Phoebus … they | Were all composed of feeble human clay). There is no need to accept the suggestion that these lines, which were acclaimed by Faria e Sousa as confirming his schema, were added at the bidding of the Inquisition and should be censored from modern editions. What they declare is amply confirmed by Tethys in canto 10, stanza 82, in words which must be authoritative:

  I, Saturn and Janus,

  Jupiter and Juno, are mere fables

  Dreamed by mankind in his blindness.

  We serve only to fashion delightful

  Verses . . .

  Much of our difficulty here lies in that word ‘allegory’. Since the eighteenth century most allegorical writing has been political, offering the reader subversive codes, with one-to-one correspondences between the ciphered and the actual events. This is the context in which we enjoy Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel and Orwell’s Animal Farm. Reading The Lusíads in this reductive manner involves us in the absurdity of representing Venus’s comic-erotic seduction of Jupiter (canto 2, stanzas 33–43) as an intercession by the Virgin Mary. While Bacchus is plausibly cast as Satan, appearing in dreams or in a multitude of disguises (as a long-lost Christian, a Muslim counsellor, as Mohammed himself), Venus is never anything other than the goddess of love, resplendent in her sexiness and expert in all the arts of seduction. It is important to note that the gods and goddesses never accomplish anything. Like the sylphs in Pope’s Rape of the Lock, they go about their business blissfully unaware that all their efforts amount to nothing. There is no need for the reader to believe that it was Venus who prevented the fleet entering harbour at Mombasa, or Bacchus who called up the hurricane. Da Gama has no difficulty in explaining all that befalls him in terms of a quite different set of beliefs (nor has the modern reader in attributing Portuguese setbacks to a mix of commercial jealousy and natural disasters).

  Medieval and Renaissance allegory, however, was less concerned with one-to-one codes and correspondences than with depths and suggestions and ramifications, reinforcing our understanding of the unity of God’s creation. Once we accept Camões’s gods and goddesses as entertaining fictions, we can see how he has deployed them to achieve a variety of effects which would have been impossible in a more conventional narrative of the voyage. The debates on Mount Olympus and in Neptune’s underwater palace allow him to emphasize the significance of da Gama’s achievement as a turning-point in human history, comparable to mankind’s legendary first voyage in pursuit of the Golden Fleece, or to the attempts by Daedalus and Icarus to fly. Bacchus, admittedly ranting, warns (canto 6, stanza 29) that the Portuguese voyage means the end of religion as he knows it:

  very soon, I promise you,

  Of the vast oceans and the heavenly span

  They’ll be the gods, and you and I but Man.

  By contrast, Venus’s various antics with or without her sea-nymphs, from the striptease before Jupiter to the nuptials of the Isle of Love, make room for poetry of a startling sensuality. There are moments of stylish comedy about all these scenes, for this is a far from solemn epic: Mars giving Jupiter’s throne ‘such a thwack with his cudgel | The heavens trembled and sheer fright | Momentarily dimmed Apollo’s light’, or Neptune’s nymphs awaiting Bacchus’ arrival at his underwater palace, ‘Trying to fathom what in heaven had brought a | King of wine to the domain of water’, while Triton stands by awaiting instructions, his head crowned with a lobster shell, his naked slimy body crawling with every kind of mollusc and crustacean. Camões’s comic relish in these scenes deserves more emphasis that it has received.

  Utterly different, at his epic’s very heart, is the entirely original myth of Adamastor, the ‘Cape of Storms’ personified. The emotional force of this former Titan’s love for the nymph Doris and the punishment that followed such presumption, is matched by the terrible prophecy of what is to befall Portuguese navigators in these waters, beginning with his vengeance against Bartolomeu Dias who first rounded the cape in 1488. But he stands not only
as sentinel over the most dangerous part of the voyage. He marks the boundary between two different visions of Africa, corresponding to two different divisions of the world.

  ‘Ethiopians’ is the word used of the peoples encountered by the navigators along the coasts of South Africa and Mozambique. The word means, in its Greek derivation, simply dark-skinned or sunburned, and is related to the myth of Phaethon, Apollo’s son, who borrowed the sun’s chariot and, startled by the signs of the Zodiac, lost control and steered too close to earth, scorching some of its peoples. Homer, however (Odyssey, i. 22–4), had mentioned two kinds of Ethiopians, ‘some where Hyperion sets, some where he dawns’, giving rise to a distinction increasingly elaborated by classical and medieval geographers. ‘Eastern Ethiopia’ became the Africa of fable, containing the ancient kingdoms of Nubia, Abyssinia, and Ophir, linked with Moses, Solomon, and Sheba, and the enduring myth of Prester John. ‘Western Ethiopia’ was the wild, savage Africa bordering the unexplored Atlantic Ocean. To the north, the two ‘Ethiopias’ were separated by the Sahara Desert; to the south, by a barrier somewhere to the South.

  By the time of da Gama’s voyage, however, this division was being superseded by another. The west coast of Africa had been navigated and charted. Camões, in canto 5, describes the fleet sailing past capes and islands already ‘christened’ anew, past ‘beaches that are ours’ and kingdoms which have been ‘brought to faith in Christ’. Some of this detail is anachronistic, giving rise to the comment that Camões seems at times to be describing his own rather than da Gama’s voyage. As The Lusíads opens, with the navigators already in the Mozambique Channel, the Cape of Storms has come to mark the boundary between the known Africa of the west coast and the unknown Africa bordering the Indian Ocean. Adamastor charges the Portuguese with breaching ‘what is forbidden’, desecrating ‘Nature’s secrets’, a charge rich in meaning to the Renaissance reader.

  Significantly, this is also the boundary between the world where Christianity rules supreme, and the world where the pagan deities believe they hold sway. For there is no mention of Jupiter, Venus, and Bacchus in the long account of Portuguese history occupying cantos 3 and 4, nor in the voyage down the West African coast in canto 5, nor indeed in Paulo da Gama’s further discourse on Portuguese history in canto 8. Parallels are frequently drawn with heroic figures of ancient times and these occasionally border on myth. But paganism does not obtrude until the fleet is in the Indian Ocean, provoking the debate on Mount Olympus. Everything Venus and Bacchus do subsequently is confined to Africa and India, and the distinction adds a further dimension to Camões’s recourse to the pagan deities.

  Camões was—for the point bears repeating—the first major European artist to visit the tropics and the orient. He was thus the first to face the challenge of finding a language and form to give expression to such new experiences. Da Gama’s voyage of exploration becomes an extended metaphor for his own explorations in the ‘craft’ of poetry. By raiding the Latin classics for references associating Bacchus with India and by expanding on Venus’ legendary love for islands, Camões was able to invent for himself the rudiments of a ‘tradition’ which Portuguese exploits could be represented as supplanting. Once embarked on this course, it was surprising how many classical tales could be adapted to his purpose—Phaethon’s chariot, the Argonauts and Daedalus, Memnon and Ethiopia, Venus and Cupid hiding as dolphins from the heat of the tropics, and a host of other borrowings from Virgil, Ovid, Horace, and Catullus. His style, or rather his variety of styles, reflects this, mixing Latin or Latinisms with Castilian Spanish and vernacular, sometimes vulgar, Portuguese, in a combination demonstrably his own. The classical authors gave him a framework and a language to stand off from, even as modern authors like Soyinka and Rushdie have given shape to their work by ‘writing back’ against British myths about the West Indies, Africa, and India.

  But the pagan deities gave Camões something more. As the navigators approach Mozambique Island (canto i, stanza 45), they pass a cape which Camões confidently identifies as ‘Prasso’, namely Ptolemy’s Promontorium Prasum, the furthest point south known to the Greeks. No one knows for sure which cape was meant, but by identifying it with Cape Corrientes Camões is making an ideological point: that these sea routes and city states, currently in the possession of Islam and about to become a battleground, were ‘colonized’ by the European imagination long before the ‘Moors’ got there.

  The most troublesome aspect of The Lusiíads to the modern reader must surely be Camões’s treatment of Islam. Perhaps we should not be unduly taken aback. The ending of the Cold War has reopened a much older wound in human history—that fault line between Christian and Islamic communities which extends from northern Asia to the west coast of Africa. Fears of Islamic fundamentalism, especially in southern Europe, have led to suggestions that it should be targeted as NATO’s newest (or oldest) enemy, while our airports and borders bristle with immigration patrols. In the sixteenth century the Turkish Empire was Europe’s rival super-power. The Crusades had ended in catastrophe with the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Though the loss of Christianity’s eastern capital was partly offset by the capture of Granada in 1492, the Turks were secure in their occupation of Athens and the Balkans and were advancing in the Middle East and North Africa. The destruction of the Turkish fleet at the Battle of Lepanto occurred while Camões was putting the finishing touches to The Lusíads.

  Even in this context, Camões’s hostility is disturbing. Muslims are consistently presented as astuto, falso, enganoso, malicioso, pérfido, sábio, sagaz, torpe, and gentes infernais. The only fiel Muslim is Monsayeed from Morocco, who turns Christian after helping da Gama escape from Calicut. Yet these adjectives, together with the fact that Camões consistently labels all Muslims as ‘Moors’, suggest a great deal.

  Camões was well informed about Islam and was perfectly aware of its scope and its divisions: the first suspicion of the Sheikh of Mozambique when he comes to inspect the Portuguese fleet is that they must be Turks, whom he regards as hostile. The label ‘Moors’ insists on two things. It declares that Islam is a single and united enemy; and it identifies the Swahili traders of East Africa and the Muslim rulers of the Persian Gulf, Turkey, and parts of India, with the Muslim Berbers driven out of Portugal during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. This is the principal theme of canto 3, as da Gama narrates events from the Battle of Ourique (1139) to the Battle of the River Salado (1340), including sieges such as the capture of Lisbon (1147) and of Silves (1189) with the assistance of English and German knights en route to the second and third Crusades. The capture of Ceuta in Morocco, Portugal’s first overseas possession, was an extension of the same campaign, followed by the earliest voyages down the West African coast in an effort to take ‘the Moors’ in the rear.

  Yet not long before, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, students had been flocking to Muslim Andalusia—to read Aristotle in Arabic with commentaries by Averroes, to study Galen, to learn the use of the astrolabe, to benefit from the new mathematics (since the reign of Henry I, our chief tax collector has been known as chancellor of the exchequer: the reference is to the abacus, the chequered cloth, which made it possible to calculate in tens and units). Andalusia was a centre of learning in all its branches, the civilized heart of the medieval world, a place of culture and architectural splendour, and of greater religious tolerance than any society which followed. It is this that makes Camões’s adjectives interesting. Earlier translators had little difficulty in rendering them as ‘wily, cunning, dissembling, treacherous, deceitful’, and so on, and these are legitimate synonyms. But they also suggest intellect, subtlety, learning, diplomacy—all the provocations of culture and sophistication to a young, emerging nation, conscious of destiny and flexing its muscles. Self-assertion is less offensive in the relatively powerless than in the powerful, and Camões’s hostility to Islam is still infused with the determination to cast off an alien yoke.

  The Lusíads, then, belongs with the Song o
f Roland, the epic of El Cid, and more directly, Dante’s The Divine Comedy, in claiming the spiritual, cultural, and intellectual initiative for Europe after a long period during which Islam has been in the ascendancy. As with Dante, Virgil becomes Camões’s guide to the origins of the new Christian humanism, in terms of which Portuguese revelations about the size and wealth of our planet can be comprehended. It is no accident that this vision of Europe’s significance, and of Portugal’s place as the crown on the head of Europe, should have come to Camões in India. No one can speak with assurance of what was passing through his mind during his long sojourn in the orient. Our only source is his poetry, and any conclusions will follow from how that poetry, including his many lyrical poems, is interpreted. The intuition that has guided this present translation is as follows: that during his years in Goa, Macau, and Mozambique, Camões ‘discovered’ two things.

  First, he learned what it was to be Portuguese, to come from a landscape whose towns and rivers he loved, whose plains and castles were haunted by the ghosts of warriors who had fought for this territory, whose provinces were part of Christendom and the Holy Roman Empire but were emerging as a ‘state’, and whose people were learning loyalty to a concept of nation which transcended loyalty to kings. Secondly, he learned to celebrate what the Portuguese had given to the world with the pioneer voyages of the fifteenth century, culminating in the voyage to India, in revealing the planet’s true dimensions, its wealth, and its multitudes of peoples. It was the former of these ideas which was prophetic, taking wing after the restoration of Portuguese independence from Spain in 1640. The latter, Camões’s celebration of the newness of the world, was a theme that required, and requires, constant rediscovery.