(…cont.)
CAMÕES’S OS LUSÍADAS, THE FIRST MODERN EPIC (2/2)
With William Julius Mickle’s translation in 1776, one hundred-twenty-one years after Fanshawe’s, however, the Lusíadas ‘became’ a British poem, one offered to an imperial power in the midst of what seemed to be unlimited overseas growth. While Mickle’s translation has often been criticized for its alterations of Camões’s text-excisions and interpolations of considerable amounts of material, varying the meaning of the poem in substantial ways, and the poet Longfellow describes it, rather harshly, as ‘rather a paraphrase than a translation’[19]-it nevertheless, in its numerous editions (it is still in print), continued to reign as the edition of the Lusíadas best known to English-language readers with little or no Portuguese. It was in Mickle’s version that Melville got his Camões, for instance, and that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow quoted in his anthology Poets and Poetry of Europe, in which he included the episodes of the posthumous crowning of Inez de Castro and the appearance of Adamastor, the monstrous ‘Spirit of the Cape.’ In fact, even as he offered his own competing translation of Camões’s poem in the 1880s, Richard Burton admitted that Mickle’s ‘Poem with all its faults of stilted, turgid smoothness, of ‘flimsy, pompous chime,’ has maintained up to the present the hold which it took upon the last century; and has become a pseudo-classic in English literature’-a questionable status, surely, but one that that his own mock-Elizabethan version failed to achieve.[20]
Trumping all or any of its perceived faults, however, was the fact that Mickle presented his version as the epic of trade and commerce. No Englishman had written such a poem, and Mickle, himself a poet, domesticated it for imperial Britain by ‘Englishing’ it to his own liking. He complemented this work by discussing the Lusíadas in an introductory essay. It was hardly a disinterested performance, for Mickle had ties to the East India Company, whose interests (along with his own) the poem would serve in its disguise as propaganda for the continued unfolding of Britain’s commercial empire. Right off Mickle announces his theme and reveals his purpose: ‘It is a concatenation of events centered in one great action, events which gave birth to the present commercial system of the world; if these be of the first importance in the civil history of mankind, the Lusiad, of all other poems, challenges the attention of the philosopher, the politician, and the gentlemen.’[21] Distinguishing it from Milton’s Paradise Lost, ‘the Epic Poem of Religion,’ he describes the Lusíadas, ‘a poem founded on such an important period of history,’ as especially important for the Britain of his day, for it offers ‘evidence to counter the arguments of those who lament that either India was ever discovered, and who assert that the increase of trade is big with the real misery of mankind, and that commerce is only the parent of degeneracy, and the nurse of every vice.’[22] On the contrary, argues Mickle rather baldly, commerce and trade have introduced to native and barbarous populations the advantages of Europe’s superior civilization. In short, Camões’s poem, on ‘the grandest subject it is (of profane history) which the world has ever beheld,’ is celebrated:
A voyage esteemed too great for man to dare; the adventures of this voyage, through unknown oceans, deemed unnavigable; the Eastern World happily discovered, and for ever indissolubly joined and given to the Western; the grand Portuguese empire in the east founded; the humanization of mankind, and universal commerce the consequence! What are the adventures of an old fabulous hero’s arrival in Britain, what are Greece and Latium in arms for a woman, compared to this? Troy is in ashes, and even the Roman empire is no more. But the effects of the voyage, adventures, and bravery of the hero of the Lusiad, will be felt and beheld, and perhaps increase in importance, while the world shall remain.[23]
In stressing that the Lusíadas (like Gama’s voyage) was about ‘universal commerce,’ Mickle was well aware that he was in defiance of Camões’s intentions. ‘Propaganda for the discoveries ran up against a time-honored aristocratic disdain for mercantile activities,’ it has been written. ‘If profit was a matter in which a gentleman was not supposed to take any interest, the Portuguese aristocracy could view its participation in the imperial enterprise primarily in terms of its traditional role as a military caste, in terms of personal honor, patriotism, and religious zeal. These are the terms of the Lusíadas, and indeed they are the traditional terms of epic, a genre historically linked to aristocratic values…. Exchanging gain for glory, Camões provided a version of the Portuguese ventures in the East that plays down their commercial character, a version that was both consonant with epic norms of behavior and congenial to the self-image of a noble reader.’[24]
Immediately recognized as one of Camões’s most memorable achievements, the figured avatar of the ‘Spirit of the Cape,’ Adamastor, may not be what Mickle rather rashly called it, ‘the grandest fiction in human composition,’ but it has had its many admirers and imitators down through the centuries.[25] ‘There is nothing in his [Camões’s] models to equal the terrifying grandeur of the apparition of the Spirit of the Cape of Good Hope, as the Giant Adamastor, or the prophetic truth of his allocution to the Portuguese Argonauts of Vasco da Gama as they round the Cape of Storms for the first time,’ writes Campbell.[26] A. Bartlett Giamatti, for another, writes: ‘For Camoens, the sea was all those forces presented by the giant figure of Adamastor (Canto V) and Portugal’s glory consisted in braving them. It is the passionate sense of individual and collective heroism, and the feeling that the sea is the proper scene for that heroism, that hold this poem together.’ [27] Yet it seems to me to be something of an exaggeration, though it is still worth noting, in the words of a recent commentator, that ‘more than any other episode of the Lusíadas, it [the Adamastor episode] has given the poem its place in world literature, a place to which Camões and even his hero da Gama self-consciously lay claim.’[28]
Here is Camões’s description of Adamastor, the fierce ‘Spirit of the Cape,’ just before the monster offers his prophecies (Canto V, stanzas 39-40):
I spoke, when rising through the darken’d air, Appall’d we saw an hideous Phantom glare; High and enormous o’er the flood he tower’d, And thwart our way with sullen aspect lour’d: An earthly paleness, o’er his check was spread, Erect uprose his hairs of wither’d red; Writhing to speak, his sable lips disclose, Sharp and disjoin’d, his gnashing teeth’s blue rows; His haggard beard flow’d quivering on the wind, Revenge and horror in his mien combined; His clouded front, by withering lightnings scarred, The inward anguish of his soul declared. His red eyes glowing from their dusky caves Shot livid fires: far echoing o’er the waves His voice resounded, as the cavern’d shore With hollow groan repeats the tempest’s roar. Cold gliding horrors thrill’d each hero’s breast, Our bristling hair and tottering knees confess’d Wild dread; the while with visage ghastly wan, His black lips trembling, thus the fiend began…[29]
While Mickle omits some of Camões’s original description, notably a comparison with the Colossus of Rhodes, he expands enthusiastically on the horrifying aspects of the monster’s appearance, and since most of Camões’s English-language readers after 1776 read his poem, not in the original Portuguese but in Mickle’s translation, it is Mickle’s Adamastor that has lodged itself in the minds of readers and writers alike.
Until recently, it seemed satisfactory to gloss Camões’s monster simply as the symbol of ‘both a natural phenomenon and the dangers of the voyage’; or explain: ‘the horror which the vision of Adamastor arouses is based on a natural fear of going too far and has a real relation to experience. The grisly and revolting phantom is an apt symbol of the horrors which may well appall those who break into waters where no men have sailed before.’[30] This no longer seems adequate, however, for there have been important changes of late in how Adamastor is viewed by Camões’s readers, particularly his English-language readers in Southern Africa. Beginning with Campbell’s 1926 poem, ‘Rounding the Cape,’ praise for Camões’s creation has been invaded by a consciousness of its tragic significance in past and present African history:
Farewell, terrific shade! Though I go free Still of the powers of darkness art thou Lord: I watch the phantom sinking in the sea Of all that I have hated or adored. The prow glides smoothly on through seas quiescent: But where the last point sinks into the deep, The land lies dark beneath the rising crescent, And Night, the Negro, murmurs in his sleep.[31]
For Campbell, the natural dangers posed by dangerous seas and storms are tied in with the dangers posed by Africa itself-the Dark Continent. Later writers in Southern Africa have taken the hint, finding in Camões’s Adamastor the symbolic key to the unpleasant truth about the dire and destructive history Africa had been made to share with Europe. The grand symbol of danger and potential destruction by which the brave exploits of conquerors justified in their civilizing missions could be given their just measurement was to be recognized for what it really was: an imposition of Eurocentric meaning on African history. Describing the Lusíadas as ‘the national epic of the Lusitanian bogeymen,’ Stephen Gray speaks for many when he argues:
It is imperative to examine it by a reverse-angle shot, as it were; we look at Camoens from the vantage point of the cruel, dark and vengeful interior that he and his hero viewed as unfit for human habitation…. The figure of Adamastor is at the root of all the subsequent white semiology invented to cope with the African experience: he is menacing and inimical, and seen across a barrier; he belongs to an older but defeated culture, and is likely to sink the new European enlightenment if allowed within its purlieu; although his size is gigantic, his responses are essentially childish and they obey paternalistic directives; he is capable of love, but only carnally, so that if he advances too presumptuously he is to be humiliated and rendered impotent…. His Titanic force, tantamount to a block mountain’s, his rumbling and earth-shaking, is not only the pent power of a vast and frighteningly unknown continent, populated by serpents and burning stone, but a symbol of the awe with which Africa was regarded in early experiences of the untamed.[32]
In short, the ‘myth’ of Adamastor-in the revisionary work of writers such as David Wright, Douglas Livingstone, and André Brink-‘expresses the white man’s anxieties about Africa,’ not the intrinsic reality of Africa itself.
It is but a short step from Gray’s re-casting of the figure of Adamastor as a symbol for Europe’s African ‘anxieties’ to saying that ‘the giant Adamastor is a blown-up figure of the African natives and of the price that will be exacted by their resistance to Portuguese mastery and conquest. If ‘Adamastor’s name means ‘the untamed one,’ and he suggests the nature of the Africans who turned out to be less domesticated than they first appeared,’ as such a post-colonial reading would have it, ‘Camões’ monster, born of the initial encounter of Portuguese imperialism and its native subjects, is the first in the line of specters haunting Europe.’[33]
By way of conclusion, however, I would point to Jorge Luis Borges’s celebratory sonnet. Borges takes the familiar trope of the sea commander who has successfully completed his long voyage, replacing, in effect, Gama by Camões and Gama’s ship by Camões’s poem. Echoing Tasso’s four-centuries-old poem, Borges re-states the triumphant notion that the great poetry of the Lusíadas has withstood the mutabilities of human history.
Displaying neither pity nor anger, time
wears through the swords of the brave. O
Captain, beaten down and saddened, nostalgia
brought you back to your dying homeland to die
-the very flower of Portugal’s manhood having
perished in the mystic desert, and the harsh
Spaniard, formerly subservient, now menacing
vulnerable coasts. What I would want to know is
-when you were crossing that last river, did you,
in your humility, know that what had been lost-
the East and West, the sword and the standard-
had been made permanent, free from the mutability
of what’s human, in your poem, in Lusitania’s Aeneid.[34]
[19] The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Volume VI, 1875-1882, ed. Andrew Hilen (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 302-3.
[20] Quoted in Ford, Lusiad, p. xxix.
[21] Mickle, ‘Introduction,’ Lusiad, p. i.
[22] Mickle, ‘Introduction,’ Lusiad, p. ii.
[23] Mickle, ‘Dissertation,’ Lusiad, p. xciii.
[24] David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 257.
[25] Mickle, ‘Dissertation,’ Lusiad, p. xciv.
[26] Roy Campbell, ‘The Poetry of Luis de Camões,’ London Magazine, 4 (Aug. 1957), 30.
[27] A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 211.
[28] Quint, Epic and Empire, p. 257.
[29] Mickle, Lusiad, pp.120-21. In the original:
Não acabava, quando ua figura
Se nos mostra no ar, robusta e válida,
De disforme e grandíssima estatura,
O rosto carregado, a barba esquálida,
Os olhos encovados, e a postura
Medonha e má, e a cor terrena e pálida,
Cheios de terra e crespos os cabelos,
A boca negra, os dentes amarelos.
Tão grande era de membros, que bem posso
Certificar-te que este era o segundo
De Rodes estranhíssimo Colosso,
Que um dos sete milagres foi do mundo.
Cum tom de voz nos fala horrendo e grosso,
Que pareceu sair do mar profundo.
Arrepiam-se as carnes e o cabelo
A mi e a todos, só de ouvi-lo e vê-lo.
(Pierce, Os Lusíadas, p.118.)
[30] Pierce, Os Lusíadas, 118 note; Bowra, From Virgil to Milton, p. 126.
[31] Roy Campbell, ‘Rounding the Cape,’ in Adamastor (London: Faber and Faber, 1930), p. 38.
[32] Stephen Gray, Southern African Literature: An Introduction (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1979), pp. 27-8.
[33] Quint, Epic and Empire, pp.116, 124.
[34] My translation. In the original:
Sin lástima y sin ira el tiempo mella
Las heroicas espadas. Pobre y triste
A tu patria nostálgica volviste,
Oh capitán, para morir en ella
Y con ella. En el mágico desierto
La flor de Portugal se había perdido
Y el áspero español, antes vencido,
Amenazaba su costado abierto.
Quiero saber si aquende la ribera
Última comprendiste humildemente
Que todo lo perdido, el Occidente
Y el Oriente, el acero y la bandera,
Perduraría (ajeno a toda humana
Mutación) en tu Eneida lusitana.
(Jorge Luis Borges, ‘A Luis de Camoens,’ in Obra Poética, 1923-1977 [Buenos Aires / Madrid: Emecé Editores / Alianza Editorial, 1977], p.147.) Published in the Cambridge Companion to The Epic, ed. Catherine Bates (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
George Monteiro is Professor Emeritus of English and Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Brown University, and he continues as Adjunct Professor of Portuguese Studies at the same university. He served as Fulbright lecturer in American Literature in Brazil–Sao Paulo and Bahia–Ecuador and Argentina; and as Visiting Professor in UFMG in Belo Horizonte. In 2007 he served as Helio and Amelia Pedroso / Luso-American Foundation Professor of Portuguese, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Among his recent books are Stephen Crane’s Blue Badge of Courage, Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Literature, The Presence of Pessoa, The Presence of Camões, and Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop and Critical Essays on Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Among his translations are Iberian Poems by Miguel Torga, A Man Smiles at Death with Half a Face by José Rodrigues Miguéis, Self-Analysis and Thirty Other Poems by Fernando Pessoa, and In Crete, with the Minotaur, and Other Poems by Jorge de Sena. He has also published two collections of poems, The Coffee Exchange and Double Weaver’s Knot.
