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. What I tremble for in its publication is, that it is too aesthetic for the British Public, and will not meet with its due meed of appreciation as the commoner translations have done. 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. Hewitt.īut 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. Mickle, Musgrave, and Mitchell latterly, Mr. In old times, Fanshawe, the best because so quaint then, Messrs. So many enterprising poet-authors have translated Camoens, and received their meed of praise and popularity.
What, then, are those difficulties, you, the reader, will ask me? Let me try to explain.
I have been daily and hourly consulted as to this expression, or this or that change of word, this or that peculiarity of Camoens. 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 bouche of the day.
I felt that I had no light task before me when I undertook to edit my Husband's 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 one's shoulder to the wheel.
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