From Leonard Bacon, 1951, Camões and the Glory of Portugal (@IWP Articles).

camões by leonard bacon

I

Have I done with Camões? — Is he done with me?
Although, like Fanshawe and the rest, I failed
To shadow forth the splendor that once sailed
Across the new-discovered “Secret Sea,”
Yet the game was worth the candle. Liberty
Lived on the page. And what a flag he nailed
To the masthead of the Soul! Brave thought, not staled
By cant, but fit to keep republics free.

The one-eyed wanderer, whose clear, lovely mind
Puzzles sophistication, holds the clue
To labyrinths we all must blunder through,
Sophisticates or not, and still whets bright
The honor and the conscience of mankind,
Against the reign of Chaos and Old Night.

II

How shall we judge Camões? — Judge the Sea,
Anatomize a forest, count the birds
In the Fall migration, measure well the words
That are to analyse a melody,
Pick and choose elements of artistry,
Plunge deep with Proteus’ oceanic herds,
Sail round all Guardafuis and Cape Verdes,
Adamastor still maintains his mystery.

But the man is here, as if in talk with you,
In spite of all conventions of his time,
Conceit and pun, extravagating rhyme —
So runs the critic’s dry as dust rehearsal.
What matter, if Paradisiac powers renew,
Simple, complex, individual, universal?

New at IWP Articles: Leonard Bacon, 1951, Camões and the Glory of Portugal.

“But before launching into what to me is a tremendous theme, I must make two admissions, first, that I am pretty much of a tyro with respect to the magnificent language of Portugal, and, second, that I am in the words of a Portuguese friend, ‘a co-religionist of the Camonian cult’ — a besotted enthusiast, who had his small episode on the Road to Damascus some thirty years ago. It was then that the scales fell from my eyes, as I wandered idly through a footnote in Fiske’s Discovery of America, where the fiftieth stanza of the Fifth Book of the Lusiads burned as bright as a ruby in a beam of sun. This happens to be a stanza so easy that a little French and less Latin would enable anyone to perceive without difficulty its clear transplendence. And my demon told me there and then that some day, if only because of those eight blazing and sonorous lines, I would translate the Epic, which has, in fact, come to pass. Accordingly, bear with me if I seem a little mad about my great man, and if I speak of his poetry in terms which, whatever they may appear to you, are certainly not hyperbolic to me. However, what troubles me most is ignorance, sheer ignorance, of which, in spite of seven years’ toil, magnificent residues remain. But all my life circumstance has compelled me to speak or write about subjects concerning which I was insufficiently informed, and I do not see why I should stop now, particularly as I am burning to infect others with an interest in Camões, because of the pleasure he can give them, and because such pleasure increases human understanding between the nations of men.”

From The Life of Samuel Johnson:

“The late ingenious Mr. Mickle, some time before his death, wrote me a letter concerning Dr. Johnson, in which he mentions: ‘I was upwards of twelve years acquainted with him, was frequently in his company, always talked with ease to him, and can truly say, that I never received from him one rough word.’ In this letter he relates his having while engaged in translating the Lusiad had a dispute of considerable length with Johnson, who, as usual, declaimed upon the misery and corruption of a sea life, and used this expression: ‘It had been happy for the world, Sir, if your hero Gama, Prince Henry of Portugal, and Columbus, had never been born, or that their schemes had never gone farther than their own imaginations.’

“‘This sentiment,’ says Mr. Mickle, ‘which is to be found in his Introduction to the World Displayed, I, in my Dissertation prefixed to the Lusiad, have controverted; and though authors are said to be bad judges of their own works, l am not ashamed to own to a friend, that that dissertation is my favourite above all that I ever attempted in prose. Next year, when the Lusiad was published, I waited on Dr. Johnson, who addressed me with one of his good-humoured smiles: ‘Well, you have remembered our dispute about Prince Henry, and have cited me too. You have done your part very well indeed: you have made the best of your argument; but I am not convinced yet.’

“‘Before publishing the Lusiad, I sent Mr. Hoole a proof of that part of the introduction in which I make mention of Dr. Johnson, yourself, and other well-wishers to the work, begging it might be shown to Dr. Johnson. This was accordingly done; and in place of the simple mention of him which I had made, he dictated to Mr. Hoole the sentence as it now stands.

“‘Dr. Johnson told me in 1772 that, about twenty years before that time, he himself had a design to translate the Lusiad, of the merit of which he spoke highly, but had been prevented by a number of other engagements.'”

New at IWP Books: Leonard Bacon’s Ph.D.s Male and Female Created He Them. From Sophia Trenton:

…………………………….
And he was very greatly to be pitied,
 And yet more pitiable, alas! he knew it,
For he had been irrevocably committed
 To talk about a thing and not to do it.
Men suffer thus however nimble-witted,
 And find not, though they seek peace and ensue it,
Their minds in a perpetual bereavement,
Wanting the strong embraces of achievement.

Not that he was not highly publicatious,
 Each year a volume more or less he tallied —
The simulacrum of a book, but, gracious!
 What reader e’er so hardy ever rallied
His forces to the sticking-point audacious,
 And faced that ghost of learning thin and pallid?
Ah! never, never shall that reader be
Saving perhaps another Ph.D.,

Who with great show of learning shall refute
 That which already has been self-refuted,
And multiply the matter in dispute,
 Merely to be himself in turn disputed.
So rushes on the circular pursuit,
 And will, I fear, till Gabriel’s horn is tooted.
But the interruption of the Day of Doom
Once o’er, I’m sure the champions will resume.
…………………………….

New at IWP Articles: Jacques Barzun, 1959, The Tyranny of Idealism in Education.

“Education is always inadequate, its pure purpose flawed by those who give it as well as by those who take it. But one element which belongs to it, and which we have suppressed in favor of ideal projections since Wilson and Dewey struggled with an older pedantry, is still there to be used as a tonic and a test: that element is intellectual work, the use of the mind for creating order in a man’s perceptions and thoughts about the world. Everything else, character included, is a by-product, and hence impossible to ‘give’ or even to cultivate directly.

“Nor, in the end, is this effort of intellect to know itself and its surroundings a selfish individual pursuit, though even if it were it would still be the only possible goal of higher education properly so-called. When sufficiently widespread the individual effort does not remain a private good but has a national result, as Wilson, once again, made evident: ‘America will be great among the nations only in proportion as she finds an adequate voice…. She will not be known until she is understood; …her wealth will not interpret her, or her physical power, or the breadth of her uncounted acres, or anything she has builded; but only such revealing speech as will hold the ear and command the heed of other nations and of her own people. Our thinkers must assist her to know herself.’”

New at IWP Articles: Jacques Barzun, 1987, Some Distinctive Characteristics of Modern Scholarship.

“The rampant specialism, an arbitrary and purely social evil, is not recognized for the crabbed guild spirit that it is, and few are bold enough to say that carving out a small domain and exhausting its soil affords as much a chance for protected irresponsibility as for scientific thoroughness.” (Jacques Barzun, Science: The Glorious Entertainment)

William James and Autumn by Leonard Bacon (1940)

Partakers of the life of God,
Drunkards of the Divine — what else? —
We face the serpent or the rod
And buckle truth within our belts —

Truth that strange thing that must describe
The instant feeling of a man,
Nor shirk the emotions of the tribe,
That all must know or no one can.

That, it is felt, the man should feel.
What man? What throb should touch him so,
Who beats at barriers that conceal
The mysteries he can never know?

He fronts the scorpions and the whips,
With such devices as he can,
Dazzled by each apocalypse
That tells him nothing. Man! Man! Man!

O Autumn! What you tell us is
Written on the world’s face in fire.
You touch on instabilities
Of hope gone by, withered desire.

O Autumn! dreaming of the Spring,
Without a spirit or a name,
You face the death that is a Thing
And shudder at the brutal game

That you are called upon to play.
You did not ask for it, but there
Oaks burn and maples blaze away,
And the whole thing is your affair.

O Autumn! Winter’s in the wind
Chill dawn lets loose. There is a tang
In that harsh breath. The sin we sinned
Hurts. And who asks what song we sang?

New at IWP Books: Joaquim Nabuco on Camoens and The Lusiads, addresses delieverd at Yale, Vassar and Cornell in 1908 and 1909. Nabuco was the Brazilian Ambassador to the US at the time.

“Modern reading is so indiscriminate that the popularity of an author is no test of his intrinsic value. One had better not touch Homer, or Dante, or Camoens, if one has contracted the habit of reading to kill time. To enjoy their company we need the contrary habit of reading to treasure up our passing hours in undying recollections. To read the great authors of the past is a duty for all who are real particles of the human intelligence. If one lets his taste for the writings of the day absorb him, he overlooks that sacred duty of watching over the precious deposits of the human mind, of keeping fresh and retentive the memory of our race, of increasing its touch with the past the more it drifts away from us. A humanity, wholly interested in the present, losing gradually its memory, unable to enjoy what should be its greatest pleasure: that of living anew by recollection in its ages of art and poetry and legend, would be a sad sight, however great the material development around it. Any shrinking of human imagination would be fatal to mind and heart, however great might be the increase of discovery.”

New at IWP Books: Luís de Camões, Os Lusíadas.

Jacques Barzun (From Dawn to Decadence): “Os Lusiadas has been translated four times into English, the latest version being in prose. [The one to read is Leonard Bacon’s, in verse.] But there is another means of access that is strongly recommended to anyone who knows Spanish: it is to study in a comparative grammar the forms that differ regularly in Spanish and Portuguese and then to plunge into the poem with a dictionary at hand.”