Jacques Barzun on The Lusiads (From Dawn to Decadence), and which translation to read:

While Tasso was garnering praise for his work, another poet in another southern land was composing a true epic. If the name of Camoëns and the tide Lusiads do not at once evoke recognition, the reason is again that of language: Portuguese is not widely read or studied outside its native limits in Europe and America. Camoëns chose a subject more factual than the paladins and had a more useful experience than the Italians for epic work. He was a soldier and sailor. He fought the Moors in north Africa, lost his right eye in battle and was invalided, re-enlisted to find adventure in the Indies, and there became an official in charge of a trading post. Accused of embezzlement and put in prison, he managed to get free and sail home. There, like everybody who could hold a pen, he wrote plays and sonnets and began the epic that made him the great national poet — indeed, a great poet tout court.

His subject was contemporary: the conquest of the ocean sea by the Portuguese. And his ostensible hero was a recent, historical character, Vasco da Gama. The actual hero is the Portuguese people, “the illustrious heart of Lusitania”; the name of the ancient Roman province that recurs in the title Lusiads. The adventures of the hero as man and people are the real and allegorical events of the explorer’s voyage home from the East. What there is of the marvelous in the incidents is due not to magic but to the well-known gods and goddesses of the ancients. Thus in the great episode of the Isle of Love, the domain of Venus, where the sailors take the Nereids, nymphs of the sea, as brides, Gama is the lover of their queen, Thetis, hitherto unattainable. Gama succeeds in his wooing after the repulsive giant Adamastor, typifying the enemies of the Portuguese, has failed. The union of godly beauty with human courage is to produce the future heroes of Portugal. In Greek mythology, when Thetis is subdued by Love, her offspring is the daundess Achilles.

This sample episode from The Lusiads is enough to show that it is a Humanist epic. Women other than goddesses play important parts in several of the main scenes. Among these is the story, told with lyrical tenderness, of Ines de Castro, the historical mistress of Prince Pedro of Portugal, whose close advisers compelled him to have her put to death. In tone and conception, the poem is equidistant from the popular ballad and the learned pastiche. Camoëns has been blamed for mixing the pagan myths with Christian, but it is standard Humanist practice. It is not sacrilege but spiritual synonymy. In The Lusiads the allegorical and the historical planes are traversed by physical action, told with unabating vigor and vivid detail. It came naturally to one who, though writing on terra firma, had spent many days on the deck of a ship. The fervor with which Camoëns celebrates the conquest, first of the sea by rounding the Cape of Storms at the tip of Africa, and then of the natives and the trade of the southeast Indies, makes his poem the first and last national epic — this at a time when the nations of the West were not so much made as in the making. The work withstands comparison with Virgil’s imperial Aeneid. Using a longer line than the Italians, Camoëns was able to achieve grandeur more easily, especially in the speeches. And he shares with the ancients and the writers of sagas something one might call epic pessimism. He is also considered Portugal’s greatest lyric poet, as well as the man whose writings fixed the Portuguese language.

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.