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. Not previously published.
These letters were edited with the assistance of Carol Bolton, Tim Fulford and Ian Packer
For permission to publish the text of MSS in their possession, the editor wishes to thank the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; the Bodleian Library Oxford University; the British Library; Boston Public Library; the Syndics of Cambridge University Library; the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge; Haverford College, Connecticut; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Hornby Library, Liverpool Libraries and Information Services; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the John Rylands Library, Manchester; the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas; Luton Museum (Bedfordshire County Council); Massachusetts Historical Society; McGill University Library; the National Library of Scotland; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the New York Public Library (Pforzheimer Collections); the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; the Public Record Offices of Bedford, Suffolk (Bury St Edmunds) and Northumberland, the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne; the Trustees of the William Salt Library, Stafford, the Wisbech and Fenland Museum; the University of Virginia Library.
A research grant from the British Academy made much of the archival work possible, as did support from the English Department of Nottingham Trent University.
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WHOEVER has read the Lusiad only in Mr. MICKLE’s poem,
These lines are very beautiful, but not a single image contained in them is to be found in the Portuguese; there is scarcely a passage in the translation from which similar instances might not be produced. “He who can construe (says Mr. Mickle) may perform all that is claimed by the literal translator. He who attempts the manner of translation prescribed by Horace, ventures upon a task of genius; yet, however daring the undertaking, and however he may have failed in it, the translator acknowledges that, in this spirit, he endeavoured to give the Lusiad in English. Even farther liberties, in one or two instances, seemed to him advantageous; but a minuteness in the mention of these will not, in these pages, appear with a good grace. He shall only add, in this new edition, that some of the most eminent of the Portuguese literati, both in England and on the continent, have approved of these freedoms, and the original is in the hands of the world.” In the note to this passage, he points out two of these farther liberties; one of them trifling, the other of importance; and adds, “it was not to gratify the dull few whose greatest pleasure in reading a translation is to see what the author exactly says, it was to give a poem that might live in the English language, which was the ambition of the translator.”
And Mr. Mickle certainly has produced a poem that will live in the English language, and that well deserves to live. The Orlando Innamorato
However I may detract from Mr. Mickle’s merits as a faithful translator, I would give him all due praise as a poet; and a complete statement of what belongs to him, what to Camoens, would increase his reputation instead of impairing it. I never read a rhyme poem of any considerable length, that wearied me so little as the English Lusiad; the versification has the ease of Dryden without his negligence, and the harmony of Pope without his cloying sweetness.
The translator’s admiration of his author, has sometimes made him lavish commendations upon passages wholly undeserving of them. In the second book, a Moorish pilot is steering the Portuguese ships upon a ridge of rocks, from which they are saved by the sea nymphs. This, Mr. Mickle says, is in the spirit of Homer; but, whatever the allegory may be, the agency is disgustingly violent; the nymphs are represented as toiling and straining and panting to push off the vessels, and Venus, who leads them on, puts her breast against the prow of Gama’s ship, and thus thrusts it off. In the speech of Inez de Castro, he says, “the beautiful victim expresses the strong emotions of genuine nature;”she talks about Romulus and Remus, the burning plains of Lybia, and the snow-clad rocks of Scythia’s frozen shore.
The “prince of the poets of Spain” cannot rank highly as an epic writer; but the faults of Camoens will be excused when we remember that his poems were written in difficulties, and dangers, and affliction, like our own Spencer.
“Poorly, poor man! he lived; poorly, poor man! he died,”
and, in the melancholy biography of men of letters, there is no life more melancholy than that of Camoens. Poor and persecuted in Portugal, after wasting his youth, and losing one eye, in the service of his country, he left it for the Indies, and exclaimed, as he looked back upon Lisbon from the vessel, “Ingrata patria, non possidebis ossa mea.”
The lines which Mr. Hastings
The lines of Mr. Hastings follow here: