Editor’s Preface.
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.
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 have been daily and hourly consulted as to this expression, or this or that change of word, this or that peculiarity of Camoens.
What, then, are those difficulties, you, the reader, will ask me? Let me try to explain. So many enterprising poet-authors have translated Camoens, and received their meed of praise and popularity. In old times, Fanshawe, the best because so quaint; then, Messrs. Mickle, Musgrave, and Mitchell; latterly, Mr. J. J. Aubertin, Mr. Duff, and Mr. Hewitt.
But 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. 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.
What I tremble for in its publication is, that it is too æsthetic for the British Public, and will not meet with its due meed of appreciation as the commoner translations have done. 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.
It stands in poetry where Boito’s “Mefistofele” stands in music. He was not appalled by Gounod, nor Spohr, nor Wagner, nor Meyerbeer, and in the opinion of many musicians has distanced them all. The first hearing of his opera takes away your breath—that is, if you are a musician—if not, it was a sin to occupy the place which would have been a seventh heaven to a musician. You don’t understand it, nor pretend to do so, but you long to go again, and you do go night after night, each time unfolding new beauties in each separate passage, until you know by heart and have dissected the whole, nor even then do you tire, but enjoy it all the more.
In this translation, whenever my Husband has appeared to coin words, or to use impossible words, they are the exact rendering of Camoens; in every singularity or seeming eccentricity, the Disciple has faithfully followed his Master, his object having been not simply to write good verse, but to give a literal word-for-word rendering of his favourite hero. And he has done it to the letter, not only in the words, but in the meaning and intention of Camoens.
To the unæsthetic, to non-poets, non-linguists, non-musicians, non-artists, Burton’s Lusiads will be an unknown land, an unknown tongue. One might as well expect them to enjoy a dominant seventh or an enharmonic change in harmony. To be a poet one must be a musician; to be a musician or a painter one must have a poetic temperament, or the poetry or the music will have a hard metallic sound, and become a doggerel, a scherzo; the painting a sign-post!
With this little explanation, I commend this grand work to the study of the public. The Commentaries will interest all alike.