The translation here, dating from 1655, is one of the great English translations of the 17th century, made while Sir Richard Fanshawe (1608–1666), a supporter of Charles I and Charles II, was under house arrest during the Cromwellian inter-regnum. , fashioning a national epic on the empire’s origins in much the same way as Virgil had done for the Rome of Augustus. , so Camões uses the great navigator, Vasco da Gama, as his tutelary spirit, while also aping Virgil’s approach in the Aeneid As Dante took Virgil as his guide in the Divine Comedy (The Lusiads), an epic poem on the beginnings of the Portuguese maritime empire, for which the author himself had fought as a common soldier – in North Africa (where he lost an eye in battle), in India, in southern Africa, the Red Sea, India and Macau – where the grotto in which he wrote some of the poem is a tourist attraction. A wonderful lyric poet, and also an occasional dramatist, his masterpiece is Os Lusíadas Camões (ca.1524/25–1580) is the national poet of Portugal, with a status in the Lusophone world akin to that of Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes and Goethe elsewhere.
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