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A Poet of Our Own: The Struggle for Os Lusíadas in the Afterlife of Camões

2010; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 10; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jem.0.0046

1553-3786

Miguel Martínez,

Historical Art and Culture Studies

By studying some early Spanish and English translations of Luís de Camões' Os Lusíadas, this essay explores the cultural and political struggle over the meaning and ownership of the Portuguese epic in early modern Europe. Shortly after the poet's death, two Castilian versions of the poem were published in 1580, the very same year of Philip II's annexation of Portugal and its overseas territories to his newly global monarchy. In 1655, some years after the Portuguese uprising against Spanish rule, the Royalist poet Richard Fanshawe published the first English translation of Os Lusíadas against the backdrop of the increasingly interventionist policies of the British Protectorate regarding the national and imperial conflict between the Iberian kingdoms. By allowing the production, redistribution, and new consumptions of literary capital, translation becomes a specifically imperial textual practice that participates in the international competition for cultural and political hegemony. This article, therefore, seeks to provide the grounds for a geopolitics of imperial cultural struggle around Os Lusíadas in early modern Europe.