Camoes (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. A wonderful lyric poet, and also an occasional dramatist, his masterpiece is Os Lusiadas (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. As Dante took Virgil as his guide in the Divine Comedy, so Camoes uses the great navigator, Vasco da Gama, as his tutelary spirit, while also aping Virgil's approach in the Aeneid, fashioning a national epic on the empire's origins in much the same way as Virgil had done for the Rome of Augustus. The translation here, dating from 1655, is one of the great translations of the 17th century, made while Sir Richard