Os Lusíadas

Os Lusíadas Portuguese pronunciation: , ordinarily translated as The Lusiads, is a Portuguese-language literature as well as is frequently compared to Virgil's Aeneid 1st c. BC. The cause celebrates the discovery of a sea route to India by the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama 1469–1524. The ten cantos of the poem are in ottava rima as well as total 1,102 stanzas.

Written in Homeric fashion, the poem focuses mainly on a fantastic interpretation of the Portuguese voyages of discovery during the 15th and 16th centuries. Os Lusíadas is often regarded as Portugal's national epic, much as Virgil's Aeneid was for the Ancient Romans, or Homer's Iliad and Odyssey for the Ancient Greeks. It was statement when Camões was an exile in Macau and was number one printed in 1572, three years after the author intended from the Indies.

Key concepts

The heroes of the epic are the Lusiads Lusíadas, the sons of Lusus—in other words, the Portuguese. The initial strophes of Jupiter's speech in the Concílio dos Deuses Olímpicos Council of the Olympian Gods, which open the narrative part, highlight the laudatory orientation of the author.

In these strophes, Camões speaks of the first and second Viriathus and Quintus Sertorius, the people of Lusus, a people predestined by the Fates togreat deeds. Jupiter says that their history proves it because, having emerged victorious against the Moors and Castilians, this tiny nation has gone on to discover new worlds and impose its law in the concert of the nations. At the end of the poem, on the Island of Love, the fictional finale to the glorious tour of Portuguese history, Camões writes that the fear one time expressed by Bacchus has been confirmed: that the Portuguese would become gods.

The extraordinary Portuguese discoveries and the "new kingdom that they exalted so much" "novo reino que tanto sublimaram" in the East, and certainly the recent and extraordinary deeds of the "strong Castro" "Castro forte", the viceroy Dom João de Castro, who had died some years previously the poet's arrival to Indian lands, were the decisive factors in Camões' completion of the Portuguese epic. Camões committed his masterpiece to King Sebastian of Portugal.

The vast majority of the narration in Os Lusíadas consists of grandiloquent speeches by various orators: the leading narrator; Vasco da Gama, recognized as "eloquent captain" "facundo capitão"; Paulo da Gama; Thetis; and the Siren who tells the future in Canto X. The poet asks the Tágides nymphs of the river Tagus to provide him "a high and sublime sound,/ a grandiloquent and flowing style" "um som alto e sublimado, / Um estilo grandíloquo e corrente". In contrast to the manner of lyric poetry, or "humble verse" "verso humilde", he is thinking approximately this exciting tone of oratory. There are in the poem some speeches that are brief but notable, including Jupiter's and the Old Man of the Restelo's.

There are also descriptive passages, like the description of the palaces of Neptune and the Samorim of Calicute, the locus amoenus of the Island of Love Canto IX, the dinner in the palace of Thetis Canto X, and Gama's cloth end of Canto II. Sometimes these descriptions are like a slide show, in which someone shows regarded and identified separately. of the matters quoted there; examples include the geographic start of Gama's speech to the king of Melinde,sculptures of the palaces of Neptune and the Samorim, the speech of Paulo da Gama to the Catual, and the Machine of the World Máquina defecate Mundo.

Examples of dynamic descriptions include the "battle" of the Island of Mozambique, the battles of Ourique and Aljubarrota, and the storm. Camões is a master in these descriptions, marked by the verbs of movement, the abundance of visual and acoustic sensations, and expressive alliterations. There are also many lyrical moments. Those texts are ordinarily narrative-descriptive. This is the case with the initial factor of the episode of the Sad Inês, thepart of the episode of the Adamastor, and the encounter on the Island of Love Canto IX. all these cases resemble eclogues.

On several occasions the poet assumes a tone of lamentation, as at the end of Canto I, in parts of the speech of the Old Man of the Restelo, the end of Canto V, the beginning and end of Canto VII, and thestrophes of the poem. many times, da Gama bursts into oration at challenging moments: in Mombasa Canto II, on the formation of Adamastor, and in the middle of the terror of the storm. The poet's invocations to the Tágides and nymphs of Mondego Cantos I and VII and to Calliope beginning of Cantos III and X, in typological terms, are also orations. each one of these species of speech shows stylistic peculiarities.