The existential pilgrimage recorded in Camões' poetry is a search for something as revolutionarily modern as the pursuit of happiness on earth. His majestic epic poem, The Lusiads, centred on the pioneering voyage of Vasco da Gama to the East, which opened the doors of Renaissance Humanism to the world, is as much the celebration of a nation (Portugal) as an auto-biographical representation of his own life. C. M. Bowra characterizes it "the epic of Humanism" and Schlegel "the supreme example of epic poetry". But Camões' lyric poetry is no less impressive. This bilingual edition, organized by two of the author's most prominent scholars, provides an ample selection of the lyric and the epic, avoiding constrictions of rhyme and metre. Camões' poetry helps us to understand the time in which he lived but also our own time.
