The Penguin Classics edition uses William Atkinson's 1952 English prose translation, which makes no attempt to convey anything of the poetical quality of the work. The gods' debates on Olympus have all the romance of a board meeting, and Vasco da Gama sounds more like a schoolteacher than a seafaring adventurer. But it's a fast, breezy read, and gives a good idea of the subject-matter of the poem. If we want to know what Camões was like as a poet, I suppose the only answer is to learn Portuguese.

Reading the poem in this translation, you are very conscious of its political agenda. On one level it's an adventure story: a brave band of men from a little European country boldly going to India round the Cape of Good Hope, a journey no-one has made before. But Camões goes to great lengths to tie the story in both with classical precedents and with Portuguese history. Allusions to the Aeneid in particular are very frequent. Da Gama is the Portuguese Aeneas, off to found a new Rome in the East for his country. Even though da Gama is also supposed to be a Christian emissary into the infidel world, Camões shows us how important his mision is by having the classical gods and goddesses fight about him, just as they did about Aeneas (Venus is rooting for him because she supports Portugal; Bacchus is trying to stop his journey because he feels that his monopoly is being infringed). The young king Sebastião is the ostensible addressee of the poem, and Camões doesn't hesitate to remind him that Augustus found Virgil very useful as a propagandist and gave him a nice pension. At one point a whole canto of the poem is taken up by Da Gama giving a lecture on Portuguese history as a form of Manifest Destiny; at another, a helpful nymph fills us in — in quite remarkable detail — about what is going to happen in the seventy years between da Gama's voyage and the publication of the poem.

Whenever he gets the chance, Camões has a go at Sebastião and his Christian fellow monarchs for not acting with a unified front against the Moslems. "We have the superior technology for the moment: if we all got together we could wipe out Islam and Christianise the world," is his message, which should go down well with today's loonier anti-Islamic politicians too. Unfortunately, Sebastião seems to have taken his advice to heart, going off a few years later on a disastrous crusade to Morocco with the entire army, and leaving the door open for Philip II of Spain.

It is interesting to observe how Camões takes it for granted that da Gama and his crew are able to communicate with the locals throughout most of their journey in Arabic: when they reach Calicut, they even encounter a Moroccan traveller who speaks Spanish. Calicut is already trading regularly with Europe through merchants based in the Arabian peninsula. It's easy to forget when we talk about "voyages of discovery" that this wasn't about going to new places: rather it was a matter of finding new, cheaper ways to get to the sources of the raw materials. All Camões's talk about spreading the Gospel is a bit of a smoke-screen: da Gama didn't bother to convert anybody (in fact, Camões never mentions whether they even had any priests or missionaries with them), but he did make jolly sure that he came back with samples of spices.

Wonderfully written story interweaving Greek gods into the lives of the voyagers. I am not sure if the tale is historically correct, but I enjoyed the adventure into the unknown lands. ( )

The rating is for the translation and not for the original poem. I'm afraid that this translation – though accurate – is very flat. Anyone wanting to read this epic in English should go to the 17th-century translation by Sir Richard Fanshawe — available in Vol. 2 of Fanshawe's Collected Poems and translation (OUP, 1995), which version is full of brio AND poetry. ( )