“This extensive and opulent city is now nothing but a vast heap of ruins … Earth’s womb was heard to groan with hollow roar, The dwellings tumbled, but men trembled more.”
A man of frightful figure looked at us with a choleric eye. The priest looked directly at him for a moment without moving so much as a muscle, simulating the best feigned indifference I ever saw. He did not forbid me to look at that man—perhaps he thought we would be less suspicious.
“It has always seemed impossible to me to write the mysteries of a land that has none, and, invented, nobody believes them. I was wrong. It is because I did not know Lisbon, or not able to calculate the power of a man’s imagination.”
Europe clamours for the organisation of labour and preaches communism. Here the same clamour translates into the cry of ‘War on the Portuguese’.
Mysterymania gripped the world in the 1840s and 1850s. From London and France it spread to USA, Germany, Italy, Brazil, and Portugal. Camilo Branco’s Misterios de Lisboa was part of this thrilling genre.
What Strangford wanted to do was translate Luis de Camões’s little-known sonnets, and the result was Poems, from the Portuguese of Luis de Camoens.