Luís de Camões

Os Lusíadas, usually translated as The Lusiads, is a Portuguese epic poem written by Luís de Camões and first published in 1572. It is widely regarded as the most important work of Portuguese-language literature and is frequently compared to Virgil's Aeneid. The work 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 and total 1,102 stanzas.

Gives English readers the first comprehensive collection of Camoes sonnets, songs, elegies, hymms, odes, eclogues, and other poems-more than 280 lyrics altogether, all rendered in engaging verse. Camoes was the first great European artist to cross into the Southern Hemisphere, and his poetry bears the marks of nearly two decades spent in north and east Africa, the Persian Gulf, India, and Macau. From an elegy set in Morocco, to a hymn written at Cape Guardafui on the northern tip of Somalia, to the first modern European love poems for a non-European woman, these lyrics reflect Camoes's encounters with radically unfamiliar peoples and places.