Selected Sonnets

Book excerpt: The most important writer in Portuguese history and one of the preeminent European poets of the early modern era, Luís de Camões (1524–80) has been ranked as a sonneteer on par with Petrarch, Dante, and Shakespeare. Championed by such influential English poets as William Blake and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and admired in America by Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Herman Melville, Camões was renowned for his intensely personal sonnets and equally intense adventurous life. He was banished for dueling and brawling at court, lost an eye fighting the Moors in North Africa, was shipwrecked off the coast of India, jailed in Goa, and exiled in Mozambique. Throughout these personal trials, he advanced poetry beyond the Petrarchin model of love won and lost to write of personal despair, history, politics, war, religion, and the natural beauty of Portugal. The first significant English translation of Camões's sonnets in more than one hundred years, Selected Sonnets: A Bilingual Edition collects seventy of Camões's best—all musically rendered into contemporary, yet metrical and rhymed, English-language poetry by William Baer, with the original Portuguese on facing pages—and reintroduces the genius of a poet whom Cervantes called "the incomparable treasure of Lusus." A comprehensive selection of sonnets that demonstrates the full range of Camões's interests and invention, Selected Sonnets will prove indespensible for both students and teachers in comparative and Renaissance literature, Portuguese and Spanish history, and the art of literary translation.