Editorial Review Book Description
The most important writer in Portuguese history and one of the preeminent European poets of the early modern era, LuÃs 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 advancedpoetry 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.
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Revisiting a great poet
This is a great anthology of Camoes lyric work.I'm a fan of bilingual poetry editions.These translations are very fine, even though not literal.
As a literary translator once told me "You write English literature."The notes are good and background information is helpful.Anyone interested in 16th century literature, I think, will treasure this volume.
You can never have too much Camoes
Luis de Camoes is generally considered the greatest writer in the Portuguese language - on a par with Shakespeare in English, or Goethe in German.His most famous work is a long epic poem entitled "Os Lusiadas" or "The Portuguese" which describes in verse Portuguese exploration of the world (see my review).Camoes also wrote several hundred sonnets, unpublished in his lifetime.Most scholars think somewhere from 200 - 300 of the current sonnets variously ascribed to Camoes are his, with a few collections having over 400.I personally like his sonnets better than his epic poem, which can be stylized and obscure.
This book is a collection of 70 sonnets with the Portuguese and English translation on facing pages.The translator, William Baer, not only translates well, but he manages to also write his translation in rhyme.This is a tremendous accomplishment because Portuguese, like all Romance languages, has few word endings and is easy to rhyme while English, a polyglot Germanic language, is not.
That is not to say that the translations are perfect.They are not.But they're pretty good and anything approximating Camoes is great.Camoes is rather a playful cynic and most of these sonnets bring out those qualities.There is a sense of wistfulness ("saudade" in Portuguese) in most of them regarding lost love and homesickness.Camoes was a world travelling ne'er-do-well who was banished from his homeland, lost an eye battling the Moors, was imprisoned, and shipwrecked near the Mekong Delta, saving only his manuscript poems.He returned to his homeland only to watch a young adventurous King lead an army of nearly all the young men of the country to a massacre by a vastly greater Moorish force.Since this King had no relatives, the country was taken over by Spain for nearly a century and lost its status as a world power.
Camoes, an ardent patriot, was devastated and you can feel that devastation in all his writings.This sense of loss in his works makes his writing almost modern.If you're new to Camoes, this book is the best single place to start.And if you've ever loved and lost, or left your home for long years, or even felt nostalgic for past places and people, these poems will go right to your heart.Highly recommended, and I don't give out many 5 star recommendations.
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