Luis de Camoes / Selected Sonnets

The most important writer in Portuguese history and one of the preeminent European poets of the early modern era, Luiacute;s de Camotilde;es (152480) 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, Camotilde;es 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 Camotilde;es's sonnets in more than one hundred years,Selected Sonnets: A Bilingual Editioncollects seventy of Camotilde;es's bestall musically rendered into contemporary, yet metrical and rhymed, English-language poetry by William Baer, with the original Portuguese on facing pagesand 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 Camotilde;es's interests and invention,Selected Sonnetswill prove indespensible for both students and teachers in comparative and Renaissance literature, Portuguese and Spanish history, and the art of literary translation.

William Baer is professor of English at the University of Evansville; founder and editor of the Formalist, a magazine devoted to poetry and literary translations; and the author of two books of poems, including The Unfortunates, winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize.