Overview
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 and admired by such poets as William Blake, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Camões was renowned for his intensely personal sonnets and equally intense life of adventure.
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 by William Baer into contemporary, yet metrical and rhymed, English-language poetry, with the original Portuguese on facing pages.
A comprehensive selection of sonnets that demonstrates the full range of Camões’s interests and invention, Selected Sonnets will prove indispensable for both students and teachers in comparative and Renaissance literature, Portuguese and Spanish history, and the art of literary translation.
“Splendidly produced. . . .William Baer brings [Camões’s] sonnets forward as accomplished, indeed often beautiful, examples of this Renaissance invention.”—Jeffery Hart, National Review
“William Baer’s artistry gives the reader translations that convey much of the poetry’s original directness and simplicity, along with the intensity, timbre, and subtlety of the original imagery and themes. . . . [Selected Sonnets] will renew interest in these superb sonnets and bring Camões deserved readership in English.”—Choice