Customer Reviews

Selected Sonnets: A Bilingual Edition (English and Portuguese Edition)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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 Camoes also wrote several hundred sonnets, unpublished in his lifetime.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.

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.

I didn't read it, but I'm portuguese and I was looking for an English translation the other day of one of his sonnets so I stumbled upon this book.
Here's what I found [page 70, "Mudam-se os tempos, mudam-se as vontades..."]:

"E, afora este mudar-se cada dia,
outra mudança faz de mór espanto:
que não se muda já como soía."

This books translation:
"Yet even more
astonishing is yet another unseen
change within all these endless changes:
that for me, nothing ever changes anymore."

--

This is wrong, really wrong. It's without a doubt one of his top5 sonnets, one that every portuguese knows, and this translation completely misses it. I was in such shock I'm writing this review!
A quite accurate translation would be:

"But besides this daily vicissitude,
One further change is the greater woe
That it changes no longer as was its wont."

See the difference?

--

Now, I haven't read anything else on this book besides this sonnet, but even considering translating poetry is really tough, this translation is definitely poor. Again, judgind by this poem alone, one much better translation was the latter above, by Landeg White.

I am not a translator of poetry in Portugeuse but my ears and eyes tell me that there is something seriously wrong with these sonnets in English. I cannot do better in this review than quote comments in the Guardian Review (2006) by Landeg White:

"Even a labour of love can be laborious, and what's wrong with these versions is visible at 20 paces. Camoes' Portuguese, in its wit, lucidity and extreme economy of expression, occupies the left-hand pages. Baer's English - normally the more succinct of the two languages - sprawls over the right hand as diction and prosody are sacrificed in the search for rhymes. White notes Camoes' "sense of fragile but robust perfection. It's not to be caught in English by pursuing one quality at the expense of all the others. In poem after poem, Baer expands on the original. " Pasmadas" (astonished) becomes "stunned and terri fied"; "tears" become "watery tears"; " fresca " becomes "sweet and fresh"; and so on as he provides the various possible translations indicated in the dictionary all too obviously at his elbow."

Amazon's misinformation is reprehensible. This is a beautifully translated book of poems from Portuguese(NOT Spanish)into English.