Selected Sonnets: A Bilingual Edition (Spanish Edition) (Hardcover)

by Luis de Camoes (Author), William Baer (Translator)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist
The Shakespeare, the Petrarch, of his nation, Camoes (1524-80) is Portugal's great sonneteer. He published only one sonnet in his lifetime, and many of doubtful authorship crept into the canon during their first century of great popularity. Baer presents 70 in Portuguese and his own English versions, formally faithful to the originals except that in the octaves Baer uses four (abba, cddc) rather than Camoes' two (abba, abba) rhymes. A sketch of Camoes' amazingly adventurous and colorful life, his works, and his reputation precedes the poems. Camoes fell in love above his station and was exiled because of it, eventually to Portugal's Asian colonies. He experienced warfare, shipwreck, jail, stranding in Africa, and, while he was gone, the death of his beloved. The sonnets, primarily inspired, as convention dictated, by the beloved, reflect his life and the reflections on it that his faith and literary education allowed. If the translations are rather less beautiful than one would want, the poems' great biographical interest makes them as fascinating, though differently so, as Shakespeare's. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"Splendidly produced.... William Baer brings [Camoes's] sonnets forward as accomplished, indeed often beautiful, examples of this Renaissance invention." - Jeffery Hart, National Review"

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (September 1, 2005)
• Language: English, Portuguese
• ISBN-10: 0226092666
• ISBN-13: 978-0226092669
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,410,474 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You can never have too much Camoes, October 26, 2006

By	Mark E. Baxter "Inquirer" (Layton, UT United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Revisiting a great poet, March 11, 2007

By	Christopher Schindler (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

5.0 out of 5 stars Portuguese NOT Spanish, June 1, 2009

By	M. silva "ml" - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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