Selected Sonnets: A Bilingual Edition.

Selected Sonnets: A Bilingual Edition, by Luis de Camoes, edited and translated by William Baer (Chicago, 176 pp., $26)

LUIS DE CAMOES (1524-80) was a violent and even criminal adventurer who was fortunate to live to write his epic Os Lusiadas (1572) and a large number of superb Petrarchan sonnets, a selection from which is ably translated in this bilingual edition by William Baer, a frequent NR contributor. This volume is a worthy successor to Baer's "Borges" & Other Sonnets" (2003). It is necessary to add that it has been splendidly produced by the University of Chicago Press, with illustrations from the period.

Camoes was admired by writers from Cervantes through Wordsworth and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and it seems odd that he--a Renaissance adventurer connected with art--did not turn up in Pound's Cantos along with Odysseus; the anonymous poet of El Cid; Malatesta; and other heroes.

Camoes was probably born in Lisbon and educated at the great University of Coimbra, but in spirit he followed the hero of his Lusiads, Vasco da Gama, whose 1497-99 voyage around the Cape of Good Hope to India limned a Portuguese trading empire that reached halfway around the globe, from the Amazon in the West to the Moluccas in Indonesia, Macao in China, and Goa in India, the administrative hub in the East. Camoes was banished for dueling and brawling at the Portuguese court, lost an eye fighting the Moors in Africa, was shipwrecked off the coast of Cambodia, swam to shore with the manuscript of his epic, was imprisoned in Goa, and was exiled to Mozambique. In 1580 he died of the plague.

His Lusiads, one of the great Western epics, is available in several translations; and now William Baer brings his sonnets forward as accomplished, indeed often beautiful, examples of this Renaissance invention. Put on an Amalia Rodrigues fado recording and enjoy Baer's translation of Camoes's sonnet "Como quando do mar tempestuoso," on this page.