Although Camões’s sonnets were not the first literary portrayals of Portuguese saudade, they expressed the melancholic condition in a way that still has a powerful effect on readers from any culture.

Camões’s Influence and Reputation

Immediately after the publication of Os Lusíadas in 1572, Camões was recognized as a great poet in his native land and in neighboring Spain. Even in Italy, his distinguished contemporary, the poet Torquato Tasso, called Camões the “prince of poets,” and the Italian also wrote a famous untitled sonnet about da Gama and Camões in 1580, the year of Camões’s death. According to Sir Richard Burton, Tasso admitted that he “feared no man but Camoens” as a poetic rival. As mentioned earlier, Cervantes similarly praised Camões as “the incomparable treasure of Lusus” in his Don Quixote (1605). Other continental admirers of Camões were Lope de Vega, Goethe, and even Voltaire, who referred to him as the “Portuguese Virgil” in his La Henriade (1723).

The first translation of Os Lusíadas into English was published by Sir Richard Fanshawe in 1655, and the second appeared over a hundred years later in William Julius Mickle’s influential couplet version of 1776. As for the lyrics, Philip Ayres published a translation of one of Camões’s sonnets in 1687, but it was the literary commentator William Hayley, in his 1782 An Essay on Epic Poetry; in Five Epistles, who first brought Camões’s lyrics to the attention of English readers. Hayley had the highest praise for Camões’s sonnets, and he translated one himself. The first ambitious translation of Camões’s lyrics into English appeared in Lord Viscount Strangford’s Poems, from the Portuguese of Luis de Camoens; with Remarks on his Writings, Notes, &c.(1803) which inspired among the English Romantics a deep appreciation of the Portuguese “Petrarch.” Byron was a great admirer; Southey translated a number of the poems; and Wordsworth, in his famous “Scorn Not the Sonnet,” defends the sonnet by citing Petrarch, Tasso, Camões (whose use of the sonnet “soothed an exile’s grief”), Dante, Spenser, and Milton. Of course, the greatest tribute to Camões came at midcentury from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who not only wrote the famous poem “Caterina to Camoens,” but then titled her sonnet sequence Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), pretending that the intimate love sonnets that she’d written during her courtship to Robert Browning were actually translations from Portuguese sonnets in the Camonian tradition.

In America, Camões was similarly admired by Edgar Allan Poe; Hawthorne, who included Camões’s work in several anthologies; Emily Dickinson, who knew his poetry through the influence of Thomas Wentworth Higginson; and, most significantly, Herman Melville. It’s hardly surprising that the poet-sailor author of Moby Dick(1851) would have a lifelong fascination with Camões. His deep appreciation expressed itself in various ways, especially in his novel White Jacket (1850), in which the sympathetic sea captain, Jack Chase, is a great admirer of Camões, and also in Melville’s uncollected, but subsequently well-known, two-part poem, “Camoens” and “Camoens in the Hospital.”

Later in the nineteenth century, the Englishman J. J. Aubertin published his translation of Seventy Sonnets of Camoens (1881), and three years later his friend Sir Richard Burton translated the Lyricks of Camoens(1884). These editions were very well received and again increased Camões’s reputation as a sonneteer. This popularity is made clear by the title of a subsequent book of translations by Richard Garnett entitled Dante, Petrarch, Camoens: CXXIV Sonnets which appeared in 1896. Thus by the end of the 1800s, Camões’s reputation as both a lyric and epic poet was firmly established. As the Portuguese poet and critic Jorge de Sena described it in 1974: “At the end of the nineteenth century, Camões was thought to be the Renaissance poet and man par excellence, after having been for the European Romantics a paragon of the adventurous genius who lives unhappy in love and dies a miser [in misery] ignored by society” (Trinta Anos de Camões, 1980).

Although there have been numerous new translations of Os Lusíadas in the twentieth century, Camões’s sonnets have yet to be given their due. Henry H. Hart included a number of prose renderings from the lyrics in his book Luis de Camoëns and the Epic of the Lusiads (1962). Jonathan Griffn translated fourteen of the sonnets for Camões: Some Poems (1976), and Keith Bosley translated twenty sonnets for L. C. Taylor’s Luís de Camões: Epic and Lyric(1990). The present volume is the first book in over a hundred years (since Burton in 1884) to translate a sizable selection of the poet’s sonnets. Nevertheless, despite the chaos of the twentieth century, many distinguished modern poets have not forgotten Camões. Roy Campbell in his 1946 collection, Talking Bronco,wrote a dedicatory sonnet to the Portuguese author which concludes:

He shouldered high his voluntary Cross,
Wrestled his hardships into forms of beauty,
And taught his gorgon destinies to sing.

Similarly, Elizabeth Bishop, who lived much of her life in Brazil, was a great admirer of Camões, and J. L. Borges, who recognized his Portuguese ancestors in his sonnet “Los Borges” (one can’t help wondering if the great Argentine was descended from the Borges whom Camões stabbed during the brawl in Lisbon), also wrote another sonnet “A Luis de Camoens” which ends with the sestet:

Quiero saber si aquende la ribera
Última comprendiste humildemente
Que todo lo perdido, el Occidente

Yel Oriente, el acero y la bandera,
Perduraría (ajeno a toda humana
Mutación) en tu Eneida lusitana.

which translates poetically:

So I wonder if you ever understood,
before you crossed that final shore to final rest,
that everything which seemed lost and gone for good— your sword, your flag, the Orient, and the West—
would resurrect, free from the human curse
of change, in Os Lusíadas, your epic verse.

The Portuguese Sources

In 1595, fifteen years after the poet’s death, Camões’s friend Gonçalo do Coutinho decided to arrange for the publication of the poet’s lyrics.