The resulting Rhythmas de Luís de Camões(Lisbon, Editio Princeps) was a small quarto that appeared later that year and contained 171 various lyrics, including sixty-five sonnets, a number of which proved to have been written by other authors. This little quarto initiated a long and convoluted series of subsequent publications of the lyrics in which each new edition contained additional but sometimes wrongly attributed poems. The ever-increasing stature of Camões, both in Portugal and abroad, led overzealous editors to assign countless debatable new lyrics to the corpus of their beloved national hero. A brief and superficial summary indicates the problem: the second issue of the Rhythmas(1598) added 43 sonnets; a so-called Second Part Editio (1616), edited by Domingos Fernandes, added 41 sonnets; a subsequent Third Part, entitled Rimas (1668), edited by Álvares da Cunha, added 91 more sonnets; the multi-volumed Rimas Várias,edited by Manuel de Faria e Sousa (1685, 1689), added 67 new sonnets; the Obras (1720) of J. Lopes Ferreira added 38 more; and the famous Obras (1860–69) of Viscount Juromenha added another 34. Thus Camões’s sonnet total increased from 65 in the first edition to over 350 in later editions. Many of these poetic attributions were correct, but many were not. Some came from unidentified sources, some were taken from the anonymous Portuguese “songbooks,” and a significant number were taken from the work of Diogo Bernardes (1530–1605?), a talented Portuguese poet who was one of the few survivors of Sebastião’s disaster at Alcácer-Kebir.

Modern scholars, following the lead of Friedrich Wilhelm Storck in his important biography of the poet, Luis de Camoens Leben(1890), have raised serious questions about the many reckless attributions to the Camonian canon. Important work has been done by Jorge de Sena, Cleonice Berardinelli, Leodegário A. de Azevedo Filho, and many others (see bibliography); and, although there are still many debates about specific attributions that will never be resolved, most modern scholars generally assign about 200 to 250 sonnets to Camões’s extant authorship. The best modern editions of the lyrics are Álvaro J. da Costa Pimpão’sRimas(re- vised edition, 1973), which includes 166 sonnets; Cleonice Serôa da Motta Berandinelli’s Sonetos de Camões: corpus dos sonetos Camonianos (1980), which includes 400 sonnets; and Maria de Lurdes Saraiva’s Luís de Camões Lírica Completa, Sonetos, Volume Two (1980), which includes 366 sonnets, of which the editor considers at least 215 to be authentically Camonian. For the purposes of the present volume, I have translated only those sonnets which are generally undisputed, with three exceptions, which are discussed in the notes. Similarly, as with Shakespeare and all the Renaissance poets, there are occasional textual variants regarding the sonnets, and I have generally followed the Sonetos of Maria de Lurdes Saraiva while citing significant textual deviations or problems in the notes.

The Translations

Luís de Camões was obsessed with the sonnet, and he spent much of his lifetime expressing his deepest thoughts in beautifully crafted sonetos. Given this fact, I have done my best to render Camões’s sonnets as sonnets, both in form and content. Camões always wrote his sonnets in the Italianate format, and the rhyme schemes of his octaves never varied (abbaabba) although he used a variety of formats for his sestets (mostly cdecde, cdcdcd, and cdedce). With few exceptions, I have kept his exact rhyme schemes in the sestets and, given the limited number of four-sound rhymes in English, I have used the more flexible abbacddc in the octaves. As expected, Camões’s sonnets are metrically tight, although his rhythms are smooth and melodic, so I have used the versatile English iambic pentameter for his decasyllabics. Although there is something to be said for “literal” prose translations, which are especially useful to the scholar and student, I have tried to render Camões’s sonnets in the exacting form he loved and to which he dedicated his life. Doing so has led to some aesthetic liberties, but my primary objective in all these poems has been to render, as best I could, what Helen Vendler in her essay “Camões the Sonneteer” describes as Camões’s “exploration of the most obscure reaches of human consciousness,” and to try, with English meters and rhymes, to highlight with sound, as his originals do so beautifully, Camões’s poetic “explorations.”

Unfortunately, it is impossible, with few exceptions, to date Camões’s poems with any useful accuracy. Sir Richard Burton, in the appendix to his translations of 1884, claimed that establishing the dates of Camões’s compositions would be as “unsatisfactory and arbitrary as the task of chronologising the Koran.” Given this situation, I have presented the poems in this collection in no specific order, but I have, nevertheless, tried to give a sense of Camões’s wide variety within a general progression from his more youthful love lyrics, to the increasing saudade of his sojourn in the Orient, to his eventual return to Lisbon and his Roman Catholic faith. Also, in the typical Renaissance manner, virtually all of Camões’s original sonnets were untitled, but given that it’s the convention of our own times to use titles, I have added English titles to the translations. I feel it’s appropriate for this selection of translations, the first extensive rendering of the sonnets in over a hundred years, and I hope it will be helpful to the reader, especially since this edition is bilingual, and the original untitled texts are conveniently en face. It’s been a daunting task to attempt to translate the lyrics of a legend like Camões, especially in rhymed and metrical sonnets, but it has been a privilege to serve him as well as I can.

Of course, no book like this could be completed without assistance. I’m most grateful to Professor Jonas Barros of the Universidade Metodista de Piraciaba, São Paulo, Brasil, for his assistance in the production of these translations. We went over every line of these sonnets together, and I greatly appreciate his attention to detail, his interpretive insights, and his patience. I’m also indebted to Randolph Petilos of the University of Chicago Press, and to the press’s two anonymous reviewers, who offered both encouragement and invaluable suggestions. I’m similarly grateful to all the literary editors who published selections of these translations in their various periodicals. I’d also like to thank my generous readers, Carolina Cuervo Grajales, Mike Carson, Rob Griffth, and Paul Bone, as well as the University of Evansville for its helpful ART and ARSAF Grants. Finally, I’m forever grateful to the U.S.