The most important writer in Portuguese history and one of the preeminent European poets of the early modern era, Luis de Camoes (1524 80) has been ranked as a sonneteer on par with Petrarch, Dante, and Shakespeare. Championed and admired by such poets as William Blake, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Camoes was renowned for his intensely personal sonnets and equally intense life of adventure.
The first significant English translation of Camoes s sonnets in more than one hundred years, "Selected Sonnets: A Bilingual Edition" collects seventy of...

The first European artist to cross the equator, Camoes's narrative reflects the novelty and fascination of that original encounter with Africa, India and the Far East. The poem's twin symbols are the Cross and the Astrolabe, and its celebration of a turning point in mankind's knowledge of the world unites the old map of the heavens with the newly discovered terrain on earth. Yet it speaks powerfully, too, of the precariousness of power, and of the rise and decline of nationhood, threatened not only from without by enemies, but from within by loss of integrity and vision.
For more than...

"The late ingenious translator of the Lusiad," says Lord Strangford, "has portrayed the character, and narrated the misfortunes of our poet, in a manner more honourable to his feelings as a man than to his accuracy in point of biographical detail. It is with diffidence that the present writer essays to correct his errors; but, as the real circumstances of the life of Camoens are mostly to be found in his own minor compositions, with which Mr. Mickle was unacquainted, he trusts that certain information will atone for his presumption."