Selected Sonnets (review)

William Baer has found it a "daunting task to attempt to translate the lyrics of a legend like Camões." He is not the first to make the attempt. Yet it is surprising to think that this handy volume of seventy sonnets by the great Renaissance poet Luis Vaz de Camões, with originals and William Baer's English translations appearing on facing pages, is not only the first substantial collection of Camões's lyric poetry to be published in English translation in well over a century but actually the first such collection ever to originate in the United States. In fact, of Camões's works only one edition has had its origin in the United States—Leonard Bacon's translation of Os Lusíadas in 1950. What makes these facts all the more remarkable is that Camões and his work have always been, demonstrably, a part of U. S. cultural literacy from the rise of the first literary and historical journals in the eighteen century right on through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A ProQuest check of newspapers and journals has turned up well over seven hundred references, including the surprisingly frequent reprinting of Camões's sonnets in the translations of the English Viscount Strangford and Richard Burton, and those of the American Richard Henry Wilde, as well as, occasionally, excerpts from Camões's epic poem. Indeed, the several editions of Strangford's collection of poetry issued in the United States ensured that it was his versions that were widely disseminated there. No one in the United States was willing, apparently, to rival Strangford's accomplishment in 1803, although the case was far different in the United Kingdom, which saw the publication of Seventy Sonnets of Camoens by J. J. Aubertin (1881), The Lyricks by Richard F. Burton (1884), and Dante, Petrarch, Camoens by Richard Garnett (1896).

Baer's translations are clearly expressed. They are also stylistically fluent. But that fluency has come at a cost. He has chosen to turn Camões's characteristically taut line into the looser line of iambic pentameter verse. Loosening Camões's line in this way makes Camões more "English." The English common reader might find it familiar and comforting, but Baer's more relaxed and necessarily wordier lines fail to capture the bite of the more intensely dramatic originals. Words introduced not for the primary sake of sense but to stretch out a line or enable a rhyme take something away, giving us less. They make Camões seem both more verbose than he is and far less intense, say, than the Shakespeare of the sonnets. Consider how Baer handles "Alma minha gentil," famously Camões's most-often quoted, most-often translated, and, perhaps, most-often parodied sonnet. He introduces into the poem a "my dear" at the end of the second line to give him a rhyme—something that not Robert Southey, nor Fernando Pessoa, nor Roy Campbell, whose renditions of Camões's sonnet Baer reproduces in a note—find it necessary to do. He does something similar thing in line four, when he introduces, redundantly, the words "in pain" for the sake of keeping to his chosen meter. In another poem "Ninfa Linda" is turned into a superlative as "the loveliest nymph" and "subida nüa arvore sombria" (climbing a shady tree) becomes "making her way into the branches." And again, "assi que o roxo mar, daqui em diante, / o seja só co sangre de Turquia" becomes "make the so-called Red Sea truly red / brightly dyed with the blood of the hated Turk." Here "truly," "brightly," and "hated" are adhesions that—oddly enough—tend to de-intensify the original. Elsewhere the "extremo fio" is stretched out, again, presumably, for the end rhyme it provides, "a thread that's stretched and frayed." Elsewhere "algü' hora / vos dará tal lembrança grande dor" becomes, somewhat melodramatically, "when this memory / will crush you down with terrifying pain." I leave it to...