What an occasion! What a treasure! This book makes available for the first time in English a unique body of Renaissance poetry and a great classic of Western literature. Ably translated by Landeg White, this is a truly valuable literary achievement. -- Richard Howard, series editor of the "Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation", and author of "Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963-2003" This book is a major achievement. Superbly clear and seemingly effortless, Landeg White's translations reveal a thoroughly modern and engaging Camoes, one who will undoubtedly speak to new generations of readers. White's organization of the poems by Camoes's travels to Africa, India, and beyond makes the book read like a journey and gives a provocative vision of Camoes's range as a poet. This book sets a new standard for readers and translators of Portuguese poetry. -- Jose Luiz Passos, University of California, Los Angeles

Luis de Camoes is world famous as the author of the great Renaissance epic The Lusiads, but his large and equally great body of lyric poetry is still almost completely unknown outside his native Portugal. In The Collected Lyric Poems of Luis de Camoes, the award-winning translator of The Lusiads gives English readers the first comprehensive collection of Camoes's sonnets, songs, elegies, hymns, odes, eclogues, and other poems--more than 280 lyrics altogether, all rendered in engaging verse. Camoes (1524-1580) was the first great European artist to cross into the Southern Hemisphere, and his poetry bears the marks of nearly two decades spent in north and east Africa, the Persian Gulf, India, and Macau. From an elegy set in Morocco, to a hymn written at Cape Guardafui on the northern tip of Somalia, to the first modern European love poems for a non-European woman, these lyrics reflect Camoes's encounters with radically unfamiliar peoples and places. Translator Landeg White has arranged the poems to follow the order of Camoes's travels, making the book read like a journey. The work of one of the first European cosmopolitans, these poems demonstrate that Camoes would deserve his place among the great poets even if he had never written his epic.