translated by Landeg White
Under The Peepal Tree 2017

Under The Peepal Tree website

Luís de Camões (1524-1580) was the first great European artist to cross into the Southern Hemisphere, and his poetry bears the mark of nearly two decades spent in India, north and east Africa, the Persian Gulf and Macau. His The Lusíads is world famous, but his large and equally great body of lyric poetry is almost unknown outside Portugal. 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 addressed to a non-European woman, these lyrics reflect Camões’s encounter with radically unfamiliar places and peoples. The bulk of those years – from 1554 to 1568 – were spent in Goa where at least half of his poetry, including The Lusíads, seems to have been composed. He arrived not as a Viceroy, Governor or Admiral, not an authority figure of any kind, but as a convict soldier, sentenced for an assault in Lisbon to military service overseas. He was jailed on three occasions (see the cover picture) and when he left he was almost certainly fleeing the Inquisition. This book collects, with degrees of certainty from the absolute to the tentative, the lyric poems Camões wrote in Goa. They are translated from Portuguese, but they are very far from representing Portuguese colonial culture, which he at times wrote of with great scorn. Above all, they should be enjoyed as poetry, transcending place and time but of added interest given the place and time they were written.

by Landeg White
Universidade Católica

In the comprehensive and authoritative Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker, David Connolly, comments ‘translators … rarely keep notes about the process of translation or any record of the choices made in the process,’ adding ‘it is precisely insights into this process that are missing from most theoretical models.’

translated by Landeg White
Oxford World’s Classics 2001

1998 is the quincentenary of Vasca da Gama’s voyage via southern Africa to India, the voyage celebrated in this new translation of one of the greatest poems of the Renaissance. Portugal’s supreme poet Camões was the first major European artist to cross the equator. The freshness of that original encounter with Africa and India is the very essence of Camões’s vision. The first translation of The Lusiads for almost half a century, this new edition is complemented by an illuminating introduction and extensive notes.

translated by Landeg White
Princeton University Press 2008

Luís de Camões is world famous as the author of the great Renaissance epic The Lusíads, 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 Luís de Camões, the award-winning translator of The Lusíads gives English readers the first comprehensive collection of Camões’s sonnets, songs, elegies, hymns, odes, eclogues, and other poems–more than 280 lyrics altogether, all rendered in engaging verse.

Camões (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 Camões’s encounters with radically unfamiliar peoples and places. Translator Landeg White has arranged the poems to follow the order of Camões’s travels, making the book read like a journey. The work of one of the first European cosmopolitans, these poems demonstrate that Camões would deserve his place among the great poets even if he had never written his epic.