SOURCE: “Strangford's Poems from the Portuguese of Luis de Camoens,” in Comparative Literature, Vol. 23, No. 4, Fall, 1971, pp. 289-311.

In the following essay, Letzring comments on Perry Clinton Sidney Smythe's free translations of Camões's verse in Poems from the Portuguese of Luis de Camoens, the first collection of the poet's lyrics in English.

Even in his own Portugal, the reputation of Luis de Camoens has always rested primarily on his epic The Lusiads. Despite the fact that he is in no sense inferior as a lyric poet, his numerous canzones, elegies, odes, sonnets, and other short poems have always taken second place to his epic. And although the Lusiads, first published in 1572, was early translated into several languages and became known throughout Europe, the same is not the case with the lyrics, published posthumously in 1585. The English came to know the Lusiads as early as 1655 with the translation...