The Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute from Fresno State continues commemorating the 500th birthday of the most renowned poet of the Portuguese-speaking world, Luiz Vaz de Camões, with one of his poems every week in English translation.

We also call your attention to a conference on camões by our Fresno State President, Dr. Saúl Jimenez-Sandoval, on October 21st. The conference will be online and available to all. Please see the electronic poster at the bottom of this page.

About this Poem

In the original Portuguese, the first known appearance of “Sonnet VIII,” was I in Rythmas de Luis de Cameos, published in 1595. It was later translated into English and published by Viscount Strangford in Poems, from the Portuguese of Luis De Cameons (James Carpenter and Son, 1803). Although Lord Byron allegedly doubted the legitimacy of Strangford’s translations, claiming that he had published them “in order to get the situation at the Brazils, and did not know a word of Portuguese when he commenced,” and, furthermore, that the Irish poet Thomas Moore was their true author, as recounted in Thomas Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron (Henry Colburn, 1824), the translations were well-received by the public upon their debut (even being so popular as to partially inspire the title of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese (Chapman & Hall, 1850), at Robert Browning’s suggestion). Strangford writes About this sonnet, “The earliest and happiest years of [Camões’s] life were passed at Coimbra. The town’s walls were bathed by the river Mondego, to which this beautiful Sonnet is addressed.”