16th century poet Luís Vaz de Camões is widely considered as Portugal's greatest classical poet. Most likely born in Lisbon around 1524, Luís Vaz de Camões received a formal education, possibly from the University of Coimbra. While his family was poor, his heritage was noble and thus Luís Vaz de Camões was able to gain admittance to the court of John III where his career as a poet began. In the 1550s he traveled to the east, passing through the same regions that Vasco da Gama had sailed. It is about this time that he likely began writing his magnum opus, "The Lusiads". First published in 1572, this epic poem, which is frequently compared to Virgil's "Aeneid", relates the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama's discovery of the maritime route to India by way of Cape of Good Hope. Composed of over 1100 stanzas in ten books, "The Lusiads" is to this day widely regarded as the most important literary work of the Portuguese language. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper and follows the translation of William Julius Mickle.

Nicolopulos (Spanish, U. of Texas-Austin) investigates the literary representation of 16th-century colonialism by analyzing Alonso de Ercilla's La Araucana, a narrative poem recounting the initial phases of the Spanish conquest of Chile, and Luis de Camoens' Os Lusiadas, an epic celebration of early Portuguese maritime expansion in and beyond the Indian Ocean. He also looks at how they reveal poetic, political, and commercial rivalries between Spain and Portugal at the time. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

The most important writer in Portuguese history and one of the preeminent European poets of the early modern era, Luís de Camões (1524–80) has been ranked as a sonneteer on par with Petrarch, Dante, and Shakespeare. Championed by such influential English poets as William Blake and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and admired in America by Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Herman Melville, Camões was renowned for his intensely personal sonnets and equally intense adventurous life. He was banished for dueling and brawling at court, lost an eye fighting the Moors in North Africa, was shipwrecked off the coast of India, jailed in Goa, and exiled in Mozambique. Throughout these personal trials, he advanced poetry beyond the Petrarchin model of love won and lost to write of personal despair, history, politics, war, religion, and the natural beauty of Portugal. The first significant English translation of Camões's sonnets in more than one hundred years, Selected Sonnets: A Bilingual Edition collects seventy of Camões's best—all musically rendered into contemporary, yet metrical and rhymed, English-language poetry by William Baer, with the original Portuguese on facing pages—and reintroduces the genius of a poet whom Cervantes called "the incomparable treasure of Lusus." A comprehensive selection of sonnets that demonstrates the full range of Camões's interests and invention, Selected Sonnets will prove indespensible for both students and teachers in comparative and Renaissance literature, Portuguese and Spanish history, and the art of literary translation.

"This book is about how the sea and seafaring shaped literary creativity in early modern Portugal during the most active, consequential decades of European overseas expansion. Josiah Blackmore understands "literary" in a broad sense, including a diverse archive spanning genres and disciplines: epic and lyric poetry, historical chronicles, nautical documents, ship logs and diaries, shipwreck narratives, geographic descriptions, and reference to texts of other seafaring powers and literatures of the period (including works from Spain, Italy, Galician-Portugal, and Catalan). The centerpiece of the book, the great Luís de Camões, is arguably the sea poet par excellence of early modernity, not only of Portugal and Iberia, but of Europe more generally. Blackmore shows that the sea and nautical travel for Camões and his contemporaries were not merely historical realities in early modern Iberia during the age of discovery; they were also principles of cultural creativity that connect to larger critical debates in the widening field of the maritime humanities. For Blackmore, the sea, ships, and nautical travel unfold into a variety of empirical, metaphoric, and symbolic dimensions, and the oceans across the globe that were traversed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries correspond to oceans within the literary self, vast reaches and depths of emotion, consciousness, memory, and identity. Thus the sea and seafaring were not merely themes in textual culture but were also principles that created individual and collective subjects according to oceanic modes of perception, nautical modes of thought: a "maritime subject" that was one of the consequences of the sustained practice of navigation and imaginative engagements with the sea throughout the period. Blackmore concludes with a discussion of depth and sinking in shipwreck narratives as metaphoric and discursive dimensions of the maritime subject, foreshadowing empire's decline. The book will be welcomed by students of Iberian literature and culture, the maritime humanities, and those interested in maritime poetics beyond early modernity"--

Luis Vaz de Camoes, without doubt, remains to this day the Portuguese language's foremost poet and has mentored many with his work through the centuries and wherever the Portuguese Empire or its Sailors reached, or its language spoken - from Brazil and Africa, through Portugal itself to India and the Far East. During his lifetime the Portuguese Empire, grew rapidly and this was, perhaps, a Golden Age for Portugal in many areas. His lyrical poetry showed such mastery that, for many, his talents are the equal of Shakespeare, Homer or Dante. With lines as encompassing and truthful as "em varias flamas variamente ardia" ("I burnt myself at many flames") it is hard to argue against. Probably born in 1524 it is unknown as to where. There is a statue dedicated to him in Constanzia which together with Lisbon, Coimbra or Alenquer also rival as his birthplace. What is known is that he was an only child from a fading family of the old Aristocracy. His father went to India to pursue his fortune and died in Goa. His mother later remarried and for Camoes early life was financially comfortable. He was educated within the Catholic church and then attended the University of Coimbra giving him access to a wide range of classical and contemporary literature. Aside from his native Portuguese he read in Latin and Italian and wrote poetry in Spanish. What can be acknowledged from his work was that Camoes was a man of great learning and widely read. He was able to use that knowledge and influence to write beautiful and lasting poetry. Camoes was a romantic, and it was rumoured, fell in love with a lady in waiting to the Queen and also Princess Maria. Possibly due to indiscretions surrounding these love affairs, he was exiled from Lisbon and enlisted in the overseas militia where he lost the sight in his right eye and eventually returned to Lisbon. He now led a bohemian lifestyle and a fracas resulted in him injuring a member of the royal stables. He was imprisoned but his mother successfully pleaded for his release which involved paying a large fine and serving three years in militia in the Orient after which he took up a post in Macau. During this time he was shipwrecked and some romantics claim that he swam ashore whilst holding aloft the manuscript of his unfinished epic; Os Lusiadas, the poetical tale of how Vasco da Gama discovered India. When finally back in Lisbon, in 1570, he finished and then published two years later, 'Os Lusiadas', the masterpiece for which his poetic talent has deservedly been recognised. In July of that year he was granted a royal pension, probably in recompense for both his service in India and his having written Os Lusiadas. Luis Vaz de Camoes died in 1580 on 10th June, coincidentally Portugal's national day, and is buried in the Jeronimos Monastery in Lisbon.

An illustrated collection of traditional nursery rhymes with accompanying music.

The Other Virgil tells the story of how a classic like the Aeneid can say different things to different people. As a school text it was generally taught to support the values and ideals of a succession of postclassical societies, but between 1500 and 1800 a number of unusually sensitive readers responded to cues in the text that call into question what the poem appears to be supporting. This book focuses on the literary works written by these readers, to show how they used the Aeneid as a model for poems that probed and challenged the dominant values of their society, just as Virgil had done centuries before. Some of these poems are not as well known today as they should be, but others, like Milton's Paradise Lost and Shakespeare's The Tempest, are; in the latter case, the poems can be understood in new ways once their relationship to the 'other Virgil' is made clear.

Kiernan examines outbreaks of mass violence from the classical era to the present, focusing on worldwide colonial exterminations and 20th-century case studies including the Armenian genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, Stalins mass murders, and the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides.