and the living present with its own sound, and all these immensities drown my thoughts, but still it’s sweet to shipwreck in such a sea.

Baer’s stresses are more consistent, ranging between four and five beats. At the same time, his meter is less rigid and more supple than Galassi’s. By throwing in an extra syllable or two when it suits, Baer both avoids the predictability of undeviating iambs and mirrors Leopardi’s own practice of varying his lines slightly. Also, in accord with the collection’s theme, the translator has slightly compressed the poem to 14 lines, turning it into a sort of blank-verse sonnet.

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42:T55d,As the first great European poet to explore the non-Western world, Camoes’s sonnets reflect his wide-ranging experiences. Even when they are about the more conventional topic of love, he often couches his subject from the perspective of a voyager. Here is Baer’s rendering of “Shipwreck”:

Like a weary sailor, a refugee from wreck and storm, who escapes half-dead, and then, in terror, shudders with dread at the very mention of the name of the “sea”; who swears he’ll never sail again, who raves he’ll stay at home, even on the calmest days, but then, in time, forgets his fearful ways, and seeks, again, his fortune above the waves; I, too, have barely escaped the storms that revolve around you, my love, traveling far away, vowing to avoid another catastrophe, but I can’t, the thought of you breaks my resolve, and so, I return to where, on that fateful day, I nearly drowned in your tempestuous sea.

Only a few people have translated Camoes’s lyric verse into English. One of these is Landeg White, who faithfully reproduces the metrical structures but not the rhyme schemes. Unlike White, Baer goes the whole way here, giv

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