Writer's Corner Writer's Corner: Richard Zenith: Interview on 97.3 WJFD-FM

Contraponto program series, originally broadcast on 16 February 2025

Celebrating the 500th birthday of Luís de Camões (1524/25-1580), Tagus Press has published a new, significantly revised edition of the great Rennaisance poet’s lyric poetry, Sonnets and Other Poems, originally launched in 2009. Sonnets and Other Poems is the first bilingual edition in English to offer a cross-section of lyric poetry by Portugal’s Camões, author of The Lusiads (1572), the epic poem memorializing Vasco da Gama’s inaugural voyage from Lisbon to India (1497-99). A selection of forty sonnets is followed by poems using other metrical patterns and rhyme schemes, including terza rima, ottava rima, the sestina, the canzone, and the redondilha, a verse form typical of Portuguese folk poetry. Richard Zenith’s fluid renditions, far from attempting to “update” Camões, closely adhere to the original text, employing modern English but resisting the temptation to expand on the relatively small and simple lexicon of the Portuguese. Along with discussing his method of translation, Zenith’s illuminating introduction shows how Camões’s life and work were intimately entwined.

Richard Zenith is an award-winning translator of the Iberian troubadours, Fernando Pessoa, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, and many other poets writing in Portuguese. His Pessoa: A Biography (2021) was a Pulitzer prize finalist and named a best book of the year by The New York Times. In this interview, he discusses his life’s work and reflects on what makes Camões’s lyric poetry so fascinating and its appeal so enduring, as well as considering the challenges he faced when rendering it into English.

Please join host Irene de Amaral and Richard Zenith for a discussion of his translations of Camões on WJFD.