“This book attempts an introduction to a very beautiful and complex poem” (vii): Professor Fleming goes about this purpose in a strange way. The volume’s first chapter is dedicated to defending a thesis, that Camões’s poem (usually called Babel e Sião or, from its first line, Sôbolos / Sobre os rios) is scriptural exegesis of a psalm. Chapter 2 is on the psalm itself, Super flumina, number 136 in the Vulgate. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 are purportedly on texts (especially by “Theodulus,” Boethius, Augustine, Dante, and Boscán) that the author believes to have been especially important in composing Babel e Sião. Chapters 6 and 7 approach issues of the poem’s own inner structure. All this, however, includes many digressions of several kinds, often of doubtful relevance to the subject. The book ends with a version of Camões’s poem, taken from two modern editions; a translation (so-called “literal”) of it into English by Fleming himself; two versions of the psalm; and a bibliography that is to be commended for including items on early modern Portuguese literature rarely to be seen in an English scholarly book.

As the author rightly points out, this book is a “gesture of redress in the face of the Anglophone academy’s long but unfortunate slighting of peninsular Portuguese literature” (ix). However, several warning notes are required. As an introduction, one would expect some explanation of the poem’s more immediate literary context at all levels. Babel e Sião has often been “treated with something approaching adulation,” but Lope de Vega never wrote that it is “the pearl of all poetry,” pace Leonard Bacon (2). When information is given on when and where Babel e Sião first appeared “finished,” we are directed toward a “1597 edition of Camões’s poems” (2) that, in point of fact, does not exist. This could be a mere typo, but it is unfortunately more than that, since Camões’s lyric poetry was printed for the first time in two sixteenth-century editions, in 1595 and 1598, both of which include nonidentical texts of Babel e Sião. It is uncertain whether the version in the Cancioneiro de Cristóvão (and not Cristovão) Borges is “radically deficient” (1), as Camões probably composed the poem in two distinct time spans, and this manuscript version can certainly be read as a complete poem (even if not based on the complete psalm) without the recantation ao divino of the last printed strophes. Furthermore, Fleming correctly observes that the poem’s genre is presented in the Borges cancioneiro as “text and gloss” (1), but fails to notice that this did not necessarily represent exegesis (the central thesis in the book) but rather the poetic mode and technique of glosa (gloss) in Portuguese redondilhas, frequently practiced by Camões and others. Proper attention to these and other closely contextual matters should have been essential to the book.

The central chapters (3, 4, and 5) are mainly devoted to sorting out what poetry Camões would have read to inspire Babel e Sião. There is an entire chapter on “The Eclogue of Theodulus,” an obscure medieval poem that Camões, according to the author, must have read, even though the chapter itself contributes nothing to trace such reading. The same thing happens in the chapter on Boscán’s Conversión. Fleming makes much of his own original discovery of the “obvious vernacular ‘source’ of Camões” (83), even though, again, little sign of verbal contact is shown. Surprisingly, however, the reader finds out later (117) that someone else had suggested that the Conversión was an influence on Babel e Sião. In reality, almost everything this book says on the matter was spelled out by M. V. Leal de Matos, a specialist Fleming seems not to have read. But the bibliography does mention critical work that shows extensive contact of Babel e Sião with Heitor Pinto’s Imagem da Vida Cristã, an anonymous poem in Portuguese quintilhas, and a psalm paraphrase by George Buchanan, a Scots Catholic humanist with strong Portuguese ties. Nevertheless, Fleming makes no use of this important knowledge. Several errors in, and misinterpretations of, Portuguese words are also unhelpful and even confusing (as in efeitos for afeitos [24]). Even though this book is a welcome addition to English academic work on Portuguese literature, one has to say that, on the whole, it is a quite disappointing one.