Bacchus and the Water of Oblivion
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Vê que já teve o Indo sojugado, E nunca lhe tirou Fortuna, ou caso, Por vencedor da Índia ser cantado De quantos bebem a água de Parnaso. Teme agora que seja sepultado Seu tão célebre nome em negro vaso D'água do esquecimento, se lá chegam Os fortes Portugueses, que navegam.
He sees that he once held the Indus subjugated, and that neither Fortune nor chance ever took from him being sung as conqueror of India by all who drink the water of Parnassus. Now he fears that his so-celebrated name may be buried in a black vessel of the water of oblivion, if the strong Portuguese, who are sailing, arrive there.
In the gods' council, Bacchus fears the voyaging Portuguese. He recalls that he once conquered the East and was sung as lord of India, and dreads that a new people will drown that fame in Lethe.
Bacchus makes his case out of memory and dread. He was once the god who tamed the Indus and India, and every poet who drank from Parnassus kept singing it; that fame felt permanent, untouchable by chance. The stanza turns on the fear that a living people now at sea could undo what centuries of verse secured.
The trap a first reader steps in: the whole speech assumes fame lives or dies in poetry, not in deeds. The "black vessel of the water of oblivion" is Lethe, the underworld river of forgetting, imagined as an urn that drowns a name. Bacchus does not fear losing India; he fears losing the song about India. Camões, writing that very song for the Portuguese, quietly makes the god's nightmare his own poem's boast.
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