A Spoiled Stomach
Read the full text in our reader
Que, se aqui a razão se não mostrasse Vencida do temor demasiado, Bem fora que aqui Baco os sustentasse, Pois que de Luso vem, seu tão privado; Mas esta tenção sua agora passe, Porque enfim vem de estâmago danado; Que nunca tirará alheia inveja O bem, que outrem merece, e o Céu deseja.
For, if reason here were not overcome by excessive fear, it would be well that Bacchus should sustain them, since he comes from Luso, his own dear favorite; but let this intention of his pass now, for after all it springs from a rancorous heart. For alien envy will never strip away the good that another earns and that Heaven desires.
In the council of the gods, Jupiter reflects on Bacchus's hostility to the Portuguese. Since Gama's people descend from Luso, Bacchus's own kin, his opposition is unnatural spite, and fate will overrule it.
This is Jupiter in the council of the gods, thinking through Bacchus's hostility to the voyaging Portuguese. His logic turns the god's spite against itself: by the old legend Luso, the founder of Lusitania, was Bacchus's own son or companion, so the Portuguese are the wine-god's own kin. He, of all the gods, ought to be sustaining them. Since he is not, Jupiter sets the impulse aside as beneath reason and lets fate stand.
The line a first reader skips over is "estâmago danado" — literally a spoiled or damaged stomach, but the stomach was the seat of rancor, so it means a soured, spiteful temper. It is a deliberately low, bodily word aimed at the god of the belly's pleasures. The closing couplet then hardens into a proverb: envy never takes the good another has earned and Heaven wills. That maxim, more than the mythology, is the poem's real confidence — the outcome is already fixed by fate, and no god's grudge can move it.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Os Lusíadas 1.39 in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Os Lusíadas — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Os Lusíadas 1.39 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/lusiadas/1.39/