The Bull in the Ring
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Qual no corro sanguino o ledo amante, Vendo a formosa dama desejada, O touro busca, e pondo-se diante, Salta, corre, sibila, acena, e brada, Mas o animal atroce, nesse instante, Com a fronte cornígera inclinada, Bramando duro corre, e os olhos cerra, Derriba, fere e mata, e põe por terra:
As in the bloody ring the joyful lover, seeing the beautiful lady he desired, seeks out the bull, and planting himself before it, leaps, runs, hisses, beckons, and shouts; but the fierce beast, in that instant, with its horned brow lowered, bellowing hard, charges and shuts its eyes, knocks down, wounds and kills, and lays low all before it.
An epic simile from the middle of Canto 1: Gama's fleet has reached the hostile coast of Mozambique, and Camões pauses the unfolding treachery to hold up a single, self-contained image of a bullfight.
The whole stanza is one held picture: a bullfight. A lover, eager to show off before the lady he wants, taunts the bull with leaps and cries and waving arms; the animal drops its horned head and, blind with rage, charges and kills. Camões keeps the scene at arm's length, all verbs and no names, so it plays like a thing watched rather than a thing told.
What a first reader misses is that this is only half of a comparison. The "Qual" (as, just as) at the opening is left hanging: it answers to the surrounding stanzas, where the treacherous ruler of Mozambique, provoked, turns on Gama's men. The goring bull is his concealed fury, unleashed in an instant. The image is an old inheritance, too: Homer and Virgil both liken a charging warrior to a baited bull (Aeneid 12, for Turnus), and Camões is quietly enrolling his poem in that line.
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