The Silver Island of Japan
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Inda outra muita terra se te esconde Até que venha o tempo de mostrar-se; Mas não deixes no mar as Ilhas onde A Natureza quis mais afamar-se: Esta, meia escondida, que responde De longe à China, donde vem buscar-se, É Japão, onde nace a prata fina, Que ilustrada será co a Lei divina.
Still more land lies hidden from you, until the time comes for it to be revealed; but do not overlook, out in the sea, the Islands where Nature chose to win her greatest fame. This one, half concealed, which from afar faces China, whence men come to seek it out, is Japan, where fine silver is born, silver that will be made illustrious by the divine Law.
Thetis, guiding Gama through the vision of the world, points past the mapped coasts to the islands still hidden in the eastern sea. She singles out Japan, source of fine silver, and foretells its future conversion to the Christian faith.
Thetis is finishing her tour of the globe, and here she gestures beyond the coastlines already named to the islands scattered in the far eastern sea. She holds up one in particular: Japan, half hidden, lying off China, prized for its silver. The stanza works as geography turned into prophecy, a poet in the 1570s sketching the edge of a world Portugal had only just reached.
The line a first reader skims past is the last one. The silver that makes Japan famous is not what the poem finally values; the island will be truly ennobled by the Lei divina, the Christian faith brought by the missions then underway. Camoes folds a real event of his own lifetime, the Jesuit mission begun by Francis Xavier in 1549, into the mouth of a sea-goddess, so that commerce and conversion arrive as one promise.
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Os Lusíadas 10.131 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/lusiadas/10.131/