Venus's Tears
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" Mas moura enfim nas mãos das brutas gentes, Que pois eu fui... " E nisto, de mimosa, O rosto banha em lágrimas ardentes, Como co'o orvalho fica a fresca rosa. Calada um pouco, como se entre os dentes Se lhe impedira a fala piedosa, Torna a segui-la; e indo por diante, Lhe atalha o poderoso e grão Tonante.
"But let it die at last in the hands of the brutish peoples, for since I was..." — and at this, out of tenderness, she bathes her face in burning tears, as the fresh rose holds the morning dew. Silent a while, as if the pious plea had caught between her teeth, she turns to take it up again; and as she goes onward, the powerful and mighty Thunderer cuts her short.
Venus pleads with Jupiter to protect Vasco da Gama's fleet; mid-sentence she breaks off in bitterness and weeps, and the Thunderer moves to answer.
Venus is deep in her plea to Jupiter for Gama's sailors, and here she snaps into bitter sarcasm — let them die, then, in savage hands, since I was the one who... — and cannot finish. She breaks off and weeps, and the narrator catches the falling tears in a single image: dew left on a fresh rose. Just as she gathers herself to resume, Jupiter cuts in.
The tears are not only grief; they are argument. Camões is reworking the scene in Aeneid I where Venus, her eyes wet, pleads with Jupiter for Aeneas and the king of the gods smiles and answers. What a first reader misses is the unfinished sentence: 'pois eu fui...' stops dead, an aposiopesis that lets the threat and the reproach hang unspoken — more pointed than anything she could have said aloud.
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