Jupiter Dries Venus's Tears
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E co'o seu apertando o rosto amado, Que os soluços e lágrimas aumenta, Como menino da ama castigado, Que quem no afaga o choro lhe acrescente, Por lhe pôr em sossego o peito irado, Muitos casos futuros lhe apresenta. Dos fados as entranhas revolvendo, Desta maneira enfim lhe está dizendo:
And pressing her beloved face to his own — which only makes her sobs and tears increase, as a child punished by its nurse cries all the more the more one caresses it — in order to set her angry heart at rest, Jupiter lays before her many events to come. Turning over the innermost depths of the fates, in this manner he at last begins to speak to her:
Canto 2. Venus has pleaded with Jupiter for the Portuguese fleet; now the king of the gods draws her tearful face to his and, to calm her, prepares to unfold the future in the great prophecy that follows.
The stanza is a single gesture of comfort that keeps failing. Jupiter draws Venus's face to his, and the tenderness only feeds her weeping, so Camões pins the moment with a domestic simile: a scolded child sobs harder, not less, when someone strokes it. Only after that does the god find the remedy that will actually work — not a caress but information. He decides to show her the future.
What a first reader skims past is the last two lines, which are the real hinge. "Turning over the entrails of the fates" casts Jupiter as a Roman haruspex reading the future in a sacrificed animal's guts, and the events he is about to "present" are the entire pageant of Portuguese history that fills the rest of the canto. The consolation of a goddess is the pretext; the payload is the prophecy of empire, and this quiet stanza is the door it walks through.
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