New Worlds to the World
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Que se o facundo Ulisses escapou De ser na Ogígia ilha eterno escravo, E se Antenor os seios penetrou Ilíricos e a fonte de Timavo; E se o piedoso Eneias navegou De Cila e de Caríbdis o mar bravo, Os vossos, mores cousas atentando, Novos mundos ao mundo irão mostrando.
For if eloquent Ulysses escaped being an eternal slave on the isle of Ogygia, and if Antenor pierced the Illyrian gulfs and the source of the Timavus; and if pious Aeneas sailed the wild sea of Scylla and Charybdis, then your own people, attempting greater deeds, will go on showing new worlds to the world.
Venus pleads to Jupiter for the Portuguese. Here she caps her argument: if pagan heroes of old earned safe passage through legendary perils, Gama's men, attempting greater things, will outdo them.
Venus argues by ladder. She lines up three of antiquity's most storied voyagers, Ulysses, Antenor, Aeneas, and grants that each survived a famous ordeal, then springs the conclusion: the Portuguese will do more. The rhetorical shape is an "if... then greater" argument, each pagan precedent a rung climbed only to be surpassed by Gama's men.
The hidden hinge is the final line's compressed paradox: novos mundos ao mundo, "new worlds to the world." Camões folds the whole novelty of the age into three words, the discovery of lands the old world did not know it lacked. He borrows his heroes straight from Homer and Virgil (piedoso Eneias echoes Virgil's own pius Aeneas), but the point is that literature's models are now the ones being outrun by living sailors.
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