The King's True Gifts
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São oferecimentos verdadeiros, E palavras sinceras, não dobradas, As que o Rei manda aos nobres cavaleiros, Que tanto mar e terras tem passadas. Manda-lhe mais lanígeros carneiros, E galinhas domésticas cevadas, Com as frutas, que então na terra havia; E a vontade à dádiva excedia.
They are true offerings, and sincere words, not double-dealing, those the King sends to the noble knights who have crossed so much sea and land. He sends them besides woolly rams, and fattened domestic hens, along with the fruits the land then bore; and his goodwill exceeded even the gift.
The King of Melinde sends provisions and heartfelt words to Gama's weary crew. Camões insists the welcome is genuine, unlike the treachery the Portuguese met at Mombasa.
The stanza vouches for a welcome. The King of Melinde has sent food and a message to Gama's exhausted crew, and Camões steps in as narrator to guarantee the sincerity: the words are not "dobradas," not folded double, not two-faced. Then the plain inventory arrives, rams, hens, fruit, the homely stuff of hospitality, closing on the point that the giver's will outran the gift itself.
What a first reader misses is why the poem works so hard to certify good faith. Just cantos earlier at Mombasa the Portuguese were nearly destroyed by a treacherous welcome staged by Bacchus, all smiles over a trap. Melinde is the answer to that ambush: here the fair words really are fair. The modest livestock matters precisely because it is unglamorous, proof that the friendship is real and not a lure.
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