The Two Battle Cries
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Eis as lanças e espadas retiniam Por cima dos arneses: bravo estrago! Chamam ( segundo as leis que ali seguiam) Uns Mafamede, e os outros Santiago. Os feridos com grita o Céu feriam, Fazendo de seu sangue bruto lago, Onde outros meios mortos se afogavam, Quando do ferro as vidas escapavam.
Here the lances and swords rang out upon the armor: fierce havoc! They shout (according to the laws each side followed there) some "Mafamede," the others "Santiago." The wounded struck at Heaven with their cries, making of their own blood a brute lake, where others, half dead, drowned, at the very moment their lives were escaping from the iron.
The clash at the River Salado (1340): Afonso IV of Portugal and Castile against the invading Moors. The field divides by faith, one side calling on Muhammad, the other on Saint James.
The stanza renders battle as pure sound and its aftermath. Steel rings on steel, and then the field splits along a single audible line: one host cries the name of the Prophet, the other the name of Saint James. This is the Battle of Salado (1340), Portugal and Castile against the Moors, and Camões lets the two war cries do the work of describing who is fighting whom, faith set against faith with nothing between them but the space of a shout.
What a first reader misses is the grim precision of the last two lines. The wounded whose blood forms the "bruto lago" are not the same as those who drown in it: the men the sword spared from a clean death are the ones the lake of blood then takes. The iron "lets the lives escape" in the same instant the pooled gore closes over them, so that surviving the blade only delivers a slower end. The couplet's near-witty symmetry, escape and drowning arriving together, is Camões keeping epic distance from carnage he refuses to prettify.
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