Love's Bloody Altars
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Tu só, tu, puro Amor, com força crua, Que os corações humanos tanto obriga, Deste causa à molesta morte sua, Como se fora pérfida inimiga. Se dizem, fero Amor, que a sede tua Nem com lágrimas tristes se mitiga, É porque queres, áspero e tirano, Tuas aras banhar em sangue humano.
You alone, pure Love, with your cruel force — you who so bind human hearts — gave cause to her grievous death, as though she were a treacherous enemy. If they say, fierce Love, that your thirst is not softened even by sad tears, it is because you want, harsh and tyrannical as you are, to bathe your altars in human blood.
Camões breaks off the story of Inês de Castro — killed for a prince's love — to arraign Love itself as the cruel god who caused her death.
The narrator stops telling the story of Inês de Castro and turns to speak straight at Love. He puts Cupid in the dock: you, and you only, caused her death, treating an innocent woman as if she were an enemy who deserved killing. The repeated "tu" and the courtroom logic (if they say X, the reason is Y) make this an indictment, not a lament.
What a first reader can miss is how deliberately Camões poisons his own words. "Puro Amor" should be tender, but the phrase leads immediately to "molesta morte"; and the closing image recasts the boy-god of desire as a deity who demands human sacrifice, his altars washed in blood. This is the Virgilian inheritance — Dido destroyed by love — pushed one step further: love here does not merely wound, it kills and calls it worship.
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Os Lusíadas 3.119 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/lusiadas/3.119/