The Memories That Answered Her
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Do teu Príncipe ali te respondiam As lembranças que na alma lhe moravam, Que sempre ante seus olhos te traziam, Quando dos teus fermosos se apartavam: De noite em doces sonhos, que mentiam, De dia em pensamentos, que voavam. E quanto enfim cuidava, e quanto via, Eram tudo memórias de alegria.
Of your Prince, the memories that dwelt in his soul answered you there — memories that always brought you before his eyes, whenever they turned away from your own beauties: by night in sweet dreams that lied, by day in thoughts that flew away. And whatever, in the end, he imagined, and whatever he saw, all of it was memories of joy.
In the Inês de Castro episode (Canto 3), the poet turns to the murdered Inês and describes how Prince Pedro's memories of her lived on, answering her even after her death.
The poet speaks directly to the dead Inês, telling her that her Prince's memories kept answering her after she was gone. Grief here is not a single wound but a whole daily economy: dreams by night, wandering thoughts by day, every image circling back to her.
The quiet hinge is the word "mentiam" — the dreams "lied." They gave Pedro Inês alive again and then took her back at waking, so their sweetness was also a cruelty. Camões keeps the whole stanza in the imperfect tense, the tense of habit and duration, so the mourning reads less as an event than as a condition that simply went on. Calling the sum "memórias de alegria," memories of joy, lands as tenderness and as the sharpest turn of the knife.
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