Inês Pleads for Her Life
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Ó tu, que tens de humano o gesto e o peito ( Se de humano é matar uma donzela Fraca e sem força, só por ter sujeito O coração a quem soube vencê-la) A estas criancinhas tem respeito, Pois o não tens à morte escura dela; Mova-te a piedade sua e minha, Pois te não move a culpa que não tinha.
O you, who have of the human the face and the breast (if it is human to kill a maiden, weak and without strength, only for having subjected her heart to one who knew how to conquer her), have respect for these little children, since you have none for her dark death; let their pity move you, and mine, since the guilt she never had does not move you.
In Canto 3, Camões halts the march of national history to tell the tragedy of Inês de Castro, killed for her secret love of Prince Pedro. Here she pleads before the king's agents who have come to kill her.
Inês de Castro, dragged before the king's men who mean to kill her, makes her case. She grants that her executioners have the human form, face and breast, and then quietly asks whether the deed itself is human. Her only offense, she says inside the parenthesis, was to let her heart be won by the man who loved her.
The turn a first reader can miss is legal, not merely tearful. Inês does not beg for mercy on her own account; she reframes the charge. If loving Pedro is the crime, then the crime is innocence, and the sentence falls on children who did nothing. Camões hands a condemned woman the calm syntax of an advocate: the pity she asks for is presented as owed, not granted.
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