Inês Pleads for Life or Exile
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— E se, vencendo a Maura resistência, A morte sabes dar com fogo e ferro, Sabe também dar vicia com clemência A quem para perdê-la não fez erro. Mas se to assim merece esta inocência, Põe-me em perpétuo e mísero desterro, Na Cítia fria, ou lá na Líbia ardente, Onde em lágrimas viva eternamente.
"And if, by conquering the Moorish resistance, you know how to deal death with fire and iron, know also how to grant life with mercy to one who committed no wrong deserving to lose it. But if this innocence truly earns such a fate from you, condemn me instead to perpetual and wretched exile — in frozen Scythia, or there in burning Libya — where I may live out my days forever in tears."
Inês de Castro kneels before King Afonso IV, who has come to have her killed. Having begged for her children, she now bargains: grant her life, or banish her to the ends of the earth.
Inês, kneeling before the king who has come to kill her, reworks her plea into a bargain. If you are skilled at dealing death, she says, be equally skilled at sparing a life; and if my innocence somehow demands punishment, punish me with banishment, not the sword. The stanza is built on that antithesis — fire and iron against mercy, death against life — and closes by naming the two ends of the known world, freezing Scythia and burning Libya, as places she would gladly go rather than die.
The thing a first reader misses is that this is a formal plea for mercy, a deprecatio, whose every balanced clause the reader already knows will fail: Inês is executed. The Scythia/Libya pairing is not local color but an old classical way of saying "anywhere on earth, however extreme" — the poles of cold and heat that bound the inhabited world. And her one claim, "não fez erro," made no wrong, is legally exact: her only offense is having been loved, which the balanced rhetoric can name but not undo.
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Os Lusíadas 3.128 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/lusiadas/3.128/