The Fountain of Tears
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As filhas do Mondego a morte escura Longo tempo chorando memoraram, E, por memória eterna, em fonte pura As lágrimas choradas transformaram; O nome lhe puseram, que inda dura, Dos amores de Inês que ali passaram. Vede que fresca fonte rega as flores, Que lágrimas são a água, e o nome amores.
The daughters of the Mondego long mourned that dark death, weeping over it for a great while; and, for an eternal memorial, they transformed the tears they had shed into a pure spring. They gave it the name that endures still, drawn from the love of Inês that unfolded there. See what a fresh fountain waters the flowers: its water is those tears, and its name is love.
The closing stanza of the tale of Inês de Castro: after her murder, the nymphs of the Mondego river weep for her and turn their tears into a spring that still bears the name of her love.
This stanza closes the story of Inês de Castro with a quiet metamorphosis: the river-nymphs' grief becomes a real spring near Coimbra, and the poem points to it as if to a place the reader could go and touch. The last line splits the fountain in two, telling us plainly what its water is (tears) and what its name means (love).
What a first reader can miss is that Camões is doing what Ovid does in the Metamorphoses, grounding a myth in a landmark that still exists, the Fonte dos Amores. The trick of the closing line, naming water and name in the same breath, makes the whole tragic episode survive not as a lesson but as a thing that waters flowers now, which is a stranger and gentler kind of immortality than the fame usually promised in an epic.
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