The Fire and the Fleeing Shepherds
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Bem como quando a flama, que ateada Foi nos áridos campos ( assoprando O sibilante Bóreas) animada Co'o vento, o seco mato vai queimando; A pastoral companha, que deitada Co'o doce sono estava, despertando Ao estridor do fogo que se ateia, Recolhe o fato, e foge para a aldeia:
Just as when a flame, kindled in the parched fields while the whistling north wind Boreas blows, is fed by that wind and goes on burning through the dry scrub; and the band of shepherds, who had been lying wrapped in sweet sleep, wakes at the crackling roar of the self-spreading fire, gathers up its flock, and flees toward the village:
A Homeric simile inside Nuno Álvares Pereira's battle narrative: as the small Portuguese force scatters its enemies, Camões pictures a wind-driven grass fire and the sleeping shepherds who wake and flee before it.
This is a single extended simile, and the colon at the end warns you it has not landed yet: the fire, the wind, the panicked shepherds are all the "as when" half of a comparison whose main clause waits in the next stanza. Camões is describing how Nuno Álvares Pereira's small Portuguese force scatters a much larger enemy, and he reaches for the oldest epic tool there is to make the rout vivid.
The thing a first reader misses is how mechanical the fire is made to sound. The flame does not simply burn; it is "ateada" (kindled), then "animada" (given life) by the wind, and finally "se ateia" (kindles itself) so it needs no more tending. That progression from lit, to fed, to self-spreading is the real subject: the panic runs on its own once started, and the shepherds who flee never see the enemy at all, only the noise. The fire-and-shepherds image comes straight out of Homer and Virgil, where advancing armies are routinely likened to grassland blazes.
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