The River That Divides the Continents
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Da parte donde o dia vem nascendo, Com Ásia se avizinha; mas o rio Que dos montes Rifeios vai correndo, Na alagoa Meotis, curvo o frio, As divide: e o mar que, fero e horrendo, Viu dos Gregos o irado senhorio, Onde agora de Tróia triunfante Não vê mais que a memória o navegante.
On the side where the day is born — the east — Europe borders Asia; but the river that comes running down from the Riphean mountains, into the cold, curving Maeotian lagoon, divides the two. And there lies the sea that, fierce and dreadful, once watched the raging dominion of the Greeks, where now the sailor sees nothing left of triumphant Troy but its memory.
Gama continues his map of the known world. He traces the boundary between Europe and Asia — a cold northern river draining into the Sea of Azov — and ends at the Black Sea, where triumphant Troy now survives only as a memory.
This is still Gama's geography lesson to the king of Malindi, and the stanza does one plain thing: it draws the border between Europe and Asia. A river falls from the far-northern Riphean mountains into the Maeotian marsh (the Sea of Azov), and that water-line is the divide. The eye then slides south to the sea beyond — the Black Sea — which the Greeks once ruled in war.
The turn a first reader can miss is in the last two lines. The whole careful map suddenly opens onto Troy, and Troy is only a memory now: the sailor passing that coast sees nothing of the city Homer's Greeks destroyed. Camões plants the ubi sunt note — where are the great things now? — inside a dry list of rivers and seas, so that the poem quietly measures every present empire against a famous ruin before Gama has even reached India.
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