The Wealth of the East
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" Posto que a rica Arábia e que os ferozes Eníocos e Colcos, cuja fama O Véu dourado estende, e os Capadoces, E Judeia, que um Deus adora e ama, E que os moles Sofenos, e os atroces Cilícios, com a Arménia, que derrama As águas dos dous rios, cuja fonte Está noutro mais alto e santo monte;
Granted that rich Arabia, and the fierce Heniochi and Colchians — whose fame the golden Fleece spreads abroad — and the Cappadocians, and Judea, which worships and loves one God, and the soft Sopheni, and the cruel Cilicians, together with Armenia, which pours out the waters of two rivers whose spring lies on another, higher and holier mountain;
A single concessive sentence ("Granted that rich Arabia...") that opens a sweeping catalogue of the wealthy and warlike peoples of the East — the Caucasus, Anatolia, the Levant, Armenia. The clause is left hanging, its point delivered in the following stanza.
The stanza is a single unfinished sentence — a concessive catalogue that opens with "granted that" and then piles up the rich and warlike peoples of the East: Arabia, the Caucasus tribes, Cappadocia, Judea, Armenia. The main point being conceded to never arrives here; the syntax holds everything in suspense, and the sentence spills over into the next stanza before it lands.
What a first reader misses is that Camões is mapping the same ground twice at once. The "golden Veil" of the Colchians is the Golden Fleece the Argonauts sailed to win, so the geography is read through Greek myth; but the two rivers of Armenia that rise from a "holy mountain" are the Tigris and Euphrates, which Genesis sends out of Eden. In one breath the East is both the world of Homer and the world of Scripture.
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