Sancho Reddens the River
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Porque levasse avante seu desejo, Ao forte filho manda o lasso velho Que às terras se passasse d'Alentejo, Com gente e co'o belígero aparelho. Sancho, d'esforço o d'ânimo sobejo, Avante passa, e faz correr vermelho O rio que Sevilha vai regando, Co'o sangue Mauro, bárbaro e nefando.
So that he might carry his purpose forward, the weary old man sends his strong son to cross over into the lands of Alentejo, with troops and warlike gear. Sancho, of surpassing valor and spirit, presses onward and makes run red the river that goes watering Seville, with Moorish blood, barbarous and abominable.
In the historical narration of Canto 3, the aged first king sends his vigorous son Sancho campaigning south against the Moors, into the country beyond the Tagus and down toward Seville.
The stanza turns a father's aging into a son's momentum. The "lasso velho" can no longer campaign himself, so he delegates the war south to his "forte filho," and the verse enacts the handoff: the old man gives the order, the young man does the marching. Camões keeps the two generations in tension across the octave, weariness at the top, a river running red at the bottom.
What a first reader misses is that the river is named by what it does, not by its name: "the river that goes watering Seville" is the Guadalquivir, deep in Muslim Andalusia. The point is reach. Sancho (the future Sancho I) is not just defending Portugal but striking far beyond it, and the poet lets the reddened Andalusian water carry the boast that plain geography would have muffled. The closing string of insults, "barbarous and abominable," belongs to the crusading frame Camões inherits, not to neutral description.
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