The Frozen North
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Lá onde mais debaixo está do Pólo, Os montes Hiperbóreos aparecem, E aqueles onde sempre sopra Eolo, E co'o nome, dos sopros se enobrecem. Aqui tão pouca força tem de Apolo Os raios que no mundo resplandecem, Que a neve está contido pelos montes, Gelado o mar, geladas sempre as fontes.
There, where the land lies farthest beneath the Pole, the Hyperborean mountains rise, and with them those over which Aeolus forever blows, mountains ennobled by bearing the winds' own names. Here the rays of Apollo, which light the rest of the world, have so little strength that the snow lies locked upon the peaks, the sea is frozen, and the springs are frozen without end.
Opening his account of Europe to the king of Melinde, Gama begins at the icy top of the map: the polar mountains where the winds are born and Apollo's light barely reaches.
Gama, telling Portugal's story to the king of Melinde, begins with a map. Before he reaches his own country he sweeps Europe from the top down, and this stanza is the frozen ceiling of that survey: the far north where the Pole sits lowest, where the Hyperborean mountains stand and the winds are born. The classical furniture is deliberate, Aeolus the keeper of the winds since Homer's Odyssey, and Apollo the sun whose rays here barely reach.
What a first reader skims past is the fourth line: the mountains are ennobled by the winds' names. Camões means the ancient ranges that classical geography credited with giving the north winds their names, a place dignified by what it produces. And the cold is a piece of rhetoric, not only weather. He does not say the sun is weak; he says Apollo's rays lack force, so that even the sea and the springs freeze solid. It is a grand descending panorama, and Portugal, when he finally reaches it, will be its warm and honored end.
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