The Field Left Full of the Dead
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E coa famosa gente à guerra usada Vai socorrer o filho; e assim ajuntados, A Portuguesa fúria costumada Em breve os Mouros tem desbaratados. A campina, que toda está coalhada De marlotas, capuzes variados, De cavalos, jaezes, presa rica, De seus senhores mortos cheia fica.
And with the famous people well-used to war he goes to succor the son; and, joined together thus, the customary Portuguese fury in short order has the Moors routed. The field, which lies all thick-strewn with cloaks and varied hoods, with horses, harness, and rich spoil, is left full of their dead lords.
Reinforcements arrive and the customary Portuguese fury quickly routs the Moors. The battlefield is left strewn with cloaks, horses, harness, rich spoil, and the bodies of the enemy lords.
The stanza closes a battle scene at a run. Reinforcements arrive, the two forces merge, and within a single line ("Em breve") the enemy is already beaten. Camões spends more words on the aftermath than on the fight: the last four lines are an inventory of the emptied field, cloaks and hoods and horses and harness, ending on the dead who owned them.
What a first reader misses is that the litany of loot is doing the killing. Camões never narrates a blow; he lets the debris carry the violence. The Moorish words themselves, marlota and jaez, both from Arabic, sit strewn across the Portuguese verse the way the goods lie across the plain, so the enemy is present only as scattered belongings and bodies. The stanza ends not on triumph but on "mortos", the last thing the eye reaches.
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