Competing for the Worst Danger
Read the full text in our reader
" Porque eis os seus acesos novamente Duma nobre vergonha e honroso fogo, Sobre qual mais com ânimo valente Perigos vencerá do Márcio jogo, Porfiam: tinge o ferro o sangue ardente; Rompem malhas primeiro, e peitos logo: Assim recebem junto e dão feridas, Como a quem já não dói perder as vidas.
For behold, his men, kindled once more by a noble shame and an honorable fire, argue among themselves over which of them will beat down more dangers, with a braver spirit, in the game of Mars. Burning blood stains the iron; they break through mail first, and then through chests. So they take and deal wounds in the same motion, like men for whom losing their lives no longer hurts at all.
Canto IV, in the thick of Aljubarrota (1385). The Portuguese ranks catch fire again, and the fighting turns into a contest among themselves over who will face the most.
The stanza turns the battle line into a competition. What relights the Portuguese is not hatred of the enemy but shame in front of each other, and the rivalry that follows is internal: each man arguing, by fighting, that he will take on more than the man beside him. Camões then compresses the whole exchange into a single motion, receiving and giving wounds at once, with the mail breaking before the chest does.
The phrase a first reader skims is "Márcio jogo" — the game of Mars. Calling a massacre a game is not decoration; it is the reason the last line works. Men who treat war as a contest have already agreed to stake their lives, and once the life is staked, losing it stops registering as loss. Camões does not praise that. He states it flatly and lets the reader notice that the courage and the numbness are the same thing.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Os Lusíadas 4.39 in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Os Lusíadas — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Os Lusíadas 4.39 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/lusiadas/4.39/