The Apples Only Hercules Could Pick
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" Este pôde colher as maçãs de ouro, Que somente o Tiríntio colher pôde: Do jugo que lhe pôs, o bravo Mouro A cerviz inda agora não sacode. Na fronte a palma leva e o verde louro Das vitórias do Bárbaro, que acode A defender Alcácer, forte vila, Tângere populoso e a dura Arzila.
This man could pick the golden apples that only the Tirynthian was able to pick: the fierce Moor does not even now shake from his neck the yoke that he laid on it. On his brow he wears the palm and the green laurel of his victories over the Barbarian who runs to defend Alcacer, that strong town, populous Tangier, and hard Arzila.
Still inside the long dynastic roll-call the old man of Restelo's world produces, the poem reaches Afonso V and his African conquests. The Hesperides orchard was placed in the far west of Africa, which lets Camoes hand a Moroccan campaign a Greek myth.
The stanza is a campaign record dressed as a labour of Hercules. Afonso V took Alcacer Ceguer in 1458, Arzila and Tangier in 1471, and Camoes credits him with the golden apples of the Hesperides, a garden the ancients placed on the far western edge of Africa. The geography does the work: the same coast, so the same orchard, so the king who took it did what only Hercules had done.
What a first reader misses is that the yoke has no past tense. The Moor still does not shake it off, present tense, in Camoes's own day, and this is the boast that would not hold. Four years after the poem appeared, Sebastiao died at Alcacer Quibir and Portugal lost its crown to Spain. The African cities named here were the ones the empire kept bleeding for.
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