My Brother Offers to Come
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" Com mercês sumptuosas me agradece E com razões me louva esta vontade; Que a virtude louvada vive e cresce, E o louvor altos casos persuade. A acompanhar-me logo se oferece, Obrigado d'amor e d'amizade, Não menos cobiçoso de honra e fama, O caro meu irmão Paulo da Gama.
He thanks me with lavish gifts, and with words he praises this resolve of mine; for virtue that is praised lives and grows, and praise urges men on to lofty deeds. At once my dear brother Paulo da Gama offers to come with me, bound by love and by friendship, and no less covetous of honor and fame.
Gama, telling the King of Melinde how the voyage began, describes King Manuel rewarding his acceptance with gifts and praise. Then his brother Paulo volunteers to sail with him.
Gama is still recounting the day he accepted the voyage. The king pays him in two currencies at once, gifts and words, and the middle of the stanza stops to explain why the second one counts: praise is not decoration, it feeds the thing it names. Then the payment works. Paulo hears his brother praised and volunteers.
The thing under it is that Camões has put his own job description into the king's mouth. If praised virtue lives and grows, then the poem you are holding is not a record of the voyage but part of its machinery, and Camões will spend the rest of the epic asking Portugal to keep paying men in that currency. He had reason to press the point: he wrote this after years of soldiering and exile and got very few mercês of his own. Note too what the last line costs on rereading. Paulo sails, and Paulo does not come home.
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