Do You Want the Wind to Take It?
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Qual em cabelo: Ó doce e amado esposo, Sem quem não quis Amor que viver possa, Por que is aventurar ao mar iroso Essa vida que é minha, e não é vossa? Como por um caminho duvidoso, Vos esquece a afeição tão doce nossa? Nosso amor, nosso vão contentamento Quereis que com as velas leve o vento?
Another, her hair loose: "O sweet and beloved husband, without whom Love has not willed that I should live, why do you go to risk on the wrathful sea that life which is mine and not yours? How, for one uncertain road, does our affection, so sweet, slip out of your mind? Our love, our vain happiness — do you want the wind to carry them off with the sails?"
On the beach at Belém, as the fleet prepares to sail in 1497, Camões passes down a line of women saying goodbye. This one is a wife, and the stanza is her speech, quoted whole.
Camões is not describing the goodbye scene; he steps aside and lets one wife speak it. She argues rather than weeps. Her husband's life is her property, held by the law of love, so sailing is not courage but theft. She has hold of the sixteenth-century marriage vow and is using it as a lever.
The word to watch is "vão" in line seven. She calls their own happiness vain, empty — and she does it in the middle of defending it. That is her own voice conceding what the narrator has been arranging all along: this crowd on the beach is about to lose the argument, and she half knows it. The stanza also does what Camões keeps doing in Canto 4 — he gives the objection to the voyage the best lines he has, then sails anyway.
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Os Lusíadas 4.91 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/lusiadas/4.91/