The Old Man of Restelo Rises
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Mas um velho d'aspeito venerando, Que ficava nas praias, entre a gente, Postos em nós os olhos, meneando Três vezes a cabeça, descontente, A voz pesada um pouco alevantando, Que nós no mar ouvimos claramente, C'um saber só de experiências feito, Tais palavras tirou do experto peito:
But an old man of venerable aspect, who stayed behind on the shore among the crowd, fixed his eyes on us, shook his head three times in displeasure, and raised his heavy voice a little — we heard it clearly out on the water — and with a knowledge made of nothing but experience, drew these words from his practiced breast:
As Gama's fleet pulls away from the beach at Belém in 1497, an unnamed old man in the crowd left behind lifts his voice against the whole enterprise. This stanza is only the wind-up: it describes him gathering himself to speak.
The whole stanza is a delay. Camões spends eight lines getting one man ready to speak: he is old, he is on the beach and not on the ship, he looks at the fleet, he shakes his head, he lifts his voice. Nothing is said yet. By the time the colon lands at the end of line 8, the reader has been made to wait for a speech that has not begun.
What a first reader misses is who is being praised. The old man's authority is "a knowledge made only of experience" — the exact thing the voyage claims for itself, and the exact thing Camões the poet claims: he had sailed, been shipwrecked, lost an eye at Ceuta. The epic hands its best credential to the man about to argue that the epic should not happen. Camões never gives him a name, and never answers him.
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